This is a review of the Auschwitz trip provided by GR8WAY. I originally booked an Auschwitz trip through Get Your Guide for £74 but after seeing lots of negative reviews, decided to book through TUI instead and paid £200. How on earth TUI are partnering with this company is beyond me. I was clearly ripped off as both companies appear to use this 3rd party tour company GR8WAY. I decided to pay more and book through TUI as I thought it was more secure and nothing would go wrong. How wrong was I.
So, what I booked was a £200 guided tour to Auschwitz including tickets, with hotel pick up and drop off. I booked for a 7am hotel pick up.
(JUST A REMINDER - AUSCHWITZ IS ACTUALLY FREE TO VISIT - YOU JUST NEED TO BOOK A TIME SLOT) so I paid £200 for nothing but lies.
We arrived in Krakow on 26/12/25 and were booked in for Auschwitz on 27/12/25, to be picked up at 7am.
At 13.55pm the day before the trip I was sent a message via WhatsApp, stating that Auschwitz has significantly reduced their number of tour guides the next day, and in order for the trip to take place, we would have to depart at an earlier time (5 HOURS earlier!!) They messaged us with just under 12 hours before the trip was due to start, so that we wouldn’t be able to get a refund if we cancelled.
My partner woke up at MIDNIGHT to go on a trip that was meant to start at 7am the next day!!! The tour bus didn’t even pick us up from our hotel as stated when booking; instead we had to get a taxi to another hotel to be picked up from there.
We were picked up at 2am from some random closed down hotel on a backstreet in Krakow. The driver didn’t say a word to any of us the whole time and was on his phone whilst driving. We picked up from several other hotels and arrived at Auschwitz at 3.30am. The driver jumped out, again without saying a word, and left us sat in the bus with the heating blasting whilst he went and stood with the other drivers having a cig whilst we were nearly passing out from the heat!! My partner had to turn the heating off and open the doors with the buttons himself so that some of us could get out as it was so hot in the bus, we then had to get back in as it was freezing outside. We had to leave the door open with the heating on so that we could breathe. The driver then came back to the bus and told us we had to get out and stand in line.
3.30am in the dark, minus degrees and snowing we stood in line outside Auschwitz with hundreds of other suckers. At this point the driver told us it opens at 6am, walked back to the bus, drove off and left us all! Absolutely nobody around. There were children and elderly people in this queue in the middle of the night and if something had have happened to somebody there’d have been nobody to help. So dangerous. No shelter, no toilet facilities, nowhere to get a hot drink. We were frozen. People were huddled together like penguins trying to keep warm.
Upon looking online, I found out that the ticket office doesn’t open until 7.30am. We quickly realised that the reason we were waiting in line at 3.30am was to buy our own tickets as they had clearly not been purchased for us. It got to 6am and the gates had still not opened. I messaged the driver and told him; to which he replied that it might be 6.20am as it depends on which staff member is working?!? It got on to 6.30am and the gates opened with everyone pushing and shoving through the gates, only to realise that once we got through them, we would be queuing once again for another hour out in the cold, until the ticket office opened up at 7.30am!! Although at least now we had access to toilets and a cafe which ended up being absolutely rammed and you just ended up in another queue.
When 7.30am arrived, suddenly our driver reappeared from nowhere and told us all that he needed our passports! So here we are handing over our passports to this man who then goes off to the ticket office. 10 minutes later he came back and handed out our tickets, we had been booked onto a tour for 8.30am - another hour wait!!
We finally started the tour at 8.30 am. Our group was absolutely massive. Our tour guide was of course Polish but his accent was very thick so unfortunately it was hard to understand. We were all given a headset so that we could all hear him on the way around the camp. Unfortunately, Auschwitz was so busy so we ended up being rushed around. I think it took us less than an hour and we were done. It’s such a shame because it’s somewhere that I have waited to visit all my life and it was just so rushed. You could only look at something for 5 seconds before you had to move on so that the person behind you could see it.
After we finished at Auschwitz 1 we were told that a bus would take us to Birkenau. When we left the first camp we went to get a hot chocolate and to use the toilet, coming back to find that our guide and group had vanished. We text the driver to say that we had been separated and we were on our own and the reply we got back was; “Ok”. Great!! We ended up getting the bus over the Birkenau on our own, and only by chance managed to find our group right at the end. The driver was waiting for us all back at the first camp, we only knew this because we followed a couple of people from our bus back otherwise we wouldn’t have known as there was absolutely no communication regarding travelling back. Everyone on the bus fell asleep on the way as we were all so knackered.
Overall, I would say that you should be super cautious when booking the Auschwitz trip. Take a look on Tripadvisor or TikTok and see for yourself how many people this has happened to. And I don’t think it’s just this company either, as there were coach fulls of other people that were also waiting in line with us that had come from other companies. These companies are clearly doing this all the time and this is not a one off.
I have been trying to message GR8WAY on WhatsApp since the trip, several messages have been read and ignored, then they have just been ignored even though I can see they have been online, and now I have been blocked.
An absolute rip off, GR8WAY you are a scam of a company. Shame on you doing this to people. Disgusting. Auschwitz is a once in a lifetime opportunity - please don’t ruin it by booking a tour through any of these companies.
* P.S Just a reminder that Auschwitz is actually FREE to visit by yourself. All you need to do is book a time slot and you can go around by yourself (highly recommended as the tours are far too busy & rushed! Also you get scammed by these tours)
Q8280LEroberts
01 Jan 2026
We never made it to Auschwitz, the tour company messaged at 8pm the night before, saying they’d not been able to secure a guide. We booked some weeks in advance. They offered the following day but we had other trips booked (and no guarantee they wouldn’t do the same again). Very frustrating and disappointing.
Absolute outrage! Initially, there was no response at all by telephone or through the help centre. Which is quite a cheek with such an overpriced excursion...
Less than 10 hours before "pickup" the trip was cancelled. Alternatively, the 31.12. was offered. Without words.
An SMS cancellation came the next morning, when the tour should have already started. There was no response to the mail asking for a refund.
What came, however, was the email in which I was to rate the excursion (which never took place).
This has been done herewith!