Tour manager makes or breaks these tours
Our tour manager for the Essential Poland tour did the bare minimum and it showed. According to others who had done many trips with Gate 1, she was not the standard they were used to. Anything out of the norm, such as my husband not feeling well on one of the tours and wanting to stay on the bus to wait, really flummoxed her. She had no solutions and seemed very defensive and annoyed at the changes in plans. She talked non stop about her healthy lifestyle and healthy food choices instead of giving us insights on Poland. We did not pay for a health food tour! So much so that it became a running joke in the bus. We had a couple several hours long bus rides and she barely talked at all during them, making the time go very slowly. She instituted the rotating bus seating, which most of us hated. It ensured you were stuck sitting near the same groups of people each time, while others that you had made a connection with, were sitting elsewhere. In addition, there was a VERY sick man on the tour who coughed constantly. It was said he had congestive heart failure, and it wasn't catching. Others complained to her about him, and her solution was to sit them away from this man, which meant others like us, we're stuck sitting near him the whole trip. She never insisted he get medical attentiom and a clearance to be in close quarters with others or insisted he wear a mask. My husband came down with pneumonia and several others in our tour fell very ill with upper respitory infections as well. The tour could have been very enjoyable, but the tour director did not once go the extra mile, which made it not as good of a trip. Will probably not give Gate 1 another chance. The group dinner the last night was clearly an opportunity for her to get her tips, which we did not give her. We never really felt like she tried to gel the group together, so we never really felt a commraderie with most of the folks. We wished we had skipped the final dinner with terrible food and worse service. Complete waste of time considering it was a 45 min bus ride each way. Really? No restaurants in the center of Krakow we could have gone to? From my understanding, the group manager picks the place. Once again,she failed.