Greece Summer Nights: Tsagarada & Volos Vacation

Me and my five friends did a girls' trip to Greece for 11 nights. I was nervous about planning a trip that far and did my research online. Zicasso received great reviews and I thought it was great to connect with a travel team in Greece. We worked with our travel agent for months to plan our trip of a lifetime. She took the time to listen to our needs with patience and also asked lots of questions to determine what the best itinerary for our vacation would be. She was amazing. 

The transportation company that picked us up from locations and took us from hotel to hotel was amazing too. 

We stayed in Athens the first few days and that was a great hotel. The rooms were spacious and we were right in the middle of town. We could walk anywhere we wanted to go, even to the Acropolis. We had wonderful tour guides, doing mostly private tours, and the guides felt like family at the end of our trip. We loved Athens, all the shopping and food and hustle and bustle of the city. 

Our next adventure was Chania. That hotel was fabulous too. We loved the city and again, our hotel was within walking distance to everything. Our agent also provided us with ideas for restaurants the days we didn't have tours planned, as well as other things to see. Chania was one of our favorites, especially the tour of the 7 Villages of Apokoronas. What a beautiful tour, and we got to stop at a cheese factory, try cheese, hike, and learn about the olive trees and history. Our tour guide was amazing; so full of knowledge and such a wonderful and friendly personality.  

Our next leg was the town of Rethymno. We loved it. It was so quaint and our hotel was the most beautiful boutique hotel, with so much history. We also did a walking tour of Rethymno Old Town and learned about the town and its historical places while snacking on Greek cookies and coffee. Our guide was amazing too. We had another private tour the next day of the Eleftherna and Rethymno villages, which were amazing to visit. Our agent kept us busy with lots of tours and we loved every minute of it. 

We saw monasteries and also visited Heraklion, where we did a food and wine tour. That was so amazing too. The food in Greece and all the villages was also fresh and delicious. Every place we visited was fabulous. Our tour guide and his team did an amazing job. 

We did a Heraklion Village tour and toured the Lasithi Plateau, which was beautiful. We stopped at a little café for coffee and ate lunch at a wonderful restaurant the tour company's owner suggested. It was the best food ever.

The hotels we stayed in were all top-notch. We requested four- and five-star hotels, which we got. Our drivers were always on time and went out of their way to make us happy. The breakfast in every hotel was amazing and delicious.

I had never been to a country that was so stress-free and where everyone was so nice and accommodating. I felt like we needed to stay another two weeks, but we will be back. Our agent was in touch with us the entire time and we appreciated that. She went above and beyond to ensure we were happy and having a great trip. We had no mishaps and can't wait to go back. 

Thank you, Zicasso and our travel company, agent, and teams, for making the trip a memorable one and the trip of a lifetime. We love you all and you are family now. 

Yamas!! Roxanne, Barbara, Nora, Frances, and Annette – California girls and Texas girls!

The travel fairy at Zicasso's tour operator, as she called herself (and I felt it fit her well), certainly put together a magical trip to Greece for our group of four. We all had a fantastic vacation in Greece and were super-impressed and pleased with the staff at the travel company.

The connections for flights and ferries, as well as all of the transfers to and from our hotels and excursions, were seamless, which made for a stress-free vacation. The hotels they arranged for us ranged from old Venetian buildings in older parts of Athens and Heraklion to an upscale small resort in Naxos, as well as a fantastic hotel in Chania that overlooked the harbor. My husband and I loved every one, especially the resort in Naxos.

I highly suggest this travel company because they listened to our group's likes and dislikes to plan the perfect trip. Our trip consisted of Athens, Naxos, and two places on Crete, filled with two food tours, a boat trip, historical excursions to the Parthenon and Knossos, as well as excursions in nature to Imbros Gorge and Balos Beach. Any guide during these excursions was very knowledgeable.

We would change only the following two things. Naxos was so beautiful and we were all sad to leave and wish we could have added an extra day to just relax on the beach for a full day. So, my suggestion to anyone traveling to Greece would be to save at least one full day at one of the beautiful islands without an excursion.

