Really good trip with a few areas of improvement! I recommend this trip.
Our trip leader Hayley was fantastic and made this experience wonderful.
The good:
Excellent but limited included experiences with the Fado show and port wine tasting, and Valley of the Fallen tour.
Great locations to visit, and the accommodation was safe and clean, with Lisbon and San Sebastián in great locations.
Great to have a full day in each city. Hayley gave us excellent walking tours and suggestions for each city.
The driving days had some good stops - especially Sintra! Recommend the hike up to the palace if you have decent fitness and footwear as it’s great.
The dinner activity in Porto was fabulous, beautiful food and hosts
Delicious food everywhere 😊
And of course a lovely tour group!
The areas to improve:
The bus driver wasn’t a Topdeck driver and only got us from A-B; no driving tours or chit chat. The travel days were usually full days 8-9-4-5pm or later - it would have been much better if we could start earlier and get more time in each city.
Some of the hotels (especially Madrid and Barcelona) were really far away from the city centre and required Ubers or 1+ hour on public transport to get in. Should be max 30 mins walking distance otherwise we spend a lot of time trying to get transport!
Optional food experiences were very exxy and could be done DIY for much cheaper. Would have been good to have some more included experiences given the tour cost.
The bus got to Barcelona at 7pm on the last day after a full day of driving and the hotel is very far from the city centre - as we had a flight the next day we actually didn’t get any time at all to see the city except at our final dinner :( We didn’t realise how late the arrival would be until it was too late to change flights.
Make sure you book an extra night, or preferably Topdeck should add one extra day to the tour! Otherwise there’s not much point having Barcelona on the itinerary.
