Sep 01, 2017 05:30 PM
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If you thought once you booked your tour everything else would be taken care of by tour company and you just have to pack your bags and enjoy, you are wrong! For Veena worlds European delight tour in August 2017, we made booking in March in Pune and our adjustments spree began!
Visa -
After tour booking you have to visit Veena world office 3 to 4 times to get your UK & Shengen visa papers ready. Make sure your forms are filled properly as these are filled by interns and they make mistakes. Shengen Visa form had spelling mistake and the printout had to be replaced. For UK Visa we had to go to Mumbai Visa center from Pune.
Tour preparation
We expected tour orientation session before tour but all you get is SMSs and emails from Veena world. You have to call Veena world to get your questions answered
Currency
Veena world doesnt provide foreign exchange, they will give you contact of some vendor. Kesari is better at this.
The Tour Day
For 6:30 am flight we were told to reach airport at 2:30am. Normally you reach 3hrs prior to your International departure. We thought there would be some induction/instruction session and thats why we were called 4hrs early outside airport. We reached at 2:45am. There were 2 guys distributing food hampers and all other members were standing in check-in queue inside! We dint even know which ones were from our tour. Somewhere we found tour manager. We asked him can we get our seats together as we were family of six. He said you can adjust seats later with other group members. This is the same guy who told us you cant do web checkin because its a group tour, and when asked any other important documents to carry apart from passport, answered'Passport'! Inside the plane we saw our seats were not together. We requested fellow passengers, they refused to move and later they said we would have definitely moved had we known you are on same tour! The tour manager was nowhere to be seen! Imagine sitting separate for 9hrs flight!
The tour!
One of the worst part on this tour is after you have landed in London you dont go to hotel. After immigration queue in Mumbai, 9hrs long flight and 1hr in UK immigration queue. They take you to see London eye! Stand in the queue for another hour for a 30mins ride! Now you are really exhausted and want to reach hotel asap, but guess what, your hotel is somewhere at the outskirts of the city so it takes another 30-45 mins to reach!
Once you reach hotel your tour manager tells you to wake up at 6:30 next morning, 7:30 breakfast and 8:30 pack up and leave as you'll have London city tour and then leave for Paris. After city tour you are given 30 mins for shopping where you hurriedly buy few sovenirs and then head for lunch at some Indian restaurant where all tours from India come for lunch. If you are lucky you get in or wait like us for 30 mins for other group to finish. The Eurostar station in London is pretty busy. For 4:30 pm train we were taken to the station at 2:30 pm, went through security check and immigration and waited 1:30hrs which could have been utilised better either for sightseeing or shopping!
Paris
We reached Paris hotel(again out of city) around 9:15 pm where we were served packed dinner. Next day we reached Eiffel tower at 10am and saw huge queues for tickets. There were different queues but our tour manager chose to stand us in one in the sun! We were in the queue for more than 2hrs and later came to know there were group bookings available! We were given only 45 mins to see Eiffel where there were queues to go to all floors. We were promised cold drink at Eiffel tower by Veena world. We found cans of Coke in our coach seats only after we had spent money on refreshments in the tower after standing in long queues everywhere. Then we had city tour and river cruise and then we were taken straight for dinner at 7pm! When asked why so early our tour manager casually said they eat early in Europe. Later we came to know that the coach driver can drive only 12hrs a day. If the day starts at 8:30am, driver has to end his day at 8:30pm. If you are taking dinner at Indian restaurant in city, it takes around 45 to 60mins for you to finish then another 30 mins to reach out of city hotel hence dinner at 7pm! Also these Indian hotels will give you as many tables as your tour members are as they reserve tables for other group tours, that means you have to share tables! Another bad part of having hotels far from city is you can't roam around or have walk at nearby happening place as there is nothing around! These early dinners, average hotels, breakfasts and lunches continued for the rest of the tour!
The hotels
The hotels were average. Paris hotel dint have lock to the bathroom doors. Hotel in Cologne had water dripping from AC and Zurich hotel had broken bed. A fellow tour member had to shift to other room for non functional AC. Hotel in Italy was as good(or bad) as a lodge!
Overall food on tour
The tour manager told us you'll have to get used to eat bread for breakfasts and at some hotels your breakfast buffet will end as soon as it starts. What he meant to say was we give you hotels that do not serve good beakfasts and be prepared to eat bread for the whole tour. The hotels were average and so were beakfasts. The breakfasts didn't have anything Indian. The vegetarians have to keep asking which bread has egg and which doesn't. The non vegetarians can have all breads!
The lunch and dinners are average. A single sabzi was repeated almost 7 times. The roti and chapati doesn't really taste the way it's supposed to and you have to be satisfied with dal made of chana! No local dishes included!
The tour manager
If you are fortunate you get good tour manager but if you're not you get someone like Mr. Sunil Yadav. He was too busy with himself or pretended to be busy. Didn't really care about the tour members and didn't bother to introduce tour members to each other till 4th day of the tour! We had senior citizens and children on the tour but making everyone stand in the queue in the sun or make people walk 1km to the restaurant was normal for him. If you faced any problem he was ready with standard answers that didn't help. He was never seen taking efforts to help people or make the tour any better. Luckily we had very helpful tour members and they made sure the tour was enjoyable without much help from the tour manager.
Overall the UK and the Europe are dream destinations. They are very beautiful but the way tours are arranged are disappointing. There wasn't a single moment on entire tour when we felt anything special. In fact this tour made me feel it would be better if you arranged everything on your own than filling pockets of the tour company.