Italy Trip Review: Venice, Florence, Rome, Colosseum, Vatican, Private Cooking Class, 12-Night Tour

Review by traveler

Katelyn R.

6.5.2023

General Info

Traveler Review

Which Country (Countries) did you visit on this trip?

Italy

Your overall comments on the trip and the travel company:

Overall, the travel company listened to our requests and did their best to accommodate us. Utilizing What's App and the Trip App made it easy to communicate with them and have all details, tickets and vouchers at my finger tips.

What were the most enjoyable or memorable parts of your trip?

The most enjoyable parts of the trip were in Venice and Florence. Our favorite experience was our private cooking class with Barbara. We enjoyed our time in the market, cooking in the villa and getting to enjoy our meal on an outdoor balcony. Barbara was so fun and we learned so much, we even took some recipes home to try to recreate in our kitchen!

If you could take your trip again, what would you do differently?

If we could take the trip again, we probably would have done Rome differently. The company did not tell us until the night before that it would be difficult to navigate the city because of a bike race and it caused us to almost miss our tour group of the Colosseum. Additionally, we were told we could do a small group tour at the Vatican and it ended up being 20+ people which made it difficult to hear/navigate/see everything we wanted to see. It felt like Rome wasn't as well planned as the rest of the trip which caused some stress.

Travel Company Comments:

Dear Katelyn,
Thank you very much for your review. We appreciate your kind words and positive feedback. We take our clients’ comments very seriously and look for inspiration in order to improve our operations and make the travel experience with us memorable. We carefully looked at your comment reporting the experience you had in Rome, in particular in regard to the Giro D‘Italia bike race and the small group tour of the Vatican Museums.
The Giro D'Italia is one of the most important sport competitions in the world and the mobility in the involved destinations can be more difficult to handle and it is unpredictable because of last minute changes. Luckily, we managed to let you enjoy the Colosseum Tour despite that, which is something other competitors of ours did not manage to do. In fact, a few of their clients were forced to dump their tours due to last-second cancellations caused by logistic problems and roads closures. We informed you about this event the day before your Colosseum Tour and provided you with suggestions on the best options to reach the meeting point.
As for the Vatican Museums visit, we are very sorry to read this tour didn't meet your expectations. We always suggest our clients to book private tours because they provide for a much better and personalized experience. As you can imagine, the quality and exclusivity of this kind of services is higher than the quality of an activity shared with other people.
We very seldom suggest group tours, unless the client specifically requires them because of budget constraints. As discussed during our initial call, you mentioned that your budget was not flexible and we agreed on a few shared activities to give you the chance to visit as much as possible of all the beauties/sites that Italy (Rome) has to offer.
We double checked with the tour company and on that day there was a total of 16 participants in the Vatican Museums tour, which is the max. size of that small group tour.
Having said that, we thank you very much for traveling with us and for your feedback. We will make treasure of this experience to further improve our trips and the assistance we provide to clients when traveling with us.
Best regards,
Veronica