Kimkim Trip Reviews

Without the help of Chris McCarty at Kim Kim, I would have been lost attempting to coordinate hotels and find sights around the coastline of Iceland. The timing from one location to another was perfect. This made a once in a lifetime trip as efficient as possible. Thank you

Planning (with Nathalie) was excellent and everything that had been arranged went off really well.

Excellent service and always on-hand and attentive

Planning and booking the trip was easy. KimKim connected us with a great tour provider, and always responded quickly to questions and requests.

It's rare to find a tour organizer really dedicated to creating a perfect experience, but that's the impression we had with Nicole and Haku. It's not the cheapest option, but hearing about others who had trekked with larger groups we are happy with our decision.

Our guide Josias was experienced, patient and a great companion for the 6 days. We stayed in comfortable lodges in epic locations, and really enjoyed the meal on the final night.

There were no hidden costs or surprises, and every detail was covered. This truly allowed us to enjoy one of the best hiking trails in the world.

Everything went really smoothly. Where there were minor hitches they either resolved themselves or Linda responded and sorted them quickly.

Just great. Linda was friendly by email, straightforward, and understood what I wanted from the trip. Responded quickly and made everything work well.

Very nice trip overall

The tours and hotels that the travel partner arranged for were excellent. I was very pleased with the individual tour operators. There was a massive breakdown in communication between the tour company that I was communicating with and the tour provider due to the fact that there were two or three companies in between them. The meeting times on our trip vouchers did not always match the meeting times on our overall itinerary. The tour operators called us the "ghost clients" because they didn't have any information about us and didn't even know if we were real clients.

This was most problematic on the mountain climbing tour because the tour operator provides a document to participants instructing them on equipment and supplies that they are supposed to bring. We were lucky to have the operator for a different tour so she was able to send us the document the night before our climb. We were told that lunches would be provided on full-day tours, but this was not the case for the mountain climb. We had gone to a market earlier and just brought whatever food we had. We brought hiking equipment that was sufficient for the climb, but that was purely by chance. The tour company also needed our passport numbers to register us with the government as climbers and to get us insurance for the climb. Nobody told us about this and i happened to have a copy of our passports. If not, we wouldn't have been able to climb.
Had we not met with the tour guide the day before, we would have been unable to complete the climb (other people were not permitted to climb if they were not properly outfitted).

Another tour only had the name of the third party travel agency and not our names, ages, or nationality. After the other tour issues, we went to the tour provider the evening before our tour and they were ecstatic because this allowed them to put us in the correct group with other people who spoke english.

On another day, our transfer from the port to our hotel was not there when our ferry arrived so we walked to the hotel.

The next day, our guide for the full-day tour was not at the hotel at either of the times we were provided (tour voucher and itinerary had different times). We tried calling the number listed on the voucher, but it was the number for another travel company who the kimkim travel partner had booked through. We found a poster for the tour provider and managed to get in touch with her. The third party tour company had told her that we would be arriving that day and she should pick us up at the port, not our hotel.

Overall, i used kimkim because i wanted the tour planning and booking process to go more smoothly. Due to the multiple layers of tour companies between us and the eventual tour operators, there was a tremendous lack of communication. I imagine the multiple layers also added cost. Were it not for proactive steps that we took during the trip, this could have spiraled into a complete disaster.

There were small errors that i picked up on during the planning process. There were the mismatched tour times. It's hard to say whether some of the other issues were her fault or whether it was further down the chain. If she had directly booked things for me, the way i thought this would work, it would be easier to determine where the breakdown occurred.

I only received the one company as an option. Not sure if KimKim restricts the replies to the first company or if only the one company was interested in responding but it would have been good to get multiple companies to reply.

James was great to work with and was VERY fast to respond to questions and concerns.

Many thanks to Linda to help organize our trip.

The attention from Marco during all the searching and booking process was great, and the fact that you could pay all the travel costs through one platform made things very easy.

He developed different travel proposals for me and give me all kind of recommendations and advice.

Halldor did a great job at answering all our questions. He was prompt and always gave us options. The advice was well received and everything worked out great. He delivered on every request we had. Great job!

Halldor did a great job and gave us an itinerary that was very well balanced. We visited some of the most popular spots, but there were also special places that had very few people and just as beautiful.

