Solid Marketing

Arriving home after the tour, which left positive impressions only thanks to the atmosphere created by the tourists themselves, I decided to read reviews about the work of the Accord Tour tour company and realized that our trip was not the worst. But still, I would like to leave the most objective review that will help the same naive tourists as we were.

We (two adults) were on a "Date in Paris" tour with no overnight travel from 26/07/17 to 01/08/17. Team Leader Aleksey Fedinchik. The fun started the day before the start of the tour, on 25.07, when the group leader Aleksey contacted us and said that upon arrival in Lviv (our tour started from there), we need to be at the departure point - in Terminal A, at 6:30 am, but we can only get there by taxi, since we won’t have time to get there on the free transfer from the railway station, which is written in the contract, because the transfer leaves at 6:00 exactly. We bought the tour itself from the Kiev company "Guide", where we agreed on the details of the transfer in advance. The manager of the "Guide" Karina assured us that the transfer is not a problem, and despite the fact that our train arrives at 6:00 in the morning, the transfer will be waiting for us, like the bus itself, that everything is focused on tourists and we are not alone such that everything is coordinated with the central office of "Accord Tour" and our team leader Alexey confuses something and will be notified about everything. We decided to double-check whether Aleksey was still notified about everything, and it turned out that only we were notified. Without going into all the tedious telephone conversations and clarifications, the result was a hassle on the morning of 26.07, when Alexei did not pick up the phone and did not call back to coordinate our actions. When we finally found a free transfer to Terminal A, which is the Accord Tura tourist complex, we got through to Alexey through a representative. We were called a taxi, which brought us to the track, where we were waiting for our bus near another tourist complex. Otherwise, no one would have been waiting for us, and the tour bus would have left without us. We paid for the taxi, to our demands to explain why no one picked up the phone in the morning, the group leader shut us up and told us to get on the bus - we were late. The curtain.

But, as it turned out, we were late for the whole tour. The promised sanitary stops every 3-3.5 hours sometimes turned into 5, when the whole group already demanded before the start of the tour it was trite, sorry for the details, to let people go to the toilet. At stops, 15 minutes were given for a toilet and food. There was always a queue to go to the toilet (a group of 45 people, most of them women), there was practically no time to buy food. It was not there in the cities that we passed or ran at a gallop, because when after a sightseeing tour you have 20 minutes left, of which 10 you only need to go to the bus, it’s hard to find a store and buy something edible in it. Aleksey warned us about dry food only on the first day of the tour, then, as we were told, there were normal stops for food, at least go to buy it. So we ate at gas stations, where prices are by no means cheap, not counting those incomplete two and a half days that we spent in Paris.

Regarding night crossings, which ideally should have been absent. We arrived late at night, closer to two. Exhausted after the move, families with children were not settled earlier than others, only once at the request of a mother with a child, they were given the keys to the rooms earlier, but that was once, and this is really very incompetent and disrespectful on the part of Alexei. In one hotel in Germany, the elevator was not working at 2:30 in the morning (they are turned off at night), and we ourselves, without help, dragged our bags up the spiral staircase to the fourth floor.

The hotels were chosen as normal (except for the 6th day in Budapest), there was internet, there was a hairdryer in almost all rooms, the buffet was not buffet only in one hotel on the 3rd day in France.

About mileage. We understood that from Lviv to Paris - 2100 km, and it is unrealistic to drive them in one day. But no one warned us that all the delays on the route and delays, all the transfers late at night and fast excursions - all this is due to our free time. That is, the more excursions, the later at night we arrive, and the more likely it is to miss the train at the end of the tour. But despite all these nuances, the work of the drivers was well-coordinated, the bus was clean and comfortable.

As for additional excursions, they are optional, and they are for an additional, sometimes unreasonably high fee. Of all the electives that we were (and we were not everywhere, but only where the group gathered), the excursion to Montmartre and the Latin Quarter, Ivan Ivanych the best (wink) deserves attention in Paris. The rest of the electives were not interesting and actually took away our free time. For example, in Munich, where we had two and a half hours for everything, we had to leave the tour earlier in order to simply have time to walk to the supermarket and buy groceries for the road.

On the final seventh day, we were extremely lucky that in Budapest there was no group for additional electives, and we left the city at 11 am. We were also lucky at the borders, which we passed on the way home in just an hour. If not for such a combination of circumstances, we would have missed our train home. It is written in the contract, and the manager assured us that by 23:00 1.08. we will definitely be in Lviv. In fact, as it turned out later, we could easily have missed it, and in fact we were brought first to Terminal A, where we were for 40 minutes, and then to the railway station.

Bottom line: the tour left pleasant and vivid impressions only because we accumulated all our strength and maneuvered in the circumstances in which the Accord Tour company put us on the tour. The manager of the Kiev tour of the "Guide" company Karina acted promptly and behaved correctly, but this did not give any result - no a la the main office of "Accord Tour" in Lviv did not coordinate with the group leader Alexei as a link and representative of the company. And we, as tourists, felt like hostages of the situation throughout the tour - they say, say thank you for going at all. Everything is aimed at marketing, and let the tourists themselves think about the comfort of tourists, who understand this already on the tour, but where to go - the money has been paid, if you don’t like it - go out. "What do you want me to tell you" - a quote from Alexei, and that says it all.

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