The other thing we would change is to take a boat to Balos Beach instead of walking down to the beach. My husband is 80 years old and although he is in good shape, the hike was very steep and scary in some parts. As we were walking down to the beach, we loved the incredible vistas, but were also concerned about having to walk back up the equivalent of 66 flights of stairs. I say this just as a cautionary tale to really look into this walk before your trip. The views were hard to beat, but the walk was not easy.

Highlights of this trip included the hotel in Naxos (our resort on Plaka in Naxos), with super-friendly and helpful staff, private tour of Knossos and the museum, and the charming city of Chania. Greece is truly a beautiful country, with stunning vistas, beaches, historical sites, museums, and cute narrow streets filled with shops and restaurants.

Thank you for a vacation that will stay in our hearts forever.

When we first spoke and started planning this trip, it seemed like she understood exactly what we wanted for this trip. I explained the importance of quiet hotels, and she said that she understands how I feel, and in the same way. I also expressed that we were limited in time and wanted to make the most of what we had by seeing as much as possible. I explained that we like a full itinerary and expressed concern that we wanted to make sure there was going to be enough to do in Northern Greece. She seemed to understand me and reassured me, which is why we booked with her.

After we booked, things went terribly wrong. We felt that there was a distinct lack of communication on what we were paying for. We were never informed about the 2-hour time limitation on our private tour, that our hotel had to be changed after our deposit was placed, that our “food tour” would just be our guide buying a few items for us, and nothing other than a total price was provided. After looking at the price of the inclusions online, we are confused about where all of our money went. In the end, we were left feeling like we were given the "bait and switch" as the trip was marketed to us as the luxury vacation we asked for, but ended up being very different.

We have been on several luxury trips and this trip was far from the luxury of those previous trips. Several of our hotels were very noisy and we spent most of the trip sleep-deprived because of it. The few hotels that were quiet were quite small, and one even had to have the bed built into the wall to provide enough room. We also experienced several small issues such as door locks and TVs not working in our room or air conditioners draining onto our luggage, but those things can't be planned for. The "luxury" vehicle we were supposed to have was a spacious van, but had no air vents for the back seat, no cup holders, no armrests, only a hard bench seat in the back, and the “door open” light turned on every time we curved or turned left. This was made worse by the large amount of time that we were scheduled to spend in the vehicle. We felt like we spent more time driving around than anything else. This was made worse when we experienced backtracking during our trip. We travelled 1.5 hours to Metsovo and 1.5 hours back to our hotel from Metsovo. The very next morning we had to travel over an hour back the exact same way to go to Zagori. I understand that the driver is limited in his time; however, a quick search showed hotels right there in Metsovo with good reviews and similar prices to our hotel. This would have saved us hours of sitting in the car going back to Meteora. Also, during our private olive oil tour, the tour sent their driver to pick us up and take us back to our hotel, just to have our driver pick us up from our hotel and take us 30 minutes immediately back past the tour location. As pricing was not transparent, we have to assume that we paid additional for their driver to take us around when we were already paying for our driver to take us around. This felt like a waste of time and money.

Multiple days we were dropped off at remote hotel rooms with hours to spend and nothing but a restaurant nearby. If accommodations had been booked in more populated areas, we could have walked around the shops and seen more of Greece, but instead we were trapped in remote villages. We felt that this was poor planning and on one day in particular we missed an anticipated itinerary stop due to a tour being scheduled earlier in the day, which did not allow enough time for us to follow the itinerary. We were asked to leave the hotel earlier than normal that day and we drove 4 hours with only a short bathroom stop in order to make our tour on time. This resulted in us being dropped off at the hotel after our 2-hour tour in the middle of the afternoon (and it was the hotel with nothing around it).

When I expressed my concerns to our travel planner during our trip, it felt like she dismissed my concerns entirely and tried to blame the problems on anyone or anything other than herself. Later in the trip, we contacted her again as we didn't have a time for our dinner reservation and found out that she never booked it. I felt that she wasn’t very professional in responding to my feedback about how we felt the trip was not going well. In the end, it felt like she blamed our poor experience on everyone else, including us.

