Great Ocean Road Tours

Just returned home from our trip to the Great Ocean Road and Kangaroo Island and Adelaide. We had a fabulous time and enjoyed every part of the trip. Our tour guide and coach driver were great. The food was so enjoyable and the accommodation was the best. My sister and I could not find anything to complain about so I am sure we would travel with your company again. Once again thank you for an enjoyable trip.

Global Journeys was very helpful, easy to deal with, efficient and reliable. We had a great trip. We met some great new friends and had a ball. Highlights were Kangaroo Island and the Barossa tour was very good. The accommodation was very good, even in smaller towns, and we were very pleased with the included meals - all were of high quality.

We arrived late at night in Melbourne. The transfer took a long time as we had to wait for almost an hour for the van to arrive and then for the driver to negotiate with three different individuals who had no reservations. At the Mercure Welcome Hotel, despite having requested a double bed we ended up in a tiny little room with two single beds, looking at a wall. The air conditioner was blasting over the beds and there was no way of controlling it. We were right by the elevators and it was noisy. ...read more The city tour was very good but the trip to Philip Island is of dubious value when you have to arrive hours in advance to get a good seat to see the penguins for a few minutes when they are hardly visible in the dark when they come out of the water. The Great Ocean Road trip is "pretty good" but it's a lot of time spent on the coach!

The Great Ocean Road is beautiful and Kangaroo Island is spectacular, but Oceans and Islands is not really a premium tour. Two of the hotels (Country Comfort and Chardonnay Lodge) have horrible mattresses. Country Comfort had awful food. Chardonnay Lodge not much better. There was no wine tasting, which was on the itinerary, at Chardonnay Lodge. Some of the food at Aurora Ozone either wasn't fresh or wasn't cooked. We skipped Meningie, which is on the itinerary, with the explanation that 'you have ...read more an old itinerary and AAT/Kings has changed it.' Well, it was on the itinerary handed to me when I got on the coach and it's still on the website as being on the itinerary. Change is fine but when you're eating at a highway rest stop when you're expecting a scenic town you do wonder what's going on. Certainly we made our opinions known to AAT Kings in their evaluation form, but, in terms of Global Journeys promoting just that leg of the tour, I'd say to drop it or to downgrade it in terms of expectations until they beef it up with better hotels and an itinerary they can stick to. It gives the people who are on the whole tour (Sydney back to Sydney) a couple of slow days but it's too slow for just that one week and kind of a bit here and a bit there type experience. It would be better, if they can find a way to do it, to add more Adelaide, or skip it entirely, and to add more Kangaroo Island (which is truly amazing.) If they want to have a slow wander along the coast from beachtown to port and so on they should just eliminate Adelaide and stay at the Stamford in Glenelg instead and have a nice relaxing little beach stop before Kangaroo Island. I didn't find this a Premium tour for a couple of reasons: one was that some of the food and hotels weren't very good and the other was that we didn't have porterage at a couple of hotels. Premium on the website specifies porterage. If I'd known we wouldn't have porterage I would have packed differently. The tour director was a nice guy and did a good job but he reeled off his commentary by rote...lots of facts and figures and dates with rare patches of enthusiasm. He also wasn't clear at times on where the coach would be to pick us up and stuff like that. There was no welcome message of any kind at the Melbourne hotel; we had the concierge call AAT Kings to confirm and they left him on hold for 20 minutes. I got him to call back and all I got was 'be in the lobby at 7:15', with nothing about where the oach would be or what to do with the bags. So please either ask AAT Kings to patch up the tour and make it a better experience or downgrade it from Premium. I wouldn't choose this particular tour again, I'd do a short Ocean Road tour from Melbourne and then fly to Adelaide and pick up a Kangaroo Island three or four day tour. It would cost more but it would have been more interesting. Sorry to be a downer, but AAT Kings should do some reworking to bring this tour up to a better standard.