Montecatini

The booking process was easy, the tour schedule was good, it's a full day and everything was very good. The bus was very comfortable and the guide and driver were also very good. There were no cons, we truly enjoyed the experience. The one big problem we had was that you gave us the wrong pickup time ( 8 instead of 7:30 ), and we missed the tour on the scheduled day. My tour was nice enough to reschedule the tour for foe following day and everything went well. So Happy to Visit needs to make sure you are sending the correct pickup times to your customers.

We arrived at Montecatini Terme train station at 8.45am, so prior to 9.00am, the required time as per our confirmation invoice. We rang the office at 9.10am to advise we were still awaiting pick up and were advised that our tour didn’t start until 9.15 (so why put ‘9.00am gate closes’ on the invoice?) and that the driver was on his way. We were finally collected at 9.30am (with no apologies for late collection) and proceeded to Pisa. On arrival at Pisa our guide took us from the coach park to the site of the Duomo etc. However, there was little general information given, ie, that there is only one ticket office for all tickets and the guide saying ‘tickets are available up there on the right by the red umbrella’ is not helpful when the ticket office is actually as far as the leaning tower, and then to the left! We did actually enjoy our visit, although as a number of head sets did not work, my husband and I needed to share an ear piece each on the tour of the basilica, which was primarily what we paid for, as other tickets needed to be purchased to access the rest of the site, so this tour, at €98, was not value for money. A number of people were without working headsets (with no spares available) and this is frankly unacceptable for the cost of the tour.

My friend, Margaret Spencer, and I were so excited to be able to go to Cinque Terre while we were staying in Montecatini. We arrived at the bus station 15 minutes before the suggested time of 7:45. We thought we had been duped as the bus did not show up until 8:20. We were never told that there was a window of time when we could expect the bus. We were relieved and ready to start our adventure with our guide, Armedaus. On the ride Armedaus told us to listen to him and he would tell us about Cinque Terre and he was not going to repeat it. And he kept his word. We were never told which village we were in when we arrived or anything about it; he just told us how much time we had there and where to meet. We were given one map for two people. At the third village we did have a delightful lunch and then we crowded onto a boat that took us to Porto Venere where we were given time and told when to meet the bus. We enjoyed seeing Cinque Terre, but we are used to friendly, informative guides and learning some in depth info about the places we visit. Suzanne Stetson