Portugal Tour Review: Lisbon, Óbidos, Nazaré, Douro Valley, Porto, Winery Tour, Aveiro, Five-Day Trip

Our Zicasso travel agent was amazingly helpful in crafting a custom tour and worked with us when we decided to use them for airport transport and a couple of days of touring. I appreciated her patience in all the refinements we made along the way.

We missed our connection and arrived one day late; the tour company kindly picked us up a day later. When we arrived at Lisbon airport, the driver we had was professional, affable, and exceptionally knowledgeable.

After we arrived at our hotel, I received a distressing email from the tour company that we would be charged an extra $39 for the drive to the airport because we used a van instead of a car. After several emails and texts, it became clear they mixed us up with another traveler who arrived at the same time with two portable bicycles. We appreciated the phone call from our agent apologizing for her colleague's error, but it did start off the trip with a nuisance.

Our driver for the Lisbon to Porto leg of our journey was amazing. He was professional, punctual, engaging with our sons, respectful, attentive, and knowledgeable. We couldn't have asked for a better guide for our day-long travel. We enjoyed our visits to Óbidos, Nazaré (where we had an amazingly fresh and memorable seafood lunch), and Aveiro, where he kindly shared some special traditional egg cakes with us.

We enjoyed our trip to Douro Valley. Our driver was very knowledgeable and we benefited greatly from his master’s in winery background and his enthusiasm for wines. The winery tour was satisfactory, but the picnic lunch was outstanding, with amazing views of the valley. The Douro River boat ride was very relaxing, with a nice crew; we were surprised at the amount of food and wine they had for us (enough for 10 to 15 people). Given we had just had a hearty meal, it did not make sense to us and 95% was probably enjoyed by others after we left.

As mentioned above, this was a private, custom tour booked months in advance with ample time for planning. We decided to go with this travel agency because we wanted the full experience, particularly driving on route 222, said to be one of the best drives in Europe, for at least two hours so I could enjoy the views myself instead of driving. I sent explicit emails to the tour company at the outset regarding this important desire.

Upon entering the van on the morning of our Douro Valley tour and expressing my excitement about driving on route 222, our driver informed us that this was not part of the plan and he planned to take the highway all the way there. He seemed a bit dismissive of our high priority to fully experience route 222 and wasn't communicating with anyone to make any changes, hence I emailed the company. Our driver seemed as if he was doing us a favor when he said he would drive 15 minutes on route 222 after the dam. Our driver's boss called him, but it was too late to change the route to our destination as we were 15 minutes away. Our driver then said he'd try to rearrange the boat ride to allow time to drive back for a couple of hours on route 222. This did not happen.

We had a very rushed and scary high-speed route 222 drive for 15 minutes to and the same 15- to 20-minute drive back. We had two hours at the winery after our picnic, waiting in the hot sun, that we could have used for the drive up or back to enjoy route 222.

In retrospect, I could have driven there myself or hired an Uber driver at a fraction of the cost for the experience we had that day. Or I could have booked a private Viator experience that I found that had all the components included at a lower cost (winery visit, picnic, boat tour, short drive on route 222). What distinguished our intended plans with the tour company was the extended drive on route 222.

When we travel, we like to make the most of our experiences and partner with talent on the ground to achieve them. This tour company is clearly talented. I wish they had spent the requisite time to create the private experience we were looking for with the ample time we provided for them to prepare.