Copying my review from FMP over to the head office too. Recently went on a China English tour for 11 days including roundtrip flight from Toronto to China and accomodations at 4-5 star hotels for $1800CAD and bullet train ride. It included cities like Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Beijing, with buffet breakfast included and sometimes even lunch included. It's a deal for sure but personally, I don't prefer following tours since I'm experienced enough to travel China, but my mother-in-law signed us up. I do think it's actual great for larger families with senior folks as the excursions and outings are brief before you rest in the bus. It's also great for first timers to China or those who aren't as tech savvy to use the Chinese apps. Beijing however was a bit strenuous because it was raining one day, we squeezed our itinerary tighter. The Great Wall we visited was a section that was very steep to climb. It's all optional, you can climb up as much as you want or skip climbing all together like my mother-in-law.
I had a good experience but I'm just not a fan of sitting in long bus rides and prefer to stay closer to the city centre and pay a bit of a premium to eat where I want to eat as opposed to eating at rest stops and buffet breakfast (rest stops and hotel buffets are more elevated in China than Western countries though).
11-days is quite short to fly all the way to Asia, I normally would like to stay a bit longer but the package deal was to fly on the same flight home. I found out later there were extensions that can be added to visit Xian but the agent at First Markham Place, didn't inform us about these extension add-ons to our trip. She made us think that we had to choose this package or an entirely different package.
If you sign up and subscribe to their email list you also get another $50 off per person and I believe signing up in person maybe cheaper than online. The agent helped us with applying the discount.
Another thing to keep in mind is that despite booking together, none of the airline seats of our group are sitting together so definitely check-in as early as possible to get your preferred seating and hopefully arrange yourself to sit together. Your whole tour group would be flying together and it would be a packed / full flight.
They also don't provide the hotel names and addresses in advance. You only find out a week before. It's still really good hotels, one even at a golf resort with extensive buffet breakfast. However, these hotels are cheap because they are normally 1hr away from the center of major Tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai. So even if you decide to go on your own, most of the suggested places to hit up is far away. So definitely get used to using Didi (Chinese Uber) and a Translation app ready so you can have the flexibility to explore on your own. We had one free day in Shanghai in our tour.
Now time for the review, these cheap tours are cheap because there are build-in shopping destinations like Silk factory, tea factory, pearl factory, jade factory and Chinese medicine institution that are geared towards tourist sales, which you cannot skip. Not all Taipan tours are shopping though.
I wouldn't say they are scams but I do think they made a deal with the tour company to subsidize the cost of the trip. I personally didn't find them too pushy if you don't want to buy, there will be others that will and you can just take that opportunity to window shop, but that does take up time of your trip. We did end up buying silk sheets and tea though $$$$. The prices are probably a bit more than local price, more of a tourist price. There isn't much to time shop for clothing or other personal items given you're on a schedule with the group. I do recommend setting up JD or Taobao if you want to do online shopping and have those items shipped to your hotels in advance as Chinese hotels are really good at holding packages before you arrive just make sure it's to delivery to the hotel where you would be staying at least a couple days and order at least a few days in advance or check what the estimate delivery timeline is to the destination.
Our main tour guide Zhou Yan, was fantastic. She spoke fluently in English and is clear to understand. She's also a local in China. She was really great and patient all the way through. 5-stars for Zhou (Jo) for sure. We're really lucky to have her. The other local city tour guides that they used in the other cities were just okay, their English wasn't as clear, probably understand them 70% of the time.
A lot of the add-on tours are optional. Our booking agent advised us to have USD cash prepared in advance for tour tips and excursions. I'm kind of annoyed that the tour agency told us to bring USD even though when were arrived our local tour guides are more than willing to accept Canadian conversion on par of the day's exchange rate on Google, which really would have saved us fees from exchanging money in advance to USD as Canadians. read more
