Review: Luxury Scotland Tour, Isle of Sky, Edinburgh, Ben Nevis Mountain

The trip was fantastic.

Our driver was awesome, as was our coach. His incredible local knowledge, personality and willingness to go the extra mile to make our trip a success were exemplary. Come to find out he has family living near us and he is quite familiar with our city, having visited the US on multiple occasions. What a small world, and we have our first international friend. I highly recommend him for future trips, your clients will love him.

We really liked all the hotels you picked for us. They were all different for sure, but all very nice accommodations. We wished that we had more time to spend at each location, but that was our choice to see as much as possible in a week's time, and we certainly accomplished that. The itinerary you developed for us was an excellent blueprint, and as you suspected, our driver was able to overlay his experience on it to make it even more successful.

As you know first-hand, Scotland is a beautiful country and we found the people universally friendly. We especially enjoyed the Isle of Skye, and had one of our all-team best meals ever (Scottish tapas) in Portree. The Quiraing was incredible and truly amazing, I think the highlight of our trip. Although having said that, waking up in Fort William after a overcast, drizzly 1st day of travel from Edinburgh (our only close to bad weather day the entire trip) with a snow-covered Ben Nevis towering over us was pretty awe-inspiring :-) And based upon our experience (and discussion with locals throughout our trip), with very few tourists relative to the throngs of summer, visiting Scotland in early May could not have been better for us, permitting more time and ease of access to things we wanted to see.

Really, the only things close to negative related to our trip, which we have already discussed at length, were (1) the process and confusion working with Zicasso and our travel company and securing travel insurance, and, (2) the situation surrounding the initial driver selected for our trip. Both of those processes need to be cleaned up, as both Zicasso and our travel company pride themselves on offering only premier services to their clients. These two aspects of our travel certainly detracted somewhat from our overall experience with both companies.
Thanks again for all your efforts making our trip a memorable one. Thanks, too, for the complimentary drink in Edinburgh. I now have Scottish version of my traditional Irish coffee as my go-to :-)

As for the overall rating, without the occurrence of the two issues I referenced, I would give both Zicasso and our travel specialist a solid "5 star" rating. However, considering the issues mentioned, I would drop the rating to 4.5. Given that we can't select "half stars", with final rating is "4 stars" given the "premier" service both Zicasso and our travel company. I am a tough grader.