Siena, San Gimignano, Monteriggioni and Chianti wine tasting from Florence

Wine tasting was great 😄🍷 It was June 2 and holiday so parades and ceremonies in the villages. Vicente was a great guide and driver. A great trip for sure!

Excellent 3 course lunch in Sienna. The wine tasting was very educational and fun. We attended with our 20+ year old daughters and it was a i of effect way to create a special family memory.

We had the best time. Given we did so much in one day it never felt rushed. We also lucked out with a small group. The winery was so good we joined the wine club. The lunch service was okay, the restaurant was a little pushy about how and what we ordered, I think in retrospect we would have rather just done our own thing to have had more memorable food on our vacation and not just the basics they deemed cheap enough to feed us.

I really loved every single place we went to . The only reason I gave it 4 stars is not enough time to really check out sienna or San Gimignano. An hour more in each would at least let you go in the Duomo or a museum. I loved that I got to see the city’s but I can’t say I got to experience them. It was too fast . Monteriggioni is small the time there and the wine tasting was definitely plenty. Transportation was also excellent the bus was comfortable and air conditioned:-)

Guide, although nice wasn't good at talking to groups couldn't hear her most of the time didn't wait for the group to all get together before talking

The good points: Pre trip Communication from the tour co. reconfirming pickup time & place The bad points: The guide was poor The specifics: I am a travel agent who escorted a group of 10 people on this tour of Siena, Chianti and San Gim today. I had booked it through Viator.com While I appreciate that the company was very courteous in responding to my questions in advance and in reconfirming via both email and via What’s app, I must tell you that the guide Rafael did a poor job in several aspects. First, at the start of the tour, in Siena, one of our passengers asked him a simple question. Instead of answering it, he criticized her for sleeping on the bus and thus apparently not hearing him state on the bus, the information she was asking. Then when one of the passengers asked him to turn up the volume of his microphone and/or speech, he ignored the request. He also ignored other questions by passengers. Once he was asked simply where he was from and he replied that he did not want to answer that while walking on the tour. (He later did answer that, but his initial reaction l was a bit offensive ) Then at the included lunch, the restaurant asked five of our people to sit at a four person table, making one person uncomfortable. When we asked the guide to ask the restaurant to split the five into two tables, he said he could not ask them because he does not work for the restaurant. Then at the winery, after the tour of the grounds, but before the tasting, I told the winery guide that I am allergic to sulfites in wines and thus she politely suggested I not attend the tasting but rather that I just relax on the grounds. I followed her advice and found a lounge chair on the grounds to merely sit on. However, to my surprise, a cleaning personnel walked up to me and vocally told me I could not sit there and I must return to the tasting area. I walked to your guide and asked him to explain the situation to her but he refused, again saying that he does not work there. Lastly, on the bus ride back, as we approached Villa Costanza for the drop off, I asked him to simply call a taxi for merely four people in our party wishing to go back to our hotel. He again refused, saying he could only give us the phone number to ourselves make the call. I asked him to just call for the cab and just tell us how many minutes the can company said it will be there. He claimed the taxi company would not allow someone to call a taxi for someone who would not be in the taxi and that he could not wait the 5-10 minutes a taxi would take, as he had somewhere to go. He then told us to take the tram to the second stop and get off there because He knew that taxis were always there. We followed his instructions and walked to the tram. At that time, four more people in our group decided not to go into Florence, but instead, join us on the tram to what was supposed to be where we would catch the taxi. All eight of us took the tram two stops as instructed and got off there , However, there were no taxis. We asked a security guard standing there and he said taxis don’t regularly come there. Another nice man overheard our request and he offered to call two taxis for us. We thanked him and told him the name of our hotel we were going to. He made the call and then told us that two taxis would be there on 8 minutes. This made us realize that the guide had not told us the truth about taxi companies in Italy not allowing someone to call a taxi for someone else. The taxi arrived in approx 8 minutes as the nice man had indicated and it took us to our hotel. Your guide also had terribly misguided us on which tram stop to get off at to best catch a taxi. Ultimately, his guidance the whole day, was utterly lacking. He just displayed an attitude that he just did not care to assist the passengers with anything but taking the bus from one stop to the next but nothing more. It is sad that the good work done by the tour company prior to the tour and the good vibes from the many pretty sites seen on the tour, was all undone by their guide’s lack of caring to assist his passengers.

Sienna - Wow, Monteriggioni - Wow and the last stop of the day San Gimignano - wow, the cherry on top. A long day (about 11 hours) but so worth it to see these beautiful locations, each one better than the last of that’s possible. The downside of this tour was the tour guides lack of English language frequently. Many in the group were struggling to understand her. The other issue was she was speaking with a microphone so it was hard to hear anything. I have Done many group tours and didn’t find the guide engaged that well with the group. Overall would recommend this though for the locations.

I had been to Siena before, but saw and learned so much more this time due to the knowledge of the tour guide.

Raphael was an amazing tour guide and I would highly recommend this tour to anyone wanting to visit these places.

Breathtaking medieval cities and thanks to our guide Vincenzo, it was an absolutely worth doing day trip.