Taiwan Tour Companies

Everything was great: visits, transport, restaurants, hotels. The only thing that could get better was the guide, L.W., who was far more interested in food then in culture, and made us spent twice as long time sipping coffee at the Grand Hotel then visiting the National Palace Museum. When I told her: "Please, let's finally go to this museum, only an hour is left now before the closure, and this is labelled a "cultural trip"; she said: "Well, im my view it is not a cultural trip but a trip by train". Disappointing.

My guide was extremely knowledgeable and had a great pride in Taiwan. It was an older group she was very understanding of all our needs and limitations.

There wasn’t much to see or do in the eleven days. For what there is to do, the itinerary should be shortened to seven days maximum. The typhoon prediction caused cancellations that weren’t necessary because we hardly got any rain. All in all I wouldn’t recommend this tour.

Logan was a great tour guide and helpful in any moment.You’ll learn so much about local culture, Current events and helpful ideas to make you stay better.

Excellent tour. I am glad that I did an additional day tour to Yiufen. Unfortunately, it was raining but was a good decision. The city tour was excellent as well. The 5 days tour was conducted very professionally. Excellent tour and I am very happy I took it. Very informative, The tour leader was very professional and knowledgeable.

Alan was a great guide for the 5 days around Taiwan. A couple of the stops were not that interesting but overall great trip. The hotels were 5 stars. For the 3 tour days in Bankok, they were also very good. Lots of interesting stops.

excellent, highly recommendable, versatile, not the general kind of tourism one receives mostly everywhere with large groups of boring people. This was not everything spoon fed but for the person who has an interest in a country and doesn't mind the unusual, the different, the out -of-the way experience. We would like to see more but due to the Earth quake we were unable to travel the East Coast of Taiwan but will keep it in mind. Good food, inexpensive, great markets (not just night markets but the artistic markets), good hotels, good driver and tour guide, in short summary, highly recommendable for the person who wants to have an experience outside the famous box. There are plenty of those tours for the boxed-in travelers elsewhere.

Had a great 6 day private (just 2 of us) tour of Taiwan with our guide Vincent. He was great in showing us different areas of eastern and southern Taiwan, chose some local restaurants to eat foods we would have probably never tried, took us to local landmarks and explained the local geography, history.

Wonderful private tour with driver and tour guide who were superb and even helped us navigate the typhoon that hit during the latter part of our tour. Kept our party of 7 ranging from early teen to parent in 80’s safe. The tour guide was very knowledgeable and personable. The driver was excellent. We were all very comfortable on the trip - booking was easy. Highly recommend and would do it again!

We really enjoyed our vacation in Taiwan with Moskito Adventures. The tour was excellently organized. We saw a lot and the hikes in the Taroko Gorge and the bike tours were our personal highlights. Our guide was very caring and always made sure we were comfortable. Many thanks, dear Chris ???? We will definitely book again, as Korea is still on our list. Best regards Jonathan and Petra

