Review: Family Trip to Spain & Portugal, Culture & History

Five stars with an extra asterisk star for going the extra mile!

As a background, I've taken the family (my wife and 3 girls) on many family vacations over the years and frequently use agencies to take some of the stress off of me for driving and transfers and tour guide selection. Although it can be a bit more expensive, I have found good value in using a knowledgable sherpa to guide me through the details.

Zicasso has hooked me up for a Ireland trip and our Italy trip, both with great success. But this review is for our Spain travel agency who was absolutely the gold standard of agencies. 

Our travel consultant took the time to ask and listen about our preferred style of travel and then within a day presented us with a full "draft" itinerary to review. After a few back and forth emails to fine tune the details of the trip we were all set. This planning was all within 4 weeks of our actual travel date - we are last minute types :)

Now the fun begins - we get to the airport ready to check in on Xmas night for an evening flight and come find out the 3 kids passports expire before the 3 month window required for Spain. Even though they are "valid" passports, they are not valid for travel to Spain. So after returning home, I call the travel agency contact number thinking I would leave a message with our news...and after a few rings I get a human...Our travel consultant picked up at 3AM local time!!!! He said he would make sure the driver was notified to NOT pick us up and would get started on altering our itinerary to accommodate the plan to leave with new passports in 48 hours. 

The entire itinerary was shifted by 2 days as if that was the original plan. We did all the same things at the same times and had no penalties or "change fees". Our travel consultant worked his magic and we had the best of accommodations, drivers and guides anyone could ask for. What could have been an absolute mess, was just a great vacation as expected - THANKS TO OUR TRAVEL CONSULTANT and our travel agency.