Beijing pre-cruise tour

[forevertravel]

Has anyone taken the Beijing pre-cruise tour that Regent offers? They are adding free (well, you know it's included somehow in price of cruise) and we are booked on March 2013 Beijing to Bangkok cruise. I prefer the pre-tour in Beijing to post-tour in Angkor Wat. We plan to stay for a couple of additional days in Bangkok at end of cruise. Any comments about Bangkok and Beijing are appreciated. Thank you.

 

Forevertravel

[rallydave]

Has anyone taken the Beijing pre-cruise tour that Regent offers? They are adding free (well, you know it's included somehow in price of cruise) and we are booked on March 2013 Beijing to Bangkok cruise. I prefer the pre-tour in Beijing to post-tour in Angkor Wat. We plan to stay for a couple of additional days in Bangkok at end of cruise. Any comments about Bangkok and Beijing are appreciated. Thank you.

 

Forevertravel

 

We did the Seward to Beijing cruise in Oct. 2010 and Regent included a post cruise free (included) excursion in Beijing and it was an almost complete disaster. We never got to see some of what was promised and their idea of an included lunch was a Jade manufacturer/showroom with lunch served by the Jade place. Regent did acknowledge the issues however used the excuse that since the excursion was free, they could not refund any money.

 

The tour operator that Regent chose was almost completely incompetant and what was most infuriating the next and last morning was that Regent personnel were too busy at breakfast to offer one word of apology. At least you aren't going during the week of the Chinese National Holiday.

 

For your and others sake, hope Regent got a new better tour operator for Beijing.

[ILoveMyDogs]

We just booked that trip last week I wonder if there is any way to find out if Regent has changed tour operators

[ILoveMyDogs]

Rallyedave ,

 

What hotel did they uses?

[rallydave]

Rallyedave ,

 

What hotel did they uses?

 

For our cruise we used the Regent which appeared to be a nice hotel but, couldn't really tell as we didn't arrive until almost midnight. We needed to get up early and get going as we had booked a private tour for the next day so we were only in the hotel for about 8 hours total.

 

Really happy we booked a private tour on day 2 as our guide and driver were able to get around all the horrible traffic and we were able to see everything promised and even have a nice lunch at a Beijing restaurant.

 

In case you are interested, we booked our Chinese Private tours thru Kervin Yu at Explorient Kervin Yu | Explorient <kervin.yu@explorient.com. He is in New York and provided everything we asked for and everything was as promised and we felt fairly reasonable for our trip. We started with one guide in Beijing, flew to Xian for the Terra Cotta Warriers with another great guide and then on to Hong Kong where he covered hotel, transfer and one guided tour. We were easily able to navigate Hong Kong on our own.

[xrvlcruiser]

A friend did the pre-cruise Beijing tour last winter during the World Cruise and although I have no details, she was very happy with it - she is an experienced traveler.