very much enjoyed the variety, expertise

France | Mar 16 - Mar 25, 2025

Overall we very much enjoyed the variety and expertise of our tours and guides! Here is a super-picky review just so you have details, but again we very much enjoyed our trip!!

Eiffel: guide was knowledgeable on how to make sure we would get to visit the very top given crowds and closures
Riverboat: great! one of our few chances to sit and have relaxing dinner as most days we were tired at the end of each day
Louvre: great run through the museum - guide was fantastic!
Notre Dame: guide was knowledgeable and talking points were interesting. Again, knew how to work the crowds
Loire: wonderful to see country outside of Paris for a day and the chateaux’s were great. DaVinci was a little underwhelming as but Amboise was beautiful - again we were in a hurry so I think we would have all liked more time in town to sit and eat a nice lunch (and browse) and I personally would have skipped the Luce just because we didn’t learn anything about DaVinci that we didn’t already know. We only had 30 min to get through Chambord. Maybe it was just too much for our group for the day, or maybe the guide should have kept us on schedule, but we still enjoyed the day trip.
Wine tasting: I enjoyed but the girls not so much
Perfume: fun and different!
Cooking class: chef was very nice, market was really cool (we all loved it) food was good, but no real cooking experience spent a lot of time there - maybe better for a longer trip or trip without teens
Versailles: great! again rushed in the actual palace (30 min to view before closing and some areas were closed) but bikes were fun and guide did a fantastic job with historical highlights
Opera/Passages: love the tour, guide was great! but we were all under the impression that we would get to do some shopping. It was great doing this at the end of the trip as it sort of touched on all the history we learned.
Food walk: guide was sweet and kind but the tour itself was not a highlight

Lodging: was nice! also nice to have a great little Italian place downstairs, but a couple of restaurant recommendations around lodging would have been fantastic - we were too tired to hit the bricks to look around and too hard to make a decision with 5 people. Nice accommodations, but may have been better to have been closer to our tours as we needed 45-1hr to get to them each morning.

Personally, I would have liked time to sit and eat between tours, but I like to eat :)

Kim Kim app: wonderful to have - here are thoughts for future
-push notifications when chat is enabled
-enable tour ratings in the app
24/7 help (by app or phone) on weekends as Karen mentioned

Other notes:
We found uber to be much better than taxi and the subway was clean and easy!

Thank you so much, Liz!