RSD Travel
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Cultural Tour To Crete
We returned from a cultural tour to Crete on 20th November. We have just about managed to give this trip 1 star. Probably the worst holiday my wife and I have ever had. We actually wanted to come home by the 3rd day! If you want to go on this trip be very careful that you understand EXACTLY what you will get. What RSD don't mention is that visiting monuments in Crete can involve much uphill and downhill walking as well as walking in archaeological sites which is very difficult if you have any issues at all with walking or your balance. On our trip, there were about 6 people who had some issues and one lady who actually fell over whilst at one of the sights. Although some people may want to see the sights despite this, many people will just not be able to do it. RSD will not tell you any details of the flight until they send you the flight tickets and itinerary (I asked but they refused). They say that they don't know until the last minute because it is a charter flight but that is ridiculous even charter flights have to plan months in advance to be able to schedule these flights. One of the reasons we think, they don't tell you is because the flight starts at Gatwick calls at Manchester and then on to Heraklion, So the outward journey involves the people from Gatwick having to stop at Manchester and on the return, the Manchester bound people have to get off the plane at Gatwick, go through a security check then get back onto the same seats on the same plane. I will leave you to work out for yourself how we felt about that. The flight timings are also inconvenient with the flight scheduled to land at 00:45 local time (2 hours ahead of GMT), our flight was delayed by 2 hours which put the schedule back to 02:45, in the event it was even later than that when we arrived and by the time we had reached our hotel, checked in etc, we were only able to catch around 2 hours sleep before we had to be on the coach for the first days tour. A word about the hotels. RSD describe them as 4/5-star national category. The first hotel (Bali Paradise Hotel) would barely make 2 stars in Britain, the rooms are dated with minimal old built in furniture, bathroom with a bath which was so small that a large child would only just fit in it. There was also weirdly, a window at the end of the bath which looked out on the corridor linking the rooms, it was frosted but even so bathers could be seen from the corridor. In short, the hotel was tatty. The second hotel (Royal Belvedere) was slightly better and would just about scrape 3 stars. The room we had was a family room which gave us a little extra space but again it looked tired and was in need of some TLC. Other things to note about the hotels were that in the Royal Belvedere there was only one bin in the room which was in the bathroom and neither room had any tea or coffee making facilities (we have stayed in may hotels throughout the world from basic B&B to luxurious 5 * accommodation and we cannot remember any that failed to provide this most basic service. The final thing to mention about the hotels is the food. It was appalling! RSD describe breakfast as tasty, in fact it was generally tasteless slop and in the Bali Paradise Hotel they didn’t even serve ant fresh fruit, it was tinned! The evening meal is sold as a separate package described as ‘Sumptuous Buffet’ In fact the tasteless slop theme from breakfast is repeated, none of the food looked remotely appetising and was generally only lukewarm. It will take a lot of persuading before we could agree that Chicken Nuggets would qualify as ’sumptuous’, perhaps it is considered an ‘international specialty’. If you don’t buy that extra food package, you will struggle to find somewhere to eat at night as the local tavernas and restaurants have mainly closed for the winter and the hotels are quite isolated. The message here is ‘eat out at lunchtime’ and get some snacks to eat at night. Don’t buy their package. The whole dining experience owes more to industrial canteen than to any other form of catering that we have ever come across on our travels. On to the trips, you know what you are getting when you book (or do you?). The first thing we were told by the guide was that we should take no notice of the itinerary published in the brochure. She was going to reschedule everything. The result of that was that the optional tours to Knossos Palace and the museum at Heraklion would take place on the day that we transferred from the Bali Paradise Hotel to the Royal Belvedere. This meant that even those people who were not going on the tour had to go to the places and were basically dumped there until the tour was finished. In the case of the Knossos Palace, this meant that we were dumped in a car park on a main road where there were 2 rather tatty coffee shops and a number of tourist shops. In Heraklion we were dumped in the centre of Heraklion without any directions as to where we could eat or do any sightseeing. The worst thing about the tours were the trips to a Carpet Warehouse, a Jewellery Warehouse and a Leather Warehouse. Safe to say that none of these were actually examples of Cretan Handicrafts or culture but were purely an exercise in parting the tourist from his money. Over priced goods and salespeople who seem to have been trained by the very worst breed of double-glazing salesman led to an altercation in the Leather shop when the salesman just wouldn’t go away and was on our shoulder constantly. Finally, a word about tipping, we accept that in the tourism industry, tipping is a way of life whether or not you agree with it. What we objected to was being told on 3 separate occasions that we should be tipping our guides and driver and how much to tip etc. The result of this constant harassment was that none of the guides or the driver were tipped. We just felt that the main guide had become obsessed about it and was trying to extract the maximum she could. We have to say that had Dimitri the driver taken us to the airport for our return trip, we would have tipped him despite the harassment. If you are looking at this trip and want some advice as to whether or not to book it, we would say avoid it at all costs, it is awful.