Friendly Planet Tours-are they good?
 

Looking at a Friendly Planet Tour to Thailand for Jan.07.Is this company any good.Our other choice is Oat who I know are good?I like the itinerary for Friendly Planet a little better but both look good.Thanks for thr great input that I always get!

It can really only be judged by seeing which places visited, which hotels and mode of transport, and what is actualy included in the price.
Thailand is real easy to travel around but if you like the tours that is fine, but tell us what each offers and many can input their views and also get an idea about 'value for money'.

I was on Friendly Planet Thailand tour last year, and it was great. At that time Friendly Planet sold the same tours as SmartTours. At this time, I see they changed their itinerary, and it looks different from SmartTours Thailand tour, so I am not sure if this is for the better or worse. The itinerary look even better than before, and hotels look good also. I am sure it would be a good tour.

I just returned two weeks ago from taking their Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand tour. It was wonderful, what a value! All the hotels, included meals and tours were great. The pace was a little faster than I like to travel, but it was really great.

Friendly Planet is the first discount travel company I ever called that really pays attention and cares about customer service. They really try to help. pretty unusual in today's world.

Go for Friendly Planet. If you get stuck and need help, they really try to help you out. I went to India with them and ended up with a shopping scam. A ring I bought turned out to be bogus, and they arranged for me to return the ring and get a refund. It had nothing to do with them, but they jumped in to help. No other travel company has ever treated me like that before. Their deals are really great, too.

I took the FP/ST tour to Thailand in Jan/Feb 2006. Outstanding value - and I'm not a group tour person. FP was wonderful customer service, btw. ST was less friendly (no pun intended) but the tour group was mixed from both companies. The newest tour from FP is NOT combined with ST. FP now runs their own program with a slightly different itinerary and different hotels. FP made this change because their scheduling allows people to add on both extensions, whereas the original ST itinerary allowed only one extension. The FP program now uses China Air, with better connections, than the ST plan which uses Korea Air (which we found very good, but we had to change planes in three places from Chaing Mai). The biggest (IMO) advantage of FP program is that they have some kind of promo with VISA, allowing you to use your VISA card and not pay the additional $100 fee. This is major since if they tour doesn't actually go, you should be able to use VISA to make a claim.
Consider both FP and ST. Really - you can't go wrong.

Really enjoyed Croatia with Smart tours/ friendly planet. I was going with others on our own, but every one cancelled and I ended up doing a tour, rather than go alone. I made friends I still keep in contact with. No one had anything bad to say about Friendly planet/smart tours and many on the trip had been on multiple trips with them.

Yes, when we toured with them in april 2006 (my first tour ever), many people had taken several trips with FP and Smartours. That says alot about the companies...