England and Portugal Tours and Trips

Whilst there was some overlap with my previous tour (Grand Spain & Portugal), the itinerary covered Portugal in greater depth and detail . The Tour Director Helder was excellent and made the trip even better with a secret visit to Nezere a special stop.Teamed with our driver Alfredo they worked to ensure we were given the best opportunities.

Excursion to Royal Portuguese Riviera, Cork Factory visit and Duoro River Cruise should not be optional excursions. Everybody is expected to attend, so just include them in the itinerary. They were great excursions, but should be included.

This trip covers a wide selection of town, villages and sites. There are options for interesting excursions curated by the tour director. Our tour director was the gold standard - organized, friendly, and compassionate. Our entire tour group gelled and enjoyed each other's company. The bus time was manageable and enjoyable. Our bus driver was skilled and friendly, and, with the tour director, made a great team. I highly recommend this trip.

I liked the actual itinerary of the tour. Unfortunately, the 2025 Australian Insight Vacation travel brochure from which I selected the tour has a number of major differences to the actual itinerary on the ground. From discussions with the Tour Director, the itinerary has been this way for several years. Insight needs to update the marketing for the tour to reflect the actual itinerary so that disappointments are avoided. There also appears that the Australian Insight Vacation travel office staff have little understanding of what actually happens on tour - disappointing performance. For instance, I wanted to leave some luggage in Lisbon rather than take it on the bus. I was advised that I could leave it in storage at the hotel we left in Lisbon (Hotel Corinthia) albeit we were returning to a different hotel (Turim Marques Hotel) in Lisbon. On the night before we left Lisbon the tour, Corinthia Hotel advised that I could not store the luggage as we were returning to that hotel. I then had to take a taxi to Turim Marques to store the luggage .

Susi was a superb guide, hands down the best I’ve had with Explore (and I’ve been on several Explore trips.). She’s the kind of person who’s just made for this kind of work (although she has done other work as well.). The kind of person I’d want to be friends with outside of an Explore trip, that is for sure. She made the whole trip enjoyable. I’d just bet she could have done that if our hiking weather was bad (but it wasn’t.) I don’t think we had any issue the entire trip (except maybe the one day the hotel didn’t have coffee at breakfast because the machine broke, so we just had some at a cafe during a short break period.). However, she gave me the impression that she had the confidence to deal with issues if they happened our way. I told her at the end of the trip, in a note that I included with my tip, that she completely made me forget that I was turning 68 in November. She made 38 miles over five days seem like a walk in the park. She was always encouraging, also solicitous (but not excessively so.) Susi is Austrian but lives in Barcelona (and travelled a lot in Europe) so that was a plus for me in getting intel over dinner for future travel plans. She knew plenty about Portugal as well and helped fill in my information gaps nicely. I think you will be fortunate to keep her working for Explore. She will make travelers want to come back for more. I understand she has done biking and cultural trips, as well at the hiking ones, which didn’t surprise me a bit. She’s enthusiastic about all of it.

I thought the itinerary for this trip was excellent. The trip covered the entire country from the largest cities to more rural areas where many of the wineries were. Our tour director gave us the proper level of detail, both historical and geographical, about the various regions we visited. Local guides were enlisted at many of the points of interest and they were mostly excellent. Portugal has a long and interesting history so the local guides really gave us much more detail than most of the travel guide books we read before the trip. The optional tours and trips were very good and really added to the overall experience.