France Mountains Trips

From the excellent hotels with views of the Alps, great shopping opportunities and great meals included as well as by our discovery, I thoroughly enjoyed this trip. I especially was impressed with Mauro Ciummo who was truly born to be a tour guide. He was personable, took time with everyone to get to know them and was generally very jolly and entertaining. There was time between sites to enjoy on our own which was well planned. It was difficult staying awake on the longer bus rides and although we all needed the rest, I wanted to keep my eyes on the beautiful views! Seeing fields of strange wildflowers, soaring peaks, oodles of giant snails feeding at the base of an Olympic ski jump, sheep and Great Pyrenees guarddogs outside our first room and cows being herded up the main street below another room with bells clanging...great memories. And the St Bernards were wonderful. We were very happy with British Airways also, except for the excessive charge to pick our seats. Nice trip.

Our Alpine trip was wonderful. We Love Collette and have a new favorite air carrier, British Airlines. Their food is as bad as anyone's but the planes and service are great. I had heard some less than positive comments about Brit Air, mostly that some of the employees can be surly, and while we did have a surly check-in agent at Venice's Marco Polo Airport, for the most part they were quite nice. We don't usually check bags when we fly because of lost bag problems in the past, we needed to this time because we needed heavier cold-weather clothing. This agent insisted (rather impolitely) that we check one of our 2 carry-ons, saying it was a full flight & there wouldn't be enough room. Upon boarding they announced that their planes now had expanded overhead compartments, and we then noticed there were many empty compartments. Unnecessary issue. BUT... baggage was handled perfectly and our checked bags in both directions, even through the flight transfers, went perfectly. I still don't like airports, but Brit Air's terminals do seem superior. We have traveled with Collette 7 times now and have been delighted every time with every aspect of travel with them. We had a little more free time on this trip, which we appreciated, and Mauro Ciummo was hands down the best tour manager we've had. And we've had some great ones. Give that man a raise! :) Collette is very efficient, any problems that come up are handled properly, efficiently and in a timely manner. On a previous trip our tour manager tripped on a curb in Amsterdam and had to be treated at a hospital, and there just happened to be another tour manager in the same train station who saw immediately that we were properly directed until our assigned tour manager was back on tour, bloodied but OK. Less so on our first Collette tour. Our manager was a bit of a disciplinarian and scolded one handicapped passenger for walking too slowly and making us late for one destination (we actually got there 20 minutes early... we happened to meet that passenger's son months later & she was apparently unphased) and Van got scolded for having to use the toilet after we “starred” in a play-like presentation at Bunratty Castle. Again we were not delayed because of that. But overall that tour was as excellent as any of the others. The limo service this time was very appreciated, although we did have a communication issue upon returning to Pittsburgh. My phone for some reason didn't send my confirmation that we were at the pick-up point, so the driver called us to be sure that we were there, much appreciated. However we got a text from (apparently) a different driver the next day who had seen the delayed text notice that we were waiting to be picked up and came to pick us up a day later. I don't know how that happened but it was, sadly, an unnecessary trip for them. We expected the latter parts of this tour to be anti-climactic after being so high in the Alps but that was not so. The entire tour was just wonderful. Again, though, much of that enjoyment was because Mauro was so wonderfully entertaining and well-informed. Big kudos to Mauro! While this was our first Collette tour without our friend Doug Oster and local gardeners, our group was very nice, and we did enjoy meeting people from all over our country. We hope to enjoy many more Collette tours, and along with the help of Travel Junction, hope to have a long future relationship.

The Alps, the Alps, the Alps! Loved Chamonix! Montreaux, Lucerne! Our tour manager was the best ever!

We loved every minute of our trip and every town, mountain, farm, city and peak that we visited. We would highly recommend!

Chamonix and Mt Blanc were fabulous.

Enjoyed everything about the Tour> The Tour Manager, the itinerary & the accommodations were each outstanding.