Travel Review: Tour of Spain & Portugal, Barcelona, Seville, Madrid, Ronda, San Sebastian, Prado, Guggenheim, Reina Sofia

Fantastic trip, beautifully organized. This travel company took our bare-bones specifications (contemporary art, architecture, food, and music) and created a trip that felt truly personalized including intimate experiences we could never have arranged on our own. Hotels were ideally situated in each city we visited, with the boutique-style charm and service we were looking for. Guides were uniformly excellent, and even the drivers were reliably good company (relying on their good English skills, since we are typical uni-lingual Americans). All supporting materials were nicely organized both before the trip and on arrival, including itinerary, day-to-day logistics with names & phone numbers for all guides & contact people, city maps, and well-researched restaurant and additional activity recommendations for each location. The office responded immediately to questions during the trip, and exuded a warm friendly attitude from start to finish. We were startled and charmed to discover that our guides had often learned something about our interests and quirks from the office before we ever met. 

A trip like this can be pretty pricey, but I believe it makes possible a deeper immersion than you can accomplish handling your own arrangements. Having private guides offers wonderful opportunities for long deep conversations with a variety of local people. The research required to duplicate this itinerary on our own would have been at least a month's full-time work, and even so there were resources (such as specially-qualified art museum guides) that we would have had no way to access.

Highest recommendation for this company.