Dear Vicky Dong/Sally Si:

We were most pleased and satisfied with our recent tour with Tibettrip.com. We would not hesitate to recommend your company for anyone traveling to China. The hotels were of the highest quality; the food was, by and large, excellent; the guides were knowledgeable, informative, and helpful and we were delighted to be able to design a flexible program to suit our tastes. We expect to use your agency again on our future trips to China.

We would be happy to have this description included in your web site.

In particular we would like to point out some details of concern:

Guides: Maggie and Chris were exceptional guides, knowledgeable, informative, and helpful with an excellent command of English. They were attentive to the group's wishes and made meaningful changes to the program as needed. We came away from their portion of the tour really understanding China, it's heritage and what it is like to live there.

FOOD: Hotel breakfasts were consistently very good. The restaurant food for lunch and dinner in Xi'an and Guilin was excellent, mainly because we were permitted to select from the menus with the guides' help. This should be your standard method in future tours not set meals with a standard menu. In Shanghai, the food was of comparatively low quality. We were always served tourist menus consisting of tasteless dishes. We were even told that they knew what westerners liked. In Suzhou, where we were on our own for two meals and the guide recommended a restaurant where we ordered from the menu, the food was excellent. The best meal we had in China was a dinner at JESSE in Shanhai, that we paid for on our own.

MISCELLANEOUS: The drivers were very good, the vans were comfortable, and water was always available. We did not enjoy the evening opera in Beijing as we thought it was too western, similar to the glamour presentations at Las Vegas - too "touristy" and of little relationship to real China culture. In contrast, the river front show in Yungshou was spectacular, thoroughly enjoyable, and clearly representative of the best in present day Chinese theater. You definitely should make this a regular feature of your trips. We think that if you arranged for evening lectures from specialists in such fields as archeology, history, architecture, art, food, agriculture, etc. (instead of tourist shows) it would add significant depth to our China experience.

Stanley and Laurie Maurer

New York, NY

  Vicky & Lynne,

Firstly; thank you for our tour. We thought it was very well organised, that you chose your hotels very well and that, overall, it represented good value for money. The guides, without exception, spoke excellent English and had a wealth of historical and geographical knowledge at their disposal. The choice of destinations for excursions gave us many of the grand sights of China and a sense of the history and achievements of the region. There were times, particularly in museums and the forbidden city, that I would have preferred the option to explore myself at leisure and rejoin the group a little later, though some guides accommodated this request, not all did.

The Great Wall was stunning, though I would very much have liked to visit one of the original sections, either in addition to, or instead of, Badaling. We were fortunate to have some time in Beijing on our own before joining the tour, and I'm very glad we did. It was a great shame that the others on the tour did not get experience the city centre, with it's cosmopolitan High Street, fascinating night market and the lively, and fun, Silk Market. We also enjoyed the Lama Temple and the Confucius temple, which provided a welcome contrast to the other hectic tourist areas! We also felt that, in cities, we spent a lot of time on a bus travelling a very short distance, sometimes taking an hour to do what you could walk in 15 minutes. Other than the architecture and history, we thought the Three Gorges were fantastic and especially the drag boat ride in the minor Gorges.

Water was always available to us and the choice of restaurants was good, especially for the Duck meal. I think it would have been good if we could have ordered some of our own food as, often, a number of the group did not enjoy the more 'adventurous' dishes, meaning the favourites were very thinly spread. As mentioned, the choice of accommodation was excellent. The problem was that when on the cruise, our excursion tour groups were much larger, though this to some extent was true in the first instance, with a group of 18, when we had expected 11. This detracted from some venues as it was hard to hear the guide or made the trip fragmented as the group moved at different speeds.

Overall though, we had a very positive experience and have recommended your company to our friends, and are already considering our next trip! Please pass my thanks on to our guides.

Thanks and Best Regards,

Tom Jenkins

  Christine and the driver were wonderful - very patient, always on time, took very good care of us!

Thank you!

  Dear Vicky,
I'm sorry I wasn't able to get right back to you with this e-mail. I've been quite busy since I got back from my vacation. We did indeed enjoy our tour. The guides were quite flexible and worked very hard to make sure that everything went smoothly for us. We especially enjoyed the meals they had ordered for us. Since I am a vegetarian, they made sure that we were always served vegetarian meals. They were varied and interesting and quite tasty. Both Cathleen and Jasmine were very sweet and had good use of the English language which helped us to understand more about your culture. We felt comfortable asking questions and even making suggestions when we thought there was something else we might want to see or do. Both of the hotels we stayed in were very nice and accommodating. We took advantage of the massage services at both of them. The only difficult part of the trip was the long train ride we had to make between Dunhuang and Lanzhou, but apparently there was nothing you could do about that since the airlines cancelled the flight between the cities. We enjoyed flying Air China. It was a very efficient and pleasant airline.

Thank you for all you did to make our vacation a very delightful one. You opened up China to us in a way that we would not have experienced on our own. I would certainly recommend your tour company to anyone I know. I'm afraid I don't have the time to send you photos that we took, but I hope that my comments will suffice.

Sincerely,

Linda Biggers

  Dear Nancy/ Eileen,

I had the best time of my life! My guide Droga and my driver Tserin were extremely kind, friendly and extremely helpful. I have never felt so welcomed than with them. I consider them as wonderful friends. I would also like to say that the travel company they work for (TibetTrip) and Travel Agents Nancy/ Eileen were extremely kind, helpful and they helped me plan the perfect holiday. Many many thanks to Tibet Trip, they are by far the best travel company I have ever dealt with.

I highly recommend to anyone to choose this travel agency and also I highly recommend to ask for Droge as a guide, she is warm, friendly and extremely knowledgeable about China/ Tibet culture. I also highly recommend Tserin as a driver, he is warm. kind and is an amazing driver. They both made me feel so comfortable, they are, in my opinions, the best. I can't wait to take my next holiday with Tibet Trip and to see my friends (Dro and Tserin) again.

With warm wishes to all who have made this wonderful holiday possible! Many many thanks!

Jolymar Arias

  Hi Rita,

Do accept my apology for not writing sooner.
It's been back to the crazy world of work & catching up.

We had an absolutly amazing time in China .... thanks mostly to your excellent guides ( especially Gloria in Beijing ) and a very well planned agenda by you.

Richard says he will pen his experiences/feedback to you soon as he gets a minute.
He has just recuperated from the wild & windy China adventure.... I think his whole system shut down when he got home.

It was nice meeting you even if only for a brief 10 minutes.
Thank you for co-ordinating everything together so nicely.
We already have lots of friends asking how to go about this trip.
Will recommend you indeed.... :)

Regards,
Doris