Our trip to mainland Greece, organized by Zicasso's tour agency, was the best luxury trip my husband and I have enjoyed to date. Every hotel and site tour guide was carefully selected for our needs and interests, and they were all outstanding! Our driver for the entire trip was warm, courteous, and highly professional. We saw all the sites we'd requested and a couple of fun surprises along the way.

We travelled from Athens to various spots in the Peloponnese, then through the lush plains of Thessaly to Meteora, and then, finally, Thessaloniki. The accommodations were superb, with special shout-outs to the hotels in Athens, Nafplio, and Thessaloniki. We spent our last night at the Athens airport hotel and were so glad we did. The suite was stunning and completely soundproof. The food during our trip was incredible (especially at the hotel roof restaurant in Thessaloniki) and traveling by car allowed us to fully appreciate the gorgeous mountain and sea views. The Greek people were warm and super-friendly. Nearly everyone spoke English.

When we arrived in Athens, our travel consultants met us at our centrally located, fabulous hotel with all the info we needed, as well as a Greek cell phone and lovely gifts. All instructions were clear and details perfectly arranged. We really can't exaggerate how wonderful this trip was and we'll definitely return to this company for our next trip to Greece. 10/10 stars, though they deserve an even higher rating.

Zicasso put us in touch with two travel agents to help with our 10-night trip to Greece (five nights in Athens and five nights in Crete). Our selected agent did a fantastic job of matching our interests with great hotels and a fabulous itinerary.

The Athens hotel was small and lacked a working bar, but was perfectly located in one of Athens’ popular restaurant/bar scene areas and was a reasonable walk to the Acropolis. The Crete hotel was one of our favorite hotels in all our travels. It was perfectly located, with a fantastic rooftop bar with an amazing view and a very good breakfast.

We chose our agency through Zicasso Travel, which offered us two options for travel agencies that specialized in Greek vacations. What a marvelous choice! Our travel consultant was phenomenal. To get started, we answered a few simple questions to help her get a sense of our travel desires and what we were looking for in our vacation. She came back to us with a draft itinerary, which we then spent several months exchanging emails on and talking on the phone.

She was extremely patient (we are particular in our travel preferences), helping us to understand our options and explaining the pros and cons of the ideas we had about this trip. Her extensive knowledge of Greece and the various vacation points was crucial in helping us finalize our itinerary. Our final itinerary did not take us to all of the places we initially identified because our travel consultant helped us to understand that our timeline was not sufficient for us to visit all those places and still be happy about our vacation choices. She ensured our final itinerary was far superior to our initial, self-devised plans. Simply, the itinerary she developed was perfect!

For a 12-day visit to three places in Greece, our travel consultant incorporated our ideas and personal preferences into an itinerary that allotted just the right amount of time for us to see and do what we wanted. Throughout our trip, she called us to make sure we were pleased with our activities and hotel accommodation, and to assuage our concerns and keep us updated about an impending transit workers' strike.

The travel agency used a user-friendly travel app (and provided a burner phone for local use) to ensure we had ready access to contacts, itinerary plans and changes (quickly updated), and details about our trip. This allowed for easy communication with her team, on the fly, to adjust the itinerary when changes were necessary due to weather or because of self-initiated preferences. This included producing the perfect restaurant recommendation for lunch on the morning we were being driven from Athens to Preveza!

A member of our travel consultant's team was our primary point of contact for these changes. He was incredibly flexible and conscientious about keeping us informed and making the changes we requested or that were recommended due to weather conditions. Many thanks to him (and his back-up) for always being available and meeting our "every" need.

Also, another member of the team's assistance and accommodations ensured smooth and uneventful payment processing. Every transfer was seamless, including streamlined—VIP—processing through Heraklion International Airport, and the private tour guides our travel consultant arranged for us were exceptional. One, in particular, stood out: she worked around weather and scheduling challenges, personally escorted us up the several hundred steps to the Zalongo, and timed our visits to archeological sites to avoid “bus tours.” We pretty much felt like we had the sites “all to ourselves!” The expertise of all of the tour guides was superb; our guide's services were exceptional.

The service we received from our travel consultant and her team was the best. For sure, when we plan our next trip to Greece, we will be using their services.