Grand Tour of India & Nepal Reviews

All did not however go as smoothly as expected with this October India and Nepal tour which was run by Great Railway Journeys in conjunction with APT/Travelmarvel in Australia. We finished up only doing two train journeys. When one 7.00am train which we were booked on did not turn up after an hour they got the bus which had all our luggage to take us ...read more to Varanasi. It had waited just in case, since our efficient English tour leader had experienced such delays in the past! The excellent Indian tour leader later found out that the train ran well over 4 hours late. Apparently that is common; a fact which Great Rail Journeys in York should have known.

I’ve done 34 organised tours and the company really didn’t give sufficiently detailed information which I consider was deliberate. The final tour booklet given to the Australians when the tour leader arrived was not the same as what we received in Australia. They misled us on the timing of much travel giving the impression that we would reach places in time to do certain things or have free time. It would have been good to know in advance that a journey of just over 200km from Kathmandu to Pokhara [a very pleasant location] would take 9.5 hours and another 9 hours to return three days later! Fortunately the hotels were all excellent and the English tour director was a gem. A previous tour I did in India a few years ago - mainly in Rajasthan - was much better.

Due to a flight change about 3 weeks before the tour I did not have sufficient time [85 mins] at Delhi airport to go through Immigration, collect my case and get to domestic check-in which closed 45 minutes prior to the flight to Amritsar. A flight later in the day was full however I was prepared to wait at the airport for the first flight the next day [Monday]. I rang APT/Travelmarvel and was told by a lady that I had to be there on Sunday since the tour started early on Monday. The airline had met their requirements by offering to send me on the next day so I had had no option but to completely forget about that booking and look for new flights. I finished up booking with Thai Airways however finished up $1400 out of pocket. As it happened, getting to Amritsar, it was discovered that the English Tour Director and the UK tour members were not due to arrive in Amritsa until Monday afternoon so I would have been OK. Travelmarvel's information was totally incorrect. [It actually took two and a half hours to get through the formalities at Delhi airport; something that is well worth knowing!]