Italy Vacation Review: Venice, Cinque Terre Boat Tour, Burano, Uffizi Gallery

Parts of the trip were outstanding, parts of the trip were a bust. The coordination and quality of transfers were first-class and a couple of the guides were impressive with excellent English. Other tours were with guides that were hard to understand due to heavy accents, drivers that spoke minimal English to help narrate the route and actual itinerary that was not as expected. One hotel in Venice had an old-style bath which had to be used sitting down with a hand-held sprayer and had only one person on staff at night and a request for extra towels at 9:00 at night was rejected due to lack of staff. One tour was actually originally scheduled for the afternoon of our arrival but in the final documents was scheduled for the next morning and we ended up with a very long day of tours the next day ending with an aborted plan. This aborted tour (destination for dinner) was because of a scary unpaved, one car wide approach on the side of a cliff as dusk approached. We were all very unhappy and directed the driver to go back and he, fortunately, took us to an amazing local restaurant in his own home town with great views on the way back although we wasted half the day driving rather than sight-seeing as planned. Also, the winery tour was a full 2 1/2 hours, not the 1 1/2 hour allotted, further decreasing our time to sightsee. The private boat tour in the Cinque Terra was expected to make visits to five towns but ended up being able to go ashore for only one of the towns via another scary transfer to a rowboat. The tour became just a very long boat ride that we would have also aborted after reaching the fifth town if we could have gone ashore and taken the train back.