We had a great trip! We saw a lot, learned a lot and made new and interesting friends. As we've come to expect with Special Interest Tours, everything exceeded our expectations. Our hosts graciously and attentively cared for all of us, and once again created many wonderful memories for us. What more could one ask!! Thank you!
Thank you Anjali, Sam, Julia and Andres for all your hard work. The private tours of the space center, River walk boat, and the Alamo were great venues, and even though we all would have enjoyed a longer totality, the entire package with a nice group of people made for a very enjoyable trip. See you on the next one!
The overall structure of the trip was excellent. We enjoyed the venues, special tours and various stops. Having said that, the actual organization of the trip was poor and chaotic and times. We recognize weather and other unforeseen events always happen, but that is not an excuse for keeping the folks in Group 2 informed which was not the case. The guide on our bus is a nice person but he had little useful information - he was more of a "babysitter" than anything else. He had to wait for somebody from the first bus to come on board and inform us of the up to date schedule and then that was not always clear. Cell phone communication usually works even in Texas.
Having to deal with our own luggage to and from buses was a pain. I don't usually go on tours, but the ones I do always have folks from the hotel load and unload luggage from the buses. I know there was complexity related to having two buses that is easy to deal with. Give everybody tags attached to their bags where they write Group 1 or Group 2 to make sure that the right bags get into the right bus. And, then folks can take a look and confirm their bags are loaded if they want to double check. This is just one example on how to improve the. operational/detail aspects of the tour.
The venue at the eclipse site (we did not stay there) was poorly run, disorganized and did not seem to know how to handle a medium size group such as ours. Again, the various guides on the trip were slow to step in and make sure things worked as promised. You know there is a problem when you can't even get a cup of coffee. You need additional professional help to better run your tours. Sometimes the small details can make the difference between a good trip and a bad trip.
Having said all that, I will again note we enjoyed the trip and thought that having Bob Berman and the Hubbell's as part of the tour was a real positive., and we are considering the 2025 Chile trip. My last word is that if you want sophisticated clients you need to be operationally more sophisticated and professional which seemed not to be the case for this trip.