24 Aug Erin & Dave’s European Anniversary Get-Away!
Posted at 07:14h
in Travel Reviews
| Name of hotel, resort, or cruise ship | |
| Holiday Inn St. Germain (Paris), Hotel Alba Palace (Florence), Bailey’s Hotel (Rome) | |
| One a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your trip | |
| 10 | |
| What was your favorite thing about the trip? | |
| Paris – for me a tie between climbing to the top of Notre Dame and the show at Moulin Rouge, for my husband the Palace of Versailles. Florence – the general atmosphere (quickly became our favorite stop), everyone was so friendly and helpful, there was a never ending amount of history to see and all of the views were incredible. Rome – The Vatican & St. Peter’s Basilica |
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| How was the food? Was there a memorable meal or cocktail you’d like to share? | |
| The food was incredible in all 3 locations, with the exception of a couple of instances. Aside from dinner at the Eiffel Tour, our favorite place in Paris was Au Baroudeur: we had dinner at 1a after running around the city all day for Bastille Day festivities. Aside from being thankful it was open at all, we both ordered the same salad that was topped with potato slices (among other things) – surprising but delightful. Florence had several excellent restaurants but my personal favorite was Osteria Santo Spirito – the Parmesan & Zucchini risotto was incredible. Not to mention the various gelato stops throughout the city. In Rome we didn’t have to wander far to find several great options with our favorites being La Grande Bellezza and Taverna Flavia. For dessert, we ventured into Gelateria La Romana (one block from our hotel) and our last night but since the menu was entirely in Italian we gambled on what flavors to go with – all of them were great and honestly I’d be surprised in any flavors on the whole menu were bad. | |
| Were there any service issues we should be aware of? | |
| The only tour/vendor we were somewhat frustrated with was I Love Rome (I think) that took us to Vatican City/Ancient Rome. They seemed a bit disorganized most of the time, with several employees around but only 1-2 every actively organizing the tours (this was mainly observed in the morning before entering Vatican City). Their transition from Vatican tour to lunch to Ancient Rome tour also struggled, It appears they partnered with Satiricus restaurant for lunch and the menu was pre-set. Once our waitress took our drink order we waited for long periods of time before seeing her again, often when she brought food that wasn’t fresh and had likely been under a heat lamp for a while. We were given a specific time to be outside to board the bus and when that time arrived we got on the bus but didn’t leave until 20 minutes late because we were waiting on others to join our group. It didn’t ruin the trip by any means, but after a whole week of incredible service for all our other tours, this one stuck out considerably. | |
| Which of our consultants did you work with? | |
| Bernie | |
| On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate the service you received from your consultant? | |
| 10 | |
| Would you recommend our services to others? | |
| Absolutely! | |
| Reason for your response | |
| Working with Bernie to book our honeymoon years ago was so easy and fun, she was an obvious choice to work with again to plan our 5 year anniversary trip. The first couple months of planning we had several family events come up for the same period that impacted our travel dates and our overall budget, but Bernie was patient and more than helpful the entire time. It took us several iterations to get a manageable schedule within our budget but Bernie was always quick to answer any questions, thorough when providing options and understanding when we needed to pause planning efforts for weeks at a time. Working with Bernie saved us hours of stress, not only because she put together the schedule and all necessary documents but she was able to answer general travel questions before the trip and panicked emails during the trip when we weren’t able to check in on time for an excursion. Now that we’ve had 2 wonderful experiences working with Bernie and Bliss, we sing their praises any chance we get when friends talk about international travel! | |