ChinaTour.comReviews of chinatour.com

Need more tours than shopping

we had a horrible experience at the airport when departing causing us to miss a significant portion of the tour. We were unable to reach Chinatour to help us and when we finanly did, had to pay for a whole new ticket to join our companions on the tour. Once we joined, it went well, nice clean hotels, great tour guides and exercusions.

Turned out the price was low because we were being bussed to tourist only stores “museums” to be sold a lot of product. Lots of great things-accommodations were great, great stops, but I would have done it differently had I known.

Always in a hurry to bus us from one place to another to buy, buy, buy.

The Visa came very late and contained an error. Tour group subjected to dehydration - lack of water, food too salty, rooms too warm, and heater blasting on bus. Last night suspect. Woke too groggy in morning. Later discovered earrings and ring had been altered, which I had been wearing! Suspect personal items had been accessed and searched in hotel room that particular night. Very unsettling. Suspect for identity theft or future extortion.

The tour itself is wonderful - one male tour guide leaves a lot to be desired “Tom” is rough around the edges and needs to receive an introduction to customer service.

Great price, but chinatour.com kept lower the overall rating of the hotels we were to stay at. This occurred up to a few days before the day of the trip. The initial offering showed all hotels were at least 4-star rating. Two of the hotels ended up being only 3-stars, but chinatour.com kept telling us otherwise, which created a situation where chinatour.com started treating some of our fellow travelers with hostility when they brought it up. When we got there, both of the 3-star hotels were 3-star at best (one was not very clean and needed a lot of maintenance), regardless of what the hotel and chinatour.com kept telling us. Great selection of trips including the ones at an additional cost. If you go on one of the tours, you should make sure to go on the additonal trips that cost more money. The garden tour was a waste of time since it was extremely crowed. While some of the shopping was fun, some of the "factory stores" were not very friendly and seemed to be quite dishonest (several of us thought some were scammers). One of the tour guides did not speak very good English, which distracted from what she was telling us. One of the lunch places was extremely filthy with terrible food (just one bad one out of all of them means the food was really pretty good overall). The price we got was very good and everybody had an extremely wonderful time. Due to the conflict caused by chinatour.com, I doubt if they will book anymore travel with our group, but most of us would use them again if the opportunity presented itself… providing that chinatour.com would be willing to work out the disputed issues instead of causing them to escalate.

Xian was amazing. Our guide was informative and accommodating. Could not have asked for better. Beijing was a disaster. Disorganised. Our guide was average. No time to spend enjoying any of the experiences offered. Shanghai was almost a waste of time