Mumbai Tours in February 2027

We thoroughly enjoyed this trip with both the cultural and wildlife aspects, all enhanced by an excellent tour leader. We felt it was an advantage going to the smaller tiger reserves and we had nine tiger sightings

This company organised, booked hotels and arranged drivers and guides for both tours, from the first couple of days in Delhi through Agra into Rajasthan and then from Bangalore through Kerala including safaris in Nagarhole Forest, seeing tigers and leopards etc and finally down the coast to Fort Kochi. The company monitored our trip continually through phone contact and had ensured a good quality of hotels including a splendid beach side stay in Kochi and ending up at Kumarakom Lake Resort for final real luxury! I can recommend them completely with, in particular, special mentions for Jugmohan in quotations, Deepak in operations, Ritu who monitored our progress plus drivers Deepak and Emon. Maybe again someday!! Geoff & Pat Nicholls, Solihull. U.K.

A very enjoyable tour with some fabulous sites: Elorra Caves, Ajanta Caves & Hampi are places everyone should have on their bucketlist. Some long travel days, especially the third train journey which was very unpleasant. The food was amazing and I found the people incredibly friendly.

The highlights of this trip for me were Ajanta Caves, Ellora Caves and Hampi. There was a rather mundane section in the middle of the trip with the best bits at the start and end but even the central part was reasonably interesting. The hotel in Hyderabad was by far the worst; the one in Goa was charmingly old fashioned. The train journey from Hospet to Goa was tedious and would have been better replaced by road travel which could have included sight of Goa's beaches which went unseen despite mention in the itinerary. Our Explore Leader Satish was quite competent but I feel it was unwise for him to talk about his political and anti-Islamic opinions when addressing the group in general.

The first Hotel Emarald which was booked for the first two nights and the last night was poor, not recommended. Subsequent hotels generally were better, issues for some on our trip was lack of hot water. The bus used to ferry us around was new, very comfortable. We had expected that on the Safaris we would experience different drivers, guides and mix with the others on the holiday. Generally we found the safari drivers to be average and most of the guides a waste of space. I was better at spotting animals than they were. Often they were on social media. We found that we had to share the jeep with the same individual most of the time. We raised these issues with the Explore guide but he claimed it was not under his control, as a result we did not have an opportunity to share the holiday experience with others. Our viewing of tigers was disappointing mainly because our local guides did not know the parks as well as others. Disappointing in comparison to a previous Explore Tiger tour.

What’s important to know is that just because this trip is labelled “Tiger Safari”, you will not see lots of tigers. They are rare and hard to find and that is down to how good the safari jeep drivers are. You’re allocated to one for the stay at each location and can’t change. You might strike lucky and be allocated to someone who’s engaged and knows where the tigers are. If not,. he’ll likely stop and pretend he’s listening out for them when in reality he’s checking his mobile for incoming flight times at Delhi airport. Forget the mandatory guides who come along for the ride. They know next to nothing, can barely speak English and get paid out of the tip budget extorted out of you at the start of the trip. We went for days before we finally saw two tigers close up and the pictures are wonderful. I can imagine though that if you never saw one, you would feel seriously short-changed. The trip would be better described as an Indian wildlife safari because you will definitely see a wide variety of wildlife, the places we stayed were good and the food especially consistently good. There’s the feeling though that the increasing popularity of looking for tigers - not least by local people - is placing strain on the system.