Middle East

Egypt & Jordan tour - with Insight Vacations

We had a great holiday in terms of the sights we saw. It was a fantastic time! Our guides were excellent. But it was a pretty hard trip in terms of the wake uptimes,(once as early as 2:30 am!) flights and quality of bus in Jordan. One of the optional tours was quite poor and the day we arrived in Amman Jordan late in the morning, nothing was planned or suggested till the next morning. That was pretty expensive blank time for us and there was so much to see near the city. I think that Insight had dropped the ball in terms of planning that day.
October 2010
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Treasures of Turkey - with Insight Vacations

Turkey exceeded our expectations! The tour with Insight was top notch - great hotels, good food and a very knowledgeable tour guide. I'd recommend this itinerary to anyone who was interested in history, archaeology or great shopping - a fascinating mix of Europe and Asia. Two of my highlights from the trip were hot air ballooning over the stunning Cappadocia area and bargaining for a Turkish carpet in the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul.
October 2010
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Eastern Discovery with Insight Vacations - Istanbul, Turkey

We had a wonderful trip. The Croatian Coast and Istanbul were the highlights(both had wonderful scenery and people) and the weather was perfect in both places. We had a few cool cloudy days and one where it poured but we were mostly on the bus those days. The tour group was great - lots of Australians so we had fun!! Our whole group of 7 had a good time and we really enjoyed our extra time in Istanbul.

We didn't get our extra day in Vienna as our plane was very late leaving Winnipeg and we just missed the flight to Paris by a few minutes. It took awhile but we got things organized through Delta to get us to Vienna early Sunday morning via JF Kennedy airport in New York. We ended up spending about 6 hours at JFK on Sat waiting for our direct flight via Austrian airlines to Vienna. Delta paid for our hotel in Minneapolis Friday night and some meals. Brian was able to cancel our hotel in Vienna for the extra night before the deadline. After that everything went well.

The one thing we were annoyed about was Insight Canada in Toronto INSISTING that we get a Turkish visa here or we might be left at the border.. They obviously did not look into this particular tour when you raised our concerns and were just spouting the "party line" so to speak. It might take a long time to get a visa at some border crossings but it was not the situation in our case and they should have been able to find that out for us. We were the ONLY ones on a bus of 32 people (other than some from New Zealand who needed no visa) to have a visa. Everyone else had been told to buy the visa at the border. The tour director was prepared for people to buy visas and he was surprised when we had ours already. It was a very quick process to get their visa - well over 20 people got their visas in less than 10 minutes compared to the hassle and expense we had in getting pictures,filling in forms and using a courrier as well as not having our passports for nearly 2 weeks which was a concern especially for our family as we had a small window of time when we didn't need them.
July 2010
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