Luxury Trip to Turkey Travel Review: Bosporus Boat Tour, Spice Bazaar, Food Tour, Sunrise Balloon Ride, Pottery Making, Mosques

The owners of the travel company, Derya and Ziya took an extraordinary "hands on" approach to our entire vacation. Derya is a superb email correspondent, immediately and thoroughly answering any question posed to her during the planning phase of our trip. We are 2 married couples in our 60s, great friends for over 40 years who have varied interests when it comes to travel and she and Ziya took the time to understand each of our individual expectations. As our itinerary developed, they were enthusiastic to participate in a zoom conference that included all of us. Once they digested our goals they were not shy to state why certain suggestions we made based on our own travel book readings were superb, and others, though worthy, might better be replaced by alternatives that they readily suggested. Reading client reviews before we committed ourselves to do our planning through the travel company, one of the common themes was the quality of the guides that they employ. Believe the reviews !! Our guide for the entire 7 days was a gentleman with decades of tour guide experience in Turkey with a broad fund of knowledge of history, tradition, religion, food, art, crafts, geography.....a true bon vivant and renaissance man. Additionally, he was also a logistics champion and didn't hesitate to be by our side to make potential obstacles like an ATM withdrawal in a foreign language stress free. Derya and Ziya  continued their interest in our travel experience as it was occurring, being sure to give us updates by text and interceding on our behalf (A restaurant reservation that was unobtainable by us was suddenly available when Ziya  reached out.)  The trip was flawlessly executed, guide and driver were always on time and exhibited flexibility and coordination when circumstances demanded. As an example, when our vehicle was caught in a traffic jam, our guide had us get out to walk and take mass transit with him so we could get to one of our destinations in Istanbul,  and he instructed the driver in where to catch up to us once the traffic jam resolved. If you are looking for a stress free vacation, whether it include the classic tourist destinations or "off the beaten path experiences", do not hesitate to engage the travel company and their highly competent and knowledgeable staff.