Almost perfect. There was a slight mismatch between our expectations on tour length and the expectations of the guide. Specifically, our request for a deeper dive into the historical details of sites above and beyond the usual time limitations of a fixed length standard tour was mis-matched with the guide's understanding that the standard tour length would suffice. I'm not sure where the communication could have been more complete and apologize if this is a detail that we missed somewhere in the exchanges. In any event, we raised the question with our guide and he was able to quickly clarify that he was hired for time-limited tours each day in line with the needs of regular tour customers. Overall, he was an absolute delight to work with and very impressive in terms of the depth of his knowledge clearly resulting from a deep personal passion for the history of Petra. Thank you!

It was not completely clear to us why our border crossings between Israel and Jordan were so far north and at such a remote border point. We guessed that it was due to the need to enter and depart by the same ports of entry and the relative time savings offered on the tail end of our trip when we needed to get to Haifa.

This is significant in part due to the remoteness of the Jordanian port of entry seems that it may have contributed to the delay of over an hour when the immigration officials withheld my visa stamp with no rationale or information on whether or not I would be permitted to enter Jordan.

It is very possible that the information was offered to one or both of us and we just missed it in which case I apologize. Thank you!

The schedule of activities felt oddly organized as our rest day was early in the week and prior to the more physical activities. The packed lunches with repetitive and monotonous. The trip was good but essentially we were paired with an agent from pico adventures so we were limited to activities only from their group even when we suggested an alternative it was dismissed. So essentially kimkim provided us with someone who made a hotel reservation for us and connected us to pico adventures.

See prior notes.

Chris was great to work with. He provided good recommendations for lodging and took care of making the arrangements. When one of the locations cancelled our reservation at the last minute because of a double booking he quickly helped us find another place. The sightseeing recommendations were very good.

Our first time with KimKim. We learned more about how to communicate with our tour planner. Some our fault, some his. We had a very difficult and unsatisfactory say at Centri Lodge. The other two locations were satisfactory. Yes, we dis comment back to the travel sites on all stays.

Communication of what we expected in lodgings vs. what we had. Other tour comments were in line in terms of what to do and see.

However, one detail that would've been nice to have is the suggested resturants closing times so I could have planned dinner better, as I was usually arriving just in time.

Preeti was AMAZING, available everyday until my last day of trip. It made things really flexible as I altered my trip when learning new sites to see as I met fellow travelers.

The trip planning was great. Trying to get 7 people organized was like trying to herd cats, but all our requests were handled well.

I absolutely love every minute of my planned trip through Linda! Even though it was done online and we did not verbally talk, I felt she communicated so clearly and well with me through her writing as if I was there. Any questions asked, she answered them. She also made bullet points for me as I had asked -- to make the itinerary more clear for me to scan over the needed accommodations of what I needed to cover, especially since there was so many things I was to do. I can tell she took a lot of time and effort into planning my trip. I gave her my budget and she accommodated to trying to stick with my budget. I cannot express how thankful I am with the detailed events, down to the train times and clear directions. Every day was to the spot clear. As a solo traveler, I felt very much at ease. She even called the Trolltunga hotel to make sure I was okay. I am just very VERY impressed with the process, especially since I am myself an Airbnb host and have a background in outdoor recreation planning. Its hard work with what she did and I appreciate every minute of it.

As mentioned in my last comment, I felt like Linda was a friend, answering all of my many questions. I felt like she was right there with me in Norway! Love her services so much, I do plan on attending the Nepal Yoga Retreat she had mentioned . I have been making recommendations to others about her service. I mean she even asked me at the end if I am home safe -- in not so many words. Thank you Linda. I offered to give her a tip via paypal and she declined. Amaaaazing person she is!

Monika was the strongest asset here. She knew the country in and out and is an x-pro skil jumper. The rest of the tour team was amazing as well.

Polona, Monika, Ales, and Siggi were all really amazing people to work with. I interacted with all of them via a Whatsapp group chat and they were there anytime I needed anything.

Really was a great trip. Day 2 needed a bit more instructions on sequence of stops. Food recommendations give were excellent, we could have used more recommended restaurants near we're we were booked to stay each night. Everything was really great and we had an awesome time.

Most of the trip was very good and well organized.

The Cartagena portion of the trip could have been better. There was some confusion with our day trIp to Rosario island. We didn't have the right information as to where to go and were told we needed a voucher which we never received. Tour guides in Cartagena tried to change our tour times and insisted on taking us to emerald shops (twice) even after we said we didn't want to go there.

Taxi drivers always showed up on time. Most guides were very good. Our favorite tour guides were Angelica in bogota and David in the coffee region.