ChinaTour.comReviews of chinatour.com

The tour guides were rude! Only concerned about selling us optional tours. Also there was NOT enough food for the group meals. 10 people had to share 5 small plates of food. We ended up eating McDonalds more than Chinese food. Very disappointed.

The tour guides were excellent and the tour itself covered a lot of great stops; however I would never go with this company again. They changed the dates of my tour 3 times in the weeks before I was scheduled to go, which made it difficult for my work schedule. If I did not change my dates, I was told I could get my money back. What! I had been planning this trip for months and now they were forcing me to take the trip at a time that was not as convenient. Because of all the changes, I was not able to take this trip with the rest of my extended family as we could not coordinate our work schedules around all the changes. This was really disgusting! ChinaTour also tried to get me to pay for my flight to San Francisco when they could not get enough people to fly from Chicago. I refused. They also inconvenienced us by flying us out of one airport in SF and returning us to a different airport outside of SF. You've got to be kidding! This caused my daughter to have to take buses and trains to get to her home. They forgot to book my flight from Beijing to Shanghai and I ended up having to travel alone on this flight since it was made at the last minute. The rest of the tour group stayed together while I nervously got stuck in gridlock traffic in Beijing and was met by a second tour guide at the airport who did not speak English. I would have missed my flight if he had not snuck me into a line intended for military only. I was now a woman on my own as I went through security and then caught the last bus to the airplane. Fortunately, I was able to rejoin my tour group in the luggage area of the Shanghai Airport. Expect to waste time in govt. owned businesses where the Chinese try to sell you all kinds of products, some of which are higher priced because you are a tourist. Although the hotels were really nice, there seemed to be no air and we had to open windows to sleep (we went in March). Also our hotels were sometimes really far from the sights we wanted to see. One hotel was in the middle of empty high rise buildings. In Shanghai, we were two hours by subway from the city and had to catch a cab to get to the subway. We were on our own in Shanghai and felt very unsafe when trying to return to the hotel at night from the subway station. There were no cabs around and we had to wander around what looked like a quiet town and ran across a cab driver, but not before being asked by men in non-cab cars if we needed a ride. Scary! The cab driver we found could not even understand the card the hotel gave us that was written in Chinese. We were so tired and I just wanted to cry. A European saw we were having trouble and stopped to help us by speaking to the cab driver in Chinese. He told us the writing on the card was too little for the cab driver to read. He read the card to the cab driver and told us to get in the cab. Our guardian angel helped us out of a difficult situation. I was so upset with ChinaTour that they would put us in a hotel so far from Shanghai, with no guide to help us (our guide went home a day early). We only had one day in Shanghai and spent over 4 hours just getting to the city and back. The redeeming parts of the trip were the Yellow Mountain, the Great Wall, historical sights, the shows (excellent!), eating with a Chinese family, and the delicious Chinese food. I truly enjoyed all the tour guides, but I would never book with this company again. To be pushed around so much "before" the trip was stressful and discouraging, especially when this had been a family vacation planned 6 months ago, yet different members of our family ended up having to go at different times. Evidently, if they don't have enough people to fill the trip, they just cancel your trip and try to move you to different dates that may or may not work for you. Three changes in a matter of a few weeks right before the trip is totally unacceptable, along with the mistakes on plane flights and the distance of some hotels from the main attractions. I guess you get what you pay for. I would recommend paying more and going with a company that will honor their original commitments.

This was not a good experience. From an extreme lack of communication after booking the tour to bad experience with the tour guide in Thailand. I would not suggest visiting any country through this tour company at all. We had to ask multiple times for itinerary and flight information and the information we received was incomplete or less than informative. We booked the tour for 10 of us but they split us up in two touring vans but there was only one tour guide so no matter which van we sat in half of us did not have access to the tour guide and missed a lot of informative information. She also did not seem to care about us and frequently told us we were on our own and had to figure out things ourselves.

Proceed with caution.... This tour has potential but needs some changes before I can recommend it. While the hotels in China were fabulous, the itinerary was very rushed with no time allowed to "stop and smell the roses". The majority of the time in China was spent on a bus. I would not recommend Shanghai Disney as the hours allowed from the tour company were too short to enjoy the park. We were only able to go on 2 rides. Thailand was more relaxed but there was little communication from the parent company to the local guides, so we had to continually review expectations for each event and some were not at all as listed.