Review: European Tour, Austria, Germany, Vienna, Salzburg, Wine Tasting, Food, Music, History, Museum Tours

4 star rating for a great overall experience that was not perfect. If I had a choice, I would give it 4.5 stars.

The planning phase: The planning phase began in an outstanding fashion. Our agent and his assistant were very enthusiastic and were great over the phone. They summarized our meetings and sent us email updates as needed. They were great with trying to accommodate our needs and were flexible with our budget requests. They had great ideas to suggest for the trip as well. Because of this, we selected them over their competitor. At this point, I would've given them 5 stars. However, mistakes began to show after that. In our final itinerary, a few of our top ten requested items did not show up, and no explanations were given until we asked our agent specifically about them. When we made it clear to him that these items were important to us, he in the end fulfilled our request. There was an app we could use on our phone to see the updated itinerary and we found this overall very helpful. at this point, right before we started the trip, I still would've given them a 5 star rating. 

The 4 star rating is the result of the following mistakes which happened only during the Vienna/Austria leg of our trip and which perhaps none of us could've anticipated.

1: our local tour guide showed up in the wrong hotel in Vienna as a mistake was made somewhere in the back end within the booking agency. This resulted in a nearly 40 min delay to the start of our tour which was scheduled to be 4 hours long, so we lost almost 20% of our tour time.

2: We were given the wrong train station to board our train from Vienna to Salzburg. We were told to go to the West bahnhof station to board the train according to our itinerary, so we took a taxi there. However, we were told by the station officers that our ticket actually required us to board from the Wien Meidling station, which was 4 subway stops away. So we had to take with us all of our luggages and board a subway train to get to the actual station. This made us nearly miss our actual train.  

Overall, we had a great trip. The highlights were the local guided tours, restaurants and hotels booked for us. If not for the mistakes listed above, I would've given them a 5 star rating because they otherwise did a great job planning this trip. My feedback for them is to make sure the specific agents always double check their bookings to make sure no mistakes are made in the future, especially for important things like which train station to show up for a train that one should not miss.