Travel Review: Custom Australia & New Zealand Tour - Milford, Queenstown, Great Barrier Reef, Auckland, Sydney and Daintree

Thanks for asking for feedback. It truly is the key to continued client satisfaction and referral. Here is some information about our trip.

When I have time, I would like to write up all my notes, but that will take a while.

In general, we had an AWESOME time! This was a BIG deal for us, and your itinerary and the hotels and taking care of all that stuff, made it doable and for the most part, worry free. The hotels especially, were VERY very nice.

On the way home, I informally rated everything we did/encountered as a + or – based on whether it exceeded or missed our (lofty) expectations. We had 24 + and 10 – so overall that’s excellent. And the +’s in most cases were much more rewarding than the –‘s were disappointing. Here’s what we liked the most, in order:

1. Milford trip -- off the charts positive! While expensive, it was worth every penny. The Wanderer had just been refurbished. It was superb. We didn’t need to phantom book the fourth person, as it had only 30 of 36 spots filled, but that’s not a big deal. We worried too much about the shared bathroom….no berths had one and it was not a big deal at all. In fact we liked the smaller atmosphere and crew a lot. I would do this again in a heartbeat. The scenery was at a Yosemite level, maybe better bc it rained on the way down, then cleared for our cruise and the waterfalls were at their max. simply awesome! Photo of our family on boat.

2. Queenstown – electric and fun. They were filming the Hobbit and Orlando Bloom was in town, Film crew at the Novotel. Lots of stuff to do.

3. Great barrier reef --- gorgeous day, and fun snorkel, vivid colors…needs to be seen in person

4. Wine tour on Waiheke -- Ananda did great job and as mentioned in earlier note, Coleen got the Lunch at Mudbrick print…need I say more (see our photo looking back at Auckland). Saw 300 year old Pohutukawa trees. Photo from winery table.

5. Sydney w Claire – so fun to see her…ran us ragged. Hotel location could not have been better. WE had transportation passes that got us on all busses, trains ferries…very worthwhile. Note sunrise photo from roof of the Holiday inn! One tip -- look at pic I’ll send…we went on the Sydney bridge tower climb for $11 and got almost as high as the actual bridge climb for $165. we saw as much, and saved time and money.

6. bike rental/ride in Auckland…Coleen and I rented bikes and rode along harbor to Mission Bay. Only $15 @. Easy ride and great scenery, when we’d thought riding a bike in Auckland would be scary. We love to bike ride and the rental down on Commerce and Quay was a pleasant surprise.

7. Daintree – Jamie from Back country Bliss was super. I suppose we could have rented a car and gotten the audio tape for $12 but not sure we’d have learned as much and certainly would not have seen the cassowaries. We’d thought our tour included the zipline, so we added it for $190 and it was underwhelming. Would not repeat that, especially when we ziplined later in ZQN that was truly exhilarating.

Some other pros and cons form your perspective, Jillian :

Hotels were awesome. We appreciated them from the start, and it was nice to know we would not be disappointed about our stay each night. I’m guessing they were more than we’d normally have paid for, but for this experience, they were perfect! Thanks!

Itinerary in general was very good and gave us chance to see so much. We could easily have spent more time everywhere – each spot was a destination in itself – but what a selection of the best of the best!

All the paperwork and vouchers and bookings details were nice to have taken care of.

Qantas was impressive! Thanks!

There a couple of glitches, though --- having us get up at 6:20am the first day after 32 hours of travel to drive an hour back to Cairns, when there were plenty of GBR tours right in Port Douglas, wasn’t good. The fine folks at Martinique, which we LOVED, helped us with this.

The shuttle from SYD to Holiday Inn didn’t work as planned, and took some intervention from the air[port transportation desk. It was rush hour which didn’t help.

The shuttle from Orari to CHC was cut too close…it was booked with 2 hours but the flight was changed to an hour earlier and somehow the shuttle was not changed accordingly. We made it, barely, with some worry.

We should have booked the car rental ZQN to Greymouth for 1pm pick up. That would have saved a day (which we ended up doing anyway) and given us another morning in ZQN to do stuff. Franz Josef was fun but the heli-hike was over-rated, at least it was for those of us who spend winters in the snow. I guess +Claire enjoyed first helicopter ride, but the glacier was just a bunch of dirty decaying snow…not that big of deal.