Guided trip - Turkey - February 2011
 

My friends and I are thinking of travelling to Turkey in February 2011. Will we need a tour guide? If so, can you recommend someone? Also, did you go through a tour company when you went? Was it a private tour or a busload of people? We would like to see as much of Turkey as possible during our 8-9 day stay. Thanks.

I took a tour with Pacha (Best of Western Turkey). I thought it was a great tour and we had a great guide and bus driver. They run their tours no matter how many people book - we had 19 to start and then picked up another 3 people for the second week so the bus was half full. It was a great group and since we were a small group and all meals were included we got to know each other very quickly.

You don't need a tour, you can make the arrangements (hotels, air, etc.) yourself.

In Istanbul and Ephesus, you can hire a guide through your hotel for a 1/2 or full day to take you through the sites.

l recommend you do it with a company. According to your mail you will stay here long time. You can do it yourself but you do not have a lot idea about the resorts, hotels, guides, tranportations etc. If you do it yourself you have to find everything yourself and it will cost more. Leave everything to a professional company and they will arrange everything for you. In additionaly, why you think everything for your holiday, just try to relax and company will care about you. l assure you it will cost you cheaper, because company will organize you a package tour and they have aggrements with different companies with best prices.

It will be very difficult to see much of Turkey in nine days as it is a very large country and the " tour " usually encompasses about 2,000 miles. If you go with a tour company they generally drive the distance so you will spend at least six hours per day on a bus or in the case of Pacha a small van.If you do more research of the archives you will find numerous postings from people who traveled independently and had no problems.Since your time is so limited I would recommend that you fly from place to place and go on your own.

What kind of budget are you and your friends on? If it's tight, then maybe a guided group tour is the way to go. If you can stretch it a bit, I would suggest doing a custom guided tour - meaning just your group, no strangers. We just booked a 10-day trip to Turkey (Ephesus, Pamukkale, Cappadocia and Istanbul) with Byzas Tours. It's a custom tour for 5 of us, and we will have our own car (probably minivan), driver and guide with us everywhere, altjough they will likely change in each city. To save time, we are flying domestically everywhere, no long drives to eat into sightseeing time. And we told them exactly which hotels we wanted, and also the itinerary we wanted to follow. It is more expensive than a large group tour, but you don't have to travel with strangers, and you don't have to follow someone else's itinerary that may or may not have everything you want to do. And if there are enough of you, the cost per head may come down enough to the point where its not too much more. For the 5 of us, we were pleasantly surprised that the cost was not too much more than one of the prepackaged big bus tours.

Independent travel might be a problem in February. My impression is that it can be very cold away from the Mediterranean and snowy, which would make driving a problem. Moreover, are tourist hotels generally open during that season? It could be interesting to do the trip on one's own, but will require more planning than most of us can provide on this board. On the other hand, if still interested, click on my name to find out Turkey trip report and see how far we traveled in nine days.

I was there independently in February. Did Istanbul, then flew to Izmir and stayed in Kusadasi at a tourist hotel, hired a guide through the hotel for a tour of Ephesus. Then went on to Antalya in a Renaissance hotel before heading back to Istanbul. We had snowflakes in Istanbul, nothing stuck to the ground. Rain in Ephesus.

If you want to try a custom tour, you might try Credo tours based in Istanbul It is headed by Sirma,who is full of knowledge about Turkey. We have used this agency twice.The guiding was excellent.

Hi

We used Insight tours. It was fantastic. Nice hotels, lovely food and a very professional tour director - http://www.insightvacations.com/au/s..._name=istanbul

We also used Insight Tours and thought they were great. We went in the middle of March which was early in the season so there were only 15 in our tour group. If you are going in February you might be lucky and have a small group, also. If you book them through affordabletours.com you will get a discount.

Turkey is quite easy to travel independently so we've never took a proper tour. However, we found a reliable agency in Istanbul that we used whenever we wanted to book accommodation in advance or needed bus/flight tickets. The bonus was all the information and advice about where and how to go, what to do and what to see. The guy's name is Yilmaz at the True Blue Tour ( www.truebluetour.com ). They do different tours, too. If you want to go to Eastern Turkey, I recommend Tamzara (http://mtararattour.com ). We climbed Mt Ararat with Mustafa from Dogubayazit (you are only allowed to climb with a guide). Again, we did get lots of practical info for the rest of our journey in the area, and also about the local customs, sights. Very friendly and helpful.

I was in Turkey in 2007 with my mother for 9 days, and I used Credo Tours (www.credotours.com) to arrange my trip. They are a local company, and I arranged everything through email a few months before travelling. Basically I shared with them my ideas about the itinerary and also my budget constraints, and they built up a customized tour for us that we tuned together afterwards.

Our 9-day tour covered Istanbul, Capadocia and Pammukkale + Ephesus. Credo arranged hotels, domestic flights withing Turkey and private guides for Capadocia, Pammukkale + Ephesus and for 1,5 days in Istanbul. In Istanbul we only used them to visit some locations away from the city centre, and we spent 3 other days on our own.

Excellent service, fantastic guides, great hotels. They take your budget into account, and they also have some organized group tours if you want. I recommended them several times, always with great feedback.

We highly recommend you True Blue Tour istanbul( www.truebluetour.com )they created customized tour for us all around Turkey last year, we had fantastic time. Thanks

hello Yukon_XL.

If you accept some limitations you will be happier with your trip to Turkey:

1. It is quite a large company with a great deal of antique, architectural, exotic, quaint and natural sites to see and cultural variations to experience. istanbul alone would take longer than that to discover.

2. It will be rather difficult to visit about half of the country in February due to the weather conditions. The Black Sea coast will be very rainy and parts possibly flooded. The inland mountains of the Black sea, most of Central turkey and all of eastern Turkey will be under snow. For the rest of the country, february and March are usually two of the rainiest months.

3. you will not be able to do the kind of things you might enjoy like trekking, hiking, white water rafting, snorkeling, scuba diving, spelunking, climbing canyoning, swimming, sailing, even driving to many very scenic village roads, to reach the less well known antique sites.

However, if it is mostly antiquity you are interested in, you will have some major advantages if you are prepared to tackle the rain, snow and the mud, with suitable outdoor clothing:

1. Getting to Turkey will be cheaper
2. Finding seats on local flights will be easier
3. Lodging will be cheaper
4. Car rental will be cheaper
4. Visiting historic sites will be easier because of the lack of crowds.
5. You will not be sweating and huffing and puffing in 100F weather and a burning sun.
6. You will be able to spend more time with the locals rather than other tourists.
7. In Istanbul, you will be able to attend concerts, shows, film and music festivals, visit exhibitions, art galleries, after you have done the historic tours.