Tours to China
 

Would like recommendations for reliable tour operators to China. We plan to go this October.

I went with Chinahighlights.com (CITS Guilin) for my trip last September. Everything was great.

Pacific Delight has some great trips to China. Used them years ago for a 24 day trip. It was fabulous!

different city has different travel agency you can join it in each city it is more comfortable. but not in a big group

Check out travelindochina.com

Ritz Tours!!

We used East Tours - www.east-tours.com for our trip to China in June 05.

We used Helen Wongs Tours for our trip to Shangai/Xi'an/Beijing in 2005 and found them to be fine. No issues, reasonable prices, excellent hotels & good food. I think they limit groups sizes to around 12-14 although we had only 2! (we asked to do the tour in the reverse order, which they agreed to do, and we were the only ones). We used Travel Indochina the year before for a Vietnam trip and also found them to be good - groups do not exceed 16 people (although we had 8 on our tour).

Just be aware that the first week in October is NOT a good time to go, as just about the whole country (let's say 900,000,000 of them) has the whole week off for public holidays which start October 1 and run for a week. Tourist sights, airports, restaurants, trains, etc will be very, very crowded from about September 30 – October 8. I would go at least a few days after the 8th to give things a chance to get back to normal.

China is not really hard to do on your own.

i suggest traveling independently. u have more freedom that way. doing this can also be more cost-efficient. get good deals on flights and hotels in a china-based english-language travel company. try www.elong.net. i have used it to book flights and i got really good rates.

The China Focus Travel 13d Historic China Tour is a highly regarded "loss leader" and a real bargain.
We're going late Mar-early Apr.
M

I've seem similar plugs for China Focus Travel elsewhere. But who the heck is in business to lose money? You can bet your last dollar China Focus makes money on all its tours.

We went to China with Uniworld last fall and highly recommend it. I am sure you can find many reputable companies on this board.

There are two good Australian tour companies that you might like to check out. Travel Indochina has already been mentioned and I think has an office in the US (www.travelindochina.com); and Wendy Wu Tours (www.wendywutours.com.au). Note that unless otherwise stated, prices would be quoted in AU$ (AU$1 = appx US$0.74).