11-days-shanghai-zhangjiajie-xian-beijing
The trip took place 02.04.2024–12.04.2024. Shanghai →(plane) Zhangjiajie → (plane) Xi’an → (bullet train) Beijing. I had a mixed experience with this company. From one hand we visited a lot of interesting places, from the other - a company made a lot of mistakes during our trip. I rate this company for 2/5 to bring your attention to some moments from our trip which were described in more details on the medium.com. Google it by "China Tour with Asia Odyssey Travel: Rookie Mistakes by Experienced Company" - I can't add a link here due to the policy of the platform. Some short info with ratings: - Contact person: 2/5 stars. A contact person Allan was quite communicative before paying the deposit and changed a lot to the worse side afterward. His response time by email increased dramatically. He didn’t provide enough transparency through the whole trip: no official hotels confirmation, no guides’ contacts in advance (we had to ask it ourselves), no info in advance about the situation with VPN, useful apps (such as AliPay, WeChat etc), simcards etc. - A guid in Xi'an: 5/5 stars. The guid Waldner is a really experienced guy. I really enjoy spending time with him in Xi’an. I wish there were more guides like him. - A guid in Zhangjiajie: 4.5/5 stars. The guid Joy a really good and chill person. We also enjoyed spending time with her in Zhangjiajie. This place didn’t require a lot of historical introductions and I guess the guid is a perfect fit for this place. She is really active person. - A guide in Shanghai: 4/5 stars. The guide Maria in Shanghai is quite interesting guide, but works sometimes without interaction with a group. When she explains something, there is a feeling she doesn’t really care if a group listens or not. - A guide in Beijing 2.5/5 stars. A guide Linda from Beijing also has enough knowledge about attractions in Beijing and good restaurants, but I have to say she should work on her English. Sometimes it was hard to catch what she was saying and also the speech contained a lot of repetitive words such as “you know”, “yeah yeah yeah”, “yes yes yes”. They were included quite a lot of time in her speeches — it was difficult to follow. Once she took our bags without a lot of explanations and went to other queue and told us to stay in different queue. We managed to finish the line before her and were quite stressful because of this “not making any sense” decision with a different queue. Transfers were organised really good. - Hotels: 5/5 stars. All hotels were really great. Most of the breakfasts contained enough options. A hotel in Zhangjiajie had only few options, but for me it was good. - Visited places: 5/5 stars. All places were incredibly interesting to visit. All guides bought tickets for us and helped us to go trough the security checks. - Food: 3/5 stars. They didn’t check in advance our food options. It turned out we had 3 vegetarians, 2 people who don’t eat red meat and 2 who eat everything. So, an agency didn’t ask it in advance and planned lunches without taking it into account. - The tour group consisted of 6 people. I hope it helped you to decided whether you want to go with this tour agency or not :)