Ok so first up, the good things:
The rafting is grantedly quite fun. They've built a dam which they open at the start of the session to flood the river and allow you to raft even in dry season. I'd recommend it if you're bringing younger kids or you've never rafted before.
The tour guide (Adi) is very friendly and you can see how much effort she is putting in. She tries so hard to keep everything organised (we'll get to that).
There's enough food to keep you going at lunch and it tastes quite good.
Now for the many reasons I wouldn't recommend this tour:
Firstly the rafting is extremely tame. There were only 2 spots I'd consider enough to call rafting (at least in dry season), the rest is just floating along a river. You also don't actually paddle, there's 2 guides per boat with a paddle and you just sit there. This takes all the fun out of it.
The activities are miles away, we were picked up out of Phuket town which meant a 06:30 start and we didn't start rafting until 1200. We were lucky and had lunch after this. But some people went to ATV and zipline before lunch, which means they weren't fed until after 1400.
The rest of the activities are filler at best. The zipline would be fun if you've never done it before.
The ATV would be terrifying if you'd never done it before. They tell you at the start not to let women drive because there's so many accidents (come on). I'm not surprised there's daily accidents (some serious by their own admission). The bikes are in terrible shape, there's no rear brake on most and the steering and suspension are in terrible condition. This is the only time I've ever felt unsafe on an ATV (and I was jumping them over hills in Bali a month ago).
The waterfall is barely worth mentioning let alone going out of the way to visit but it was nice to get out the bus for a walk.
Lastly is the organisation. As I said Adi tried her best, but these tours are not max 40. There's multiple variations of this tour running concurrently (5k/7k raft, elephant ride vs ATV etc) which meant there were 137 people on our tour today with only the one person trying to keep track of who was doing what and when. This meant there was a lot of sitting around waiting for your turn and just a whole lot of chaos. Why we weren't put into numbered groups instead of constantly shouting out hotel names and group sizes, I'll never know.
We got off the bus early and made our own way back in a taxi, despite paying extra for the transfer to our hotel because we couldn't face the extra 1.5 hours on the bus back once you get back to Phulet island.
Definitely not a good use of a days holiday
