MY DREAM - GERMANY, MY DISAPPOINTMENT - "FEERIA"

The program of the tour "My Dream - Germany" on the company's website made me very happy, because for some reason there are few tours in Germany, but this one looked interesting and well balanced: there are numerous excursions, and relaxation in the baths and free time for self-examination. It also bribed the fact that the tour was advertised as an author's tour, compiled by one of the best guides of the Feeria (the web designer barely had a line for exclamation marks after the name of Alexander Romanenko) In general, it seemed not a trip, but a dream, but the tour turned out to be built according to the principle “it was smooth on paper, but they forgot about the ravines” or based on the eternal Slavic chance - we will promise everything and more in order to attract people with different requests and lay the price higher, and then how it will turn out.

To tell the truth, this is the first time I am writing a negative review about the tour, but I would like to start with a positive one, this certainly includes the beauty and grandeur of the Alpine nature, the fabulous quirkiness of the castles of Bavaria and the impeccable work of our drivers, once again many thanks to them for this. As for the activities of the Feeria company, here we have to talk more about the bad than about the good.

1. Organization - it simply did not exist, over the years of trips with different companies and in different directions, I have come across this for the first time. We can safely say that getting on the bus in the morning, tourists did not know where exactly they were going today, the program changed just on the go and most often not for the better.

• To begin with, the company changed the time of departure, and almost most of not only the hotels, but also the cities of residence, which naturally led to changes in the program, which the tourists did not even think to notify in advance. Moreover, the managers in Kyiv categorically stated right up to the very departure that there would be no changes, and the guide, for his part, referred to the fact that someone in the office had booked hotels in the wrong place, so he was not to blame for the changes in the program. But gentlemen, aren't you one company and aren't you all together responsible for the quality of your tourism product?

• Some cities and objects simply dropped out of the tour, like Kosice and St. Polten, (they supposedly did not have enough time, although these days it was possible to take 1.5 hours or more for lunch at roadside taverns instead of bringing people to the city, and there everyone let us decide for ourselves to see the sights or go to dinner)

• In some cities, the program was cut at the expense of others. What, for example, is the arrival in Wiesbaden for 45 minutes, of which 20 were allotted to the supermarket - naturally, there was no talk of any baths planned in the program, there was not even enough time to explore the city; but before that, the group spent 6 hours in Heidelberg, the same situation developed at the beginning of the tour in Regensburg, when it took 7 hours to visit even the oldest brewery, and the tour itself took less than an hour, in addition, the entire time layout of the rest of this and the next day, etc. etc.

• The apotheosis of everything was the 14th, the so-called free, in connection with which a number of questions arise. Firstly, who organizes additional paid excursions on the day when the group moves from one city to another, where do tourists go if this excursion does not interest them, it turns out to be a frank coercion. If the company has not been able to organize one hotel for two days as envisaged by the program, and by the way, not anywhere, but in Bad Reichenhall, where a free day can be comfortably spent in a bathhouse, and not on a bus, then at least have the conscience not to take money for moving from hotel to hotel. Secondly, the day before the guide, after long lamentations about the closed "Eagle's Nest", offered a trip to the High Tauern, the group agreed to it, as a result, in the morning it turned out that we were not going there, because the length of the route is 450 km, but sorry, this what was not known yet in Kyiv or did the mileage change overnight? Instead, we were offered a trip to the Salzkamergut and a boat ride on the Königssee. When they campaigned, they promised 2.5 hours of boating with music, in the end it turned out to be 0.5 hours to the nearest island and back, and all the music was blowing on the pipe to demonstrate the sound of the echo, I already wrote about the forced additional excursion to the Salzkamergut . By the way, it is interesting that in the excursion kiosk in Bad Reichenhall for such an excursion the price is set at 13 euros, while at the "Feeria" 20 and this is at a discount, and initially 35 euros.

2. The guide, that very "vaunted" Alexander Romanenko, unfortunately, the main part of the organizational confusion on the route is his "merit". To be honest, I still hesitate between two assumptions: either the guide simply does not know the route he has developed, in any case, he never put it on the map and did not measure it with real distances; or he simply did not care what people who paid money (by the way, not small) for a tour on a specific program would see and what they would not see.

