Originally Posted by
toddy
Before we booked the 4 of us pretty much took that list of outfitters from the government website and divided it up and started making phone calls. We made a big spreadsheet with all the questions, costs etc. Our budget was between 4 and 6 grand Canadian. We eventually ended up with a short list of 5-6 that we wanted to book with. All of the outfitters on the short list had also given us, at our request a Canadian rate. Sylt Lake wasn't even on the list at that point. I will also add, after hours of research and viewing websites – Sylt lake’s website is just as bad as 2/3 of the outfitters in newfoundland that I looked at.
What became very apparent to me and pissed me off was how the majority of the outfitters wouldn't return phone calls or emails. To this day, of the 15-20 outfitters I contacted 10 of them never got back to me. If we waited more than two weeks for a response they were immediately off the list.
From our short list we had agreements on deposits, dates and prices with two outfitters only to have the outfitter go completely AWOL. It was so odd, it was like the outfitter was making a deal with they weren’t good with, so they avoided us. I don’t know, maybe it’s because one of our party members has mobility issues. At this point we were very frustrated. I almost felt since we were Canadian customers, they didn’t want to deal with us.
This all took place before we met Angus at Sylt lake. I personally haven't met the outfitter. My good friend (who is also going on the trip) met him at the Sportsman show last March. We were in contact with Angus on a constant basis the week of the Sportsman Show. He answered all our questions and sent us a whole pile of pictures of the accommodations etc as we had told him his website was shotty. Given what we were experiencing with our short list, and the general frustrations of booking in Newfoundland, we were excited about Sylt lake. We had an outfitter more than happy to cater to us and answer all our questions and he seemed far more generally interested in booking us more than any other outfitter we were dealing with. We felt pretty good about the place, and as such we booked.