Togo Tours and Trips

The hotel we stayed in in Grand Popo was very poor and the food was very expensive compared to other places. It was a beach hotel except you couldn't see the beach for the wall erected around the hotel! It was also about an hour and a half to two hours away from the Voodoo Festival at Ouidah so time was wasted travelling to and fro for the two nights spent there when we could have had more time at the festival if we'd had accommodation in Ouidah

If you are thinking about booking this trip... don't hesitate! This was the most amazing experience! Every time I look at my photos, I can't believe all the amazing experiences I had on this trip! Edmund, our tour leader was fantastic! Overall, a great cultural experience !

Another excellent trip with Explore. Fascinating itinerary which helped us discover many parts of both Togo and Benin. The tour leaders, Oscar and Edmund were both excellent and gave us a great insight into these fascinating countries. Some hotels were better than others, but that is to be expected in more remote regions.

The whole experience was great, which was in no small part due to the excellence of Noah our guide who was brilliant, but the communities of Togo and Benin we visited helped a lot! The downside was getting through Togo immigration going in (c2 hours)and coming out (c1 hour) .... I obviously missed something but it looked like I had completed the process with an E Visa but I also needed a Bordereau du Voyage to get in and out. Please look into and advise future travellers etc

A full on trip, with excellent tour leaders. Maybe one too many dance shows. A shame that at some of the hotels, they didn't think to check air con was working before we arrived. Temperature up to 37C and 60% humidity. A very interesting insight into two countries which are new to tourism.

The tour itself was marvellous, but it was draining to have to deal with the pre-tour admin from Explore beforehand; I spent several months trying to clarify the visa application requirements, after a completely garbled 'advice' email was sent out initially. Thanks to a previous customer named Claire, who posted an alert on this Feefo website about the need to obtain 'borderau de voyage' authorisation both for entering and for leaving Togo, I eventually succeeded in extracting all of the relevant documents from the Voyage Togo website. A month before departure, I again emailed Explore asking them, as Claire had done back in August, to warn all other travellers in my group about these requirements, but did not even receive an acknowledgement. Sure enough, when it came to exiting Togo at the end of our tour, I sailed through immigration control waving my piece of paper, while everyone else in the group got bogged down for ages trying to submit online applications from the queue, with one person even paying what was effectively a bribe to the border officials in order to get through quickly. I see from the Feefo website that clients on the tour prior to ours experienced exactly the same problem. Having been a regular Explore client for many years, I feel there really is no excuse for the admin staff on this occasion to provide such poor and unreceptive service to its customers - sort yourselves out! Having got all that off my chest, I must report that the tour itself, run for Explore by Ghana-based regional operator Ashanti African Travels, was great, and is thoroughly recommended. The co-leaders of the tour, Oscar and Edmond, were outstanding, and even for someone like me who has travelled a lot in Africa, it revealed a variety of vibrant local cultures, traditional beliefs and ceremonies that I had not encountered anywhere previously. It is a full itinerary which covers both countries in depth, and includes visits to a wide range of local village communities. The travelling, in a comfortable minibus, was not particularly onerous, and the accommodation and meals were, with a couple of exceptions, of an acceptable standard, for poor countries which have only a limited tourist infrastructure. As usual with Explore, competent and experienced tour leaders with a group of friendly, well-travelled companions made this tour a most enjoyable and illuminating experience. There were many highlights, among them the stay in Ganvie, the stilt village on a lake, three quite different masked dance ceremonies, fire eating and spirit expulsion dances, and watching the craft of blacksmiths and weavers. At the end of the day, definitely worth putting up with all of the pre-tour frustrations for!