Re: SGA Travel A tour of Turkey: Incredible in Every Way!
Incredible: travel agency (SGA Travel); travel agent (Caglar); guide (Serdar); driver (Ehtam); 20-day private tour itinerary (Oct 3-23, 2022); hotels; transport; price; etc, etc.; even the weather! I highly recommend that you take a SGA Travel package or private tour of beautiful and interesting Turkey!
Trip.me (now Travel Local) made this private (2 couples), very reasonably priced tour possible by connecting me with a very knowledgeable, efficient, and prompt, Turkish travel agent – Caglar. Shortly after carefully listening to and enquiring about our interests, dislikes, physical abilities, desired time period, … he sent me a very comprehensive, varied, interesting and well-balanced initial itinerary. After a little more input and a few tweaks it was perfect.
Our guide and driver were great and worked extremely well together during our 20-day tour! Serdar communicated very well and had a vast and varied knowledge of Turkey’s history, culture, politics, geology, agriculture. He was well organized, hardworking, energetic, personable and caring! Ehtam was a very amiable and conscientious person with an incredible knowledge of the backroads and little scenic highways of Turkey. He was an excellent driver who obviously enjoyed showing us the varied beauty of his country. We came to view both as friends!
When I compared the similar parts our tour to a 10-day Highlights of Turkey bus tour: hotels of the same quality; our tour was $37US less/day pp; we had 1.6 vs 0.9 meals/day; many more sites and activities were included and all were chosen based on our specifications; all our entry fees and such were included in the excellent price for the tour.
One important warning: Be sure that you use the Turkish government’s official site to obtain your VISA. It was temporarily not working. I used one of the many carefully set up, alternative websites and ended up paying an extra $300 for our Visas.
Re: Travel Local
Generally, our experience was excellent.
I have organized my own trips; participated in big bus, small group, private tours; big and small ship ocean and river cruises; … This is the 2nd great tour I have arranged with a local agent carefully chosen by trip.me / Travel Local. I will definitely use their valuable services again: vetted agents with an abundance of knowledge and experience; bankruptcy protection; payment options; guaranteed currency exchange rate for final payment …
We had 2 problems with Trip.me/Travel Local this time. 1. There was an extended period during which no one responded to my emails. This was probably due to Covid and organizational difficulties that arose as Trip.me merged with Travel Local. I assume that these problems are now resolved. 2. One couple had to drop out of our private tour which - of course resulted in a price increase for the 2 remaining couples. Rather than simply increase the tour's price on the existing invoices, Travel Local issued 2 new invoices for the increase which then required a new set of down-payments and final-payments - twice the hassle and twice the transfer payment cost if you choose transfer money. Apparently this was done according to company policy. I shared my displeasure with this policy with them and they allowed me to make a single final transfer (cost = $50) instead of 2. I wonder if they would make a new invoice if the price had decreased. Hopefully they have now changed their policy so that any price change is dealt with on the existing invoice.
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