Chitwan National Park Extension

Love adventures but the size of the cabins on our trip to the Cyclades Islands are extremely cramped . We have three mature adults in one cabin with no space to move and no space to hang or store anything ( including wet towels ).
If any of us had been physically inflexible or overweight we could not have coped with the sleeping arrangements . It is impossible to sit on the top bunk and even turning over in bed requires considerable planning .
An adventure does not mean cutting back on basic essentials …
In our view there were too many people in too small a space .
Two complete strangers were also asked to sleep together in an extremely small double bed , which meant that one of them decided to sleep on deck or in the living space .
The only redeeming factor was our Skipper who is professional, friendly , informative and skilled .
I would recommend this trip if the numbers were reduced .

I feel totally cheated. Just finished the Spain and Portugal 14 day trip. The itinerary does not match the actual experience and is I feel deliberately miss leading. When I says a “local bus” and an approx 3 hour journey the reality is a 6 hour trip door to door in the middle of the day. You miss valuable time at the actual destination in favour of being jammed in a bus with dozens of people traveling on a freeway with nothing worth seeing at all. The bush are not even express so you stop in the industrial outskirts of a number of towns and even the airport. By the time you finally reach the destination you are tired and frustrated. I want my money back. It’s a cheap experience that you pay a lot of money for.

Booked a premium tour to Israel and paid in full. Once I paid Intrepid changed the tour, not because of operational or safety reasons but on the basis of previous customers feedback. We asked them to keep the tour as it was advertised originally and they suggested we ask our group to see if we can persuade them to go to the original destination once we had arrived in Israel which is simply ridiculous and then I complained so they offered my money back. Not exactly the best resolution now that I already paid for my flights and booked time off separately. Hopefully the tour will be better than my experience so far.

Unfortunately, Intrepid is a company I would recommend being wary of. They are fine as long as everything is going ok, but if anything goes wrong? Don't expect any help or decent customer service. I made the mistake of booking two trips, and both times I ran into problems:

Trip 1- I was taken very ill while in Vietnam and had to drop out of the tour. I had no help from the guide- no help with getting to a doctor (I don't speak Vietnamese and was too ill to get out of bed anyway), he didn't even assist with arranging a hotel room.

Trip 2- I've had to cancel an upcoming (2024) trip, but haven't received the refund despite phoning the customer service line several times. The people I talk to are nice, but don't seem to be able to actually get anything done. They just suggest waiting a bit longer- not sure how long they think is acceptable to hang on to someone's money really.

I would think carefully before doing business with Intrepid Travel again. In May I went on 2 one-week guided cycle tours in France with Intrepid. They were both great cycles and I enjoyed the cycling very much. However, I had several complaints about the company and some of the guides (not all of them).
Once I had paid for my trips, it was very difficult to get in touch with Intrepid to ask a question.
During the trips, several times I was told something one day only to have the info change without any good reason. The guides need proper training about dealing with the heat. Some of use suffered from dehydration and heat stroke and the guides were quite flippant about it. I was told that the guides would not leave anyone behind, but it happened several times.
There was one guide (a trainee) who really took some of the pleasure out of my cycle tour. She spoke to me with a tone used for a child. This tone and her attitude to me almost bordered on harassment.
I went on a third cycling tour with a different company after my 2 with Intrepid and it was much better than my experience with Intrepid.
As the demand for ebikes rises, tour companies such as Intrepid need to increase their fleet of ebikes. They also don’t need to charge the huge amount to rent these ebikes. We only want to rent them, not buy them. As the cost of ebikes comes down, if should reflect in the rental price.

Our Ecuador guide Eitel made the tour exceptional! He has encyclopedic knowledge of Ecuador and Latin America. Because he has traveled the world, Eitel placed this information within contexts that we could appreciate. That says a lot because we were a diverse group of travelers. The experience deepened my appreciation for the country's marvelous people, history, cultures, and resources.