Hungary

Nicely paced, well thought out itinerary. Easy paths with GPS guidance, though needed to pay attention closely as it was too easy to get off the designated trail though very obvious pretty quickly from GPS if you make a wrong turn. Nice to have a floating hotel so you were not packing and unpacking. Enough time for meals and breaks with great van/trip support. Ebike option was greatly appreciated

The Emerald Seas part of the trip was outstanding. The ship’s crew was great, the food was excellent, the service could not have been better, and the cabins, although small, were well designed and quite comfortable. The land activities offered by Emerald that we participated in were excellent and a couple of the local guides they used were outstanding. If I were rating only Emerald Cruises, I would have given it five stars. I wish the VBT part of the trip was as good. This was my third VBT trip. The first two we took were both outstanding with great cycling routes everyday, excellent non-cycling activities, and a cohesiveness with the guides and other travelers that made the trips memorable. Perhaps because of the combination of two quite different objectives, the Danube Bike & River Cruise did not gel in the same way. A couple of the cycling routes along the Danube were beautiful (notwithstanding the rain we endured on those sections), but the rest seemed to be made up only to provide an opportunity to ride. Overall, as a cycling trip the routes were not all that interesting and there was not really a lot of cycling. The VBT non-cycling activities were okay but we could have done most of them with Emerald’s offerings or on our own if we had just done the river cruise and not the cycling. If I were to do the trip again, I would book directly with Emerald, skip the cycling on this trip, and find another cycling trip that did not mix the two. Two final comments: (1) The VBT guides were quite good but the nature of the trip limited their role so they were not a significant part of the trip (which is quite different than the role played by the guides on our two prior trips). (2). The local VBT representative in Prague, Barbara, offered several local tours - at an extra cost - for those who opted for the pre-trip extension. Her tours were poorly organized, she ignored participants’ requests for more information about history, politics, culture, etc., and focused primarily on architecture instead, and her sound equipment was so bad, many of us were unable to hear her for significant portions of the tours. Although she said she wanted to tailor the tours to meet the interests of the group, she did not do that and at one point continued to drag us through rain and wet, cold, wind when everyone told her repeatedly they wanted to stop to eat lunch and rest out of the wind. Although stopping for lunch was part of the tour, she had not made reservations and the restaurant she ultimately took us to did not have any tables for us.