Hi Brenda - I am glad to provide some feedback on our recently completed China trip. Unfortunately, I have misplaced my notebook, so I am unable to provide the level of detail I had hoped, and I am missing some of the guides names. Overall, we were very pleased with the trip and with the services of Travel China Guide.

1. Meals - we appreciated that the information about Jody's dietary requirements had been passed to the guides and was taken into consideration in meal planning. Food was plentiful and quite tasty. We thought the ¨¤-la-carte meals were a nice touch.

We appreciated the opportunity to have lunch outside one time when the weather was nice in Lhasa, and would have liked to do more of that. Probably our most memorable meal was one we had on our own - Crossing the Bridge Noodles at the Brothers Jiang in Kunming. The noodles were delicious, and we would suggest that you consider adding this as an included meal to your Kunming itineraries, because it is not easy for Western tourists to navigate on their own. We tried unsuccessfully 3 times to figure out how it worked on our own, and even after our guide explained it to us the next day, we only managed to eat there that night with some difficulty and confusion.

2. Guides - we had a total of 16 guides (not counting the guides who led shore excursions on our Yangtze River trip). A number of them we would rate as very good to excellent, including Pudding in Hangzhou, Annie in Kunming, the second guide whom we had in Kunming (unfortunately name forgotten), Lynn in Shanghai, Jupiter in Hong Kong, Lhakdon in Lhasa, Stephanie in Guilin, Jim in Chendgu, guide in Xian (name forgotten), and the two guides who brought us to and from the Yangtze River trip. These people were all well informed and informative, enthusiastic and helpful, and had good English. Two other guides (James in Dali and Elspeth in Lijiang) were enthusiastic and willing, but they both need to improve their English.

3. Cars - the cars were generally clean and comfortable. Drivers were generally friendly and service oriented.

4. Hotels - generally, we were impressed by the hotels. They were well located (in particular, the Holiday Inn Central Plaza in Beijing, the Shangbala in Lhasa, the Bund Riverside in Shanghai, the Weilong in Kunming, the Paradesa in Yangshuo, and especially the Grand Lijiang in Lijiang and the Salisbury YMCA in Hong Kong). We appreciated the fact that we might not have found some of these hotels on our own, as some didn't appear in our guidebooks.

5 . Other - we were very pleased overall with the trip and with Travel China Guide's work on our behalf. We were especially impressed with how effectively Travel China Guide handled all the plane and train cancellations that occurred in the first part of our trip, which were disappointing to us, but which we realize couldn't be helped. Thanks especially to Brenda for her creative thinking around getting us to see the pandas in Chengdu when flight cancellations routed us through that city - that was one of the unexpected highlights of the trip, and also resulted in us having a better schedule for getting to the cruise ship than originally proposed.

A few suggestions that we think would make your services even better:

- Home visits - the home visits were quite interesting. The guides clearly do the same visits over and over again and know all the answers to the questions we might ask the hosts; however, we would suggest they refrain from answering themselves and act more like translators, so that the hosts can play a more active role in the visits. We found this varied from guide to guide.

- Overnight train - we had a real problem on the second overnight train we took because there was nowhere to put our luggage. It was too big to fit under the berths, and too heavy to lift into the space at the ceiling. We ended up sleeping curled up with our suitcases at the end of our berths. I don't know what the solution is, but thought it was worth mentioning. On our first overnight train, we had the whole compartment and put the luggage on one of the other 2 berths. Perhaps when you ask clients if they want to buy the whole compartment, it might be worth mentioning this as a consideration.

I have no objection to our comments being published on your web-site, along with my e-mail address.

Jody Gomber & Jack Hall