Name: The Best of Switzerland
Brand: Globus
SKU: N/A
Price: 3359 USD
Availability: LimitedAvailability
Rating: 4.7 (1 reviews)

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Lake Como Tours & Trip Packages

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Europe

Italy

Lake Como

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Lake Como Tour & Trip Reviews | Travelstride

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Lake Como Walking

Good hotel, particularly for price point
Excellent trip leader

We flew into Milan and toured the town on our own a few days. Then we took the train to Varenna on Lake Como to formally start our Rick Steves tour with our guide, Lisa Anderson. She was excellent; very organized, helpful to a fault, and took us to a lot of out-of-way places not on the itinerary. What I liked most was the mixture of planned activities and time our own own; a nice balance which I believe gave us a good feel for the people, culture, and historical places we toured throughout Italy. You can read any itinerary for this trip and learn about what you're going to see, but getting to know your traveling companions (there were 28 of us) well, share food (and a cold- achoo!) made it all the better. I would highly recommend this tour to anyone who would really like to get a taste of Italy from Rome north. I had no interest in visiting Italy before, but would go back in a heartbeat. I especially enjoyed our time high up in a ski village in the Dolomite Mountains. Seeing the "big three" of Venice, Florence, and Rome was great, but I also enjoyed seeing Pisa and Assisi, and spending time in places I had never heard of before - Cinque Terre , Siena, and Orvieto. While I know you can't pick your tour hosts, I would give the highest marks to our guide Lisa, her assistant, Alex, and our bus driver extraordinaire, Adrian. They helped put an excellent adventure over the top. Kudos to you Rick Steve's! We'll book another one of your tours in the next few years.

Rick Steves

Our Rick Steve's "Best of Italy Tour," starting in Varenna, October 18, through Rome, November 3, 2015.

Best of Italy in 17 Days Tour

Intrepid Travel

Collette

Country Walkers

Great Value Vacations

Culture Trip

Audley Travel

Globus

Avalon Waterways

Cosmos

Gate 1 Travel

Tauck

Trafalgar

Went on this trip with my wife and my sister. First off the positives.
Europe is quite different from North America. History is abundant, the Europe experience is really interesting. Visited many very historic sites, cities, monuments and many amazing structures such as the Colessium, Palletine hill, fountains, Leaning tower of Pisa, so many structures and areas it is hard to name them all, but all amazing. Overall the three week trip kept us busy and we learned much about past cultures.

Now the negatives 
Upon our first group meeting we met our guide, or so we thought as she informed us she was our "leader" not our guide. I never thought much of it at the time, but as the trip progressed I understood more what she meant.
Our "leaders" name was Lauren Nichols, young lady from England. To start off, Lauren was a very bad communicator. Our group was made up of seven people, and very rarely were we informed of what was going too happen during a day we were scheduled to travel. Our first travel day was when we left Rome to head to Luca I believe, We had never travelled on a train in Europe and did not know what to expect, Lauren did do a quick explanation of how to read the train schedule board, but this was while we were walking through the busy Rome terminal, there was no explaination what we were supposed to do with our luggage when we got on the train. Any questions that were asked were just either ignored or quickly answered so she didn't get bugged anymore. This pretty much was the case throughout the trip. We were basically forced to just follow her through terminal and city metros trying to keep up and not really know where we were going. Once we would arrive at our destination there was no direction as to how far we had to walk from the train stations to our accommodations, again follow and try to keep up while dragging your luggage through the streets. At no time did she ever make an effort to inform us as a group what the day travel would entail. Became very frustrating near the trips final week, very stressful when moving through big city train stations. Once we made it o our accommodations, it was a 15-20 minute turn around and we were expected to be ready to go for our orientation walk, which was as fast as she could make it so we could get to our "free time", more so she could get to hers. Any interesting sites we passed on these walks was quickly passed by and we told to go back on our own, even when the group was ok with stopping to take pictures, which everyone wanted to do. 
I my opinion, Lauren wanted to complete her duties as our " leader" as fast as possible so she could be on her own. When we were in Stressa we met her boyfriend who came to the hotel we were staying at and had supper with our group. 
As far as the accommodations I felt they were the cheapest possible options that Intrepid could come up with. In Luca there were five of us staying in one apartment, and my sister had to stay in the laundry room where a bed was placed, very under whelming for the cost of the trip. Our guide always had a room to herself, or was housed with the smaller part of the group. 

I myself will never use Intrepid again and will certainly NOT recommend this company to anyone. The guide and accommodations were the two issues that were very lacking, but overall the countries and sites were wonderful. If we ever return to Europe I would plan the trip ourselves, not that hard once we experienced it, and using a competent travel agent hotels would easily be done on your own.

The overall experience in Europe was favourable, some stress but we really enjoyed the month we were there, no thanks to our guide.

Best of Italy

I have traveled 4 times with Intrepid now and have found each time  very rewarding and great experiences

Seemed a little more expensive than previous trips with Intrepid, even acknowledging that we were travelling thru Europe. Overall though, very enjoyable small group experience.

Seemed a little more expensive than previous

I was disappointed with the group dynamic, the group was split with some members trying to take control

I was disappointed with the group dynamic

I like the style with the right balance of activities, free time, leadership and local transport and accomodation.