Dishonest and Incompetent Tour Company My family and I have just completed a 9-day guided tour of Taiwan run by Delightful Travel . In full disclosure, there were many problems with our tour that occurred as a result of dishonesty and multiple mistakes made by Delightful Travel. One issue was an extremely serious one, which was so significant that if Delightful Travel had properly disclosed this crucial information, we would not have even booked this tour with this company Delightful Travel lied about and greatly mischaracterized many aspects of the tour and also deliberately failed to disclose very important and critical information. The first deception was calling this a 9- day guided tour of Taiwan when it was actually a 6-day guided tour. The first and last days of the tour are arrival and departure days without any tour guides and the next to last day of the tour was a “free day” without any guided tours. Another significant deception by Delightful Travel is that they want you to believe that their tour company actually runs the whole tour because there is nothing on their website that indicates that 5 of the 6 days that are actually guided tours days are actually run by a Taiwan travel company called Edison Tours. Another deception is that Delightful Travel wants you to believe that the other travelers on your tour would be travelers that booked their tours through Delightful Travel because there is nothing on their website that indicates that it would be anything else. But the reality is that our "tour group" would actually be made up of people that came from many different tour companies and would be thrown together by their secret subcontractor, Edison Tours, in one large bilingual tour group. (Much more about how Delightful Travel deliberately hid the fact that this was a tour given in both Mandarin and English will be discussed later in this review.) Another deliberate deception occurred when I contacted Delightful Travel within 2 weeks of the beginning of our tour to ask how many people would be in our tour group, and they replied that there would be a total of 20 people. As it turned out, we had 31 people on our tour. While I can understand a small deviation in knowing the number of people on a tour, it seems very logical that within 2 weeks of the start of the tour that any competent tour company would have a much more precise knowledge of the number of people on a tour and not provide a number that is off by over 50%. But the most egregious deception by Delightful Travel was the company’s failure to disclose the fact that the 5-day guided tour around the island of Taiwan was not an tour conducted in English as the Delightful Travel website explicitly stated it would be, but instead It was actually a bilingual tour conducted in both Mandarin and English. On their very own Delightful Travel website, it states in the description of the tour that it is a “Professional English Land Tour”. Very interestingly though, when you look at the website of the subcontractor who is actually running the tour for Delightful Travel which is the Edison Tours website), you will see the tour description of their tour entitled " 5-Day Best of Taiwan: Sun Moon Lake, Tainan, Kaohsiung, Kenting, Hualien" (which is the tour that Delightful Travel booked us on), in a section that follows the description of the tour on their website, it very prominently states as the very first item shown in a section entitled "Important Notice" the following: “Important Notice: Tour will be conducted in Mandarin and English." This raises a very significant question as to why Edison Tours decided that the number one fact that they wanted to make their customers aware of was that it would be a bilingual tour. But Delightful Travel decided that not only was it not important to reveal this fact, but they also decided to hide this fact by lying and plainly stating it was a "Professional English tour”. We have previously been on several multilingual tours and have greatly disliked these tours because there always seemed to be an imbalance between what was being said in one of languages compared to the other language. In fact, on one bilingual tour we took in South America, the part that was spoken in Spanish would sometimes go on for 5 minutes or more and then what was was supposed to be the same information in English lasted about 30 seconds. In addition to feeling that we were missing out on information, we consistently found it more difficult to follow the continuity of the information being presented because of the constant interruptions caused by the switching back and forth between 2 or 3 languages. We disliked these previous multilingual tour experiences so much that we vowed to never take such a tour again. But because of Delightful Travel's utter failure to disclose that this was a multilingual tour, we wound up booking a tour that we would NEVER have wanted to take. But the fact is that Delightful Travel materially misrepresented this tour and essentially tricked us into taking this tour, and by doing so, they ruined our Taiwan tour experience and enjoyment. And then, there were multiple other problems that occurred that probably would not have occurred if Delightful Travel was a competent tour company. The first problem was that despite promising to provide the final details of our tour 2 weeks prior to the start of the tour, it required five separate messages and one phone call to finally receive the information one week later than promised. The second problem was that despite contacting Delightful Travel 3 separate times (with the last 2 times occurring within a month of the start of our tour) with the details of our planned one-day early arrival date and our independent hotel booking, Delightful Travel failed to inform the people in Taiwan of the correct information. This resulted in the driver who picked us up at the airport upon our arrival taking us to the wrong hotel. Then on our next day in Taipei, we made the transfer from our first independently-booked hotel to the hotel that Delightful Travel had booked for us to officially start our tour in Taipei. When we arrived at the second hotel, they asked for the confirmation number of our reservation. They were very surprised when we told them that we did not receive a reservation confirmation number