The first assumption is supported, for example, by the fact that even if the group had left Uzhgorod 3 hours earlier (as originally planned) and to Spissky Grad, and to the baths, and for lunch, we would not have had time, why then was it all to plan and why from the entire program of the first day it was necessary to implement lunch. The same can be said about the last day of the tour, we arrived at the Slovak border 3 hours before the train departure, usually this is how much time is allotted for crossing the border, regardless of whether the day of the Ukrainian-Slovak good-neighborliness is passing or not, which means we did not get to Kosice not because of the event, but because of the time wasted in the restaurant and TESCO. I wrote about the situation with mileage on a trip to the High Tauern above. In many cities, excursion trips were carried out very superficially, in particular in Regensburg, brief information about the sights was simply read from the city map, along which the route was laid. It is clear that even the most erudite person cannot know everything, but then why not use the services of local guides, at least for the first time until the route is better studied, the tour is not so budgetary that Feeriya could not pay for them services. A separate question is why, for example, during a tour of Heidelberg during a visit to the castle, which is included in the program, the guide, instead of conducting a tour, goes to a cafe to drink beer (which, by the way, he was very fond of throughout the tour), and offers tourists take the audio guides. Travel information on the bus, with rare exceptions, was not told, but was read monotonously from an electronic book, which is a pity, because. individual episodes suggest that Alexander, when he wants, knows how to tell a fascinating story. There is no doubt that the selection and systematization of material also require time and labor, but do not replace a lively, emotional presentation. It was also surprising that on the route, tourists were not offered a thematic selection of films, but stories about the Cologne carnival and someone's trip to Switzerland, which had nothing to do with this tour, were shown.

The second assumption is supported by the fact that the guide had to be repeatedly asked about the program, and he categorically did not want to hear the questions and suggestions of the main part of the group, listening only to a small close campaign (apparently regular customers) sitting in the front seats. It got to the point that when seating on the bus, the guide tried, to the detriment of the rest of the tourists, to comfortably place “their own” one per row, and only repeated appeals and reminders from several people forced him to transfer everyone by the end of the day, so to speak “according to the purchased tickets” . It is clear that regular customers should be valued, but it should not be allowed to give the impression that the tour is a pleasure trip for the guide and his fans, and all the rest are just annoying random fellow travelers, and not clients who legally bought a ticket. An illustrative example, in Regensburg, the guide left about a third of the group (12 people) of those who did not want to visit the Weinstein brewery and, together with the bus, was about an hour late at the appointed time, people were waiting for him in the cold and in the rain, not being able to leave the meeting place . A guide who considers his tourists would have texted or found another way to report the delay. In this case, not only this was not done, but when the tourists, having no information, began to call the guide themselves, instead of a specific answer and preferably an apology, they heard a rather rude statement, like “I had to go to the brewery, and if you didn’t want to, then everything else is yours.” Problems". It seems to me that such a tone in dealing with tourists is unacceptable. The duties of a guide who travels from the company also, in my opinion, include monitoring the work of local guides (they really only invited two in 15 days), and then one of them, instead of the announced two hours, spent the tour in an hour, and devoted the rest of the time to the local sausage . The objections of tourists who would like to see Bamberg (by the way, a UNESCO landmark and an additional paid program) were not heard by either the invited guide or Mr. Romanenko. The refrain of the trip was constant references to the fact that this is supposedly a premiere tour and everything will be fine in the future, but we are traveling, as they say "here and now", especially since I had to go to the first tours, there are no such number of punctures anywhere remember. An additional indicator of the quality of the organization of the tour and the work of the guide is the fact that he did not dare to distribute questionnaires for tourists to tourists, apparently he assumed that it would be written there.

In conclusion, I would like to express regret that such an interesting idea was so carelessly and indifferently implemented. Of course, this is my subjective opinion, but at the end of the trip, I came to a disappointing conclusion: “I DO NOT RISK TO TRAVEL WITH THE FEERIA TRAVEL COMPANY AND WILL NOT RECOMMEND TO OTHERS.”

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