from Delightful Travel and, as a result, they had quite a bit of difficulty locating our reservations. But finally they were able to do so. If Delightful Travel had provided to us the hotel confirmation number, the check-in process would have been much easier and faster. On the Delightful Travel website, it states that all of the hotels used on the tour would be rated 4-Star or 5-star rated hotels and the hotels that we stayed at during the 5 days of the guided tour that was run by the subcontractor, Edison Tours, the hotels were all worthy of 4 or 5 star ratings. But the first Delightful Travel-chosen hotel in which we stayed was called Hotel Papa Whale. All four of our family members were very disappointed in the quality of this hotel and felt that it was greatly overrated as a 4 star hotel. Or to put it another way, if the Papa Whale hotel is rated as a 4 star hotel, then this is an insult to every other 4 star-rated hotel in the world. Another problem occurred at the end of our tour when we were checking into the hotel wherever we would be spending our last two nights in Taipei. Despite Delightful Travel knowing that my son and daughter were sharing a room that required two separate beds, the hotel had assigned a one bedded room to my son and daughter. The hotel reception stated that they had not received any request from Delightful Travel for a 2 bedded room. Fortunately, this problem was corrected relatively quickly, but it should never have occurred in the first place. All of the deception, the failure to disclose very important information, the many mistakes, and being tricked into taking a multilingual tour because of a deliberate lie by Delight Travel affected every aspect of our tour, including missing out on some of the information that we had hoped to have learned on our tour, and It severely affected our enjoyment of the tour. I would not recommend using Delightful Travel under any circumstances. POST SCRIPT: A couple of days after I posted the above review on the TourRadar website, Delightful Travel posted a response. In their response, they said they wanted to address all of my concerns. Delightful Travel must use a very unique method of counting or they have a very unique definition of the word “all” because in my review, there were 10 concerns that I discussed, and Delightful Travel responded to only 2 of them. And as expected, Delightful Travel replied with irrelevant attempts at explanation.and false statements. With regard to the tour being conducted in 2 different languages, Delightful Travel said that there was only one member of our tour group (out of a total of 31 people on our tour) who was not fluent in English..That’s a very surprising comment to make especially when you consider that no one from Delightful Travel was on our tour and consequently had no contact at all with any of the people on our tour. But since my family and I were actually on the tour and met our fellow travelers in person, we can definitively say that there were at least a half dozen people on our tour who spoke or understood very little English. This attempt to provide some sort of an explanation by Delightful Travel is so ridiculous because whether there was one person or 20 people on our tour who did not speak or understand English does not change the fact that the tour was conducted in both Mandarin and English, The only other “concern” that Delightful Travel decided to reply to had to do with the fact that they failed to arrange for 2 separate beds in one of the hotel rooms in which my son and daughter were staying. And then, Delightful Travel tried to use this explanation to proudly brag about helping to fix the room situation. Delightful Travel falsely claimed that they did not know that separate beds were needed or requested, As I had mentioned in my review above, .this is the same Delightful Travel company that could not competently arrange our airport arrival pickup despite 3 separate messages about our arrival details, and we wound up being taken to the wrong hotel. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that Delightful Travel did not know about our preferences for hotel bedding arrangements. Delightful Travel states on their website that they have 20 years experience. Wouldn’t it be logical to expect any truly competent and experienced tour company to ask their clients about any preferences or requests regarding hotel bedding arrangements if they didn’t already know what they were? But apparently, 20 years of experience has taught Delightful Travel absolutely nothing, because they obviously did not care or bother to find out . Instead, they just incompetently booked any random bedding configuration. Then astonishingly enough, Delightful Travel had the temerity to very proudly congratulate themselves for having helped fix the very problem their own incompetence had caused.. Avoid this company.

This was packaged as a 9 day tour. Its actually 6 days.Other das were travel days and free time.

Such a magical experience! Our driver was really friendly as well as our guide, with great recommendations for local-fare for the time away from the tour. Mr. Chang made sure to introduce us to a special Taiwanese tea ceremony since the museum from the tour did not have such an exhibit. He was also really friendly with the locals that made our group feel really welcomed to the environment. He expertly lead the way through the Alishan terrain and knew the best places to take photos. He not only kept up with but outpaced an entire flock of 20-somethings!

A wonderfully well organised tour with a great selection of sights, food and accomodation. A beautiful country to visit with friendly locals. Our guide Amanda was extremely knowledgeable, friendly and accommodating and made our trip memorable.

We were happy that we chose the 9 day option and would recommend this to others. The hotels were superb as were the meals that were chosen for us. We hardly spent any money at all as everything was supplied for us. We are usually independent travellers but feel that Tiawan would be difficult to manage on our own. Having gone on this tour we feel that we have really seen a very varied and interesting side of this country. Our guide was extremely well informed, friendly and nothing was too much trouble for her. She really made our trip.