Dear Brenda,

It was a pleasure to meet you in XiAn during our recent China tour.

I would like to thank you and Travel China Guide for your hard work in producing an excellent China tour for us. It was the opinion of all of our group that Travel China Guide exceeded our expectations for our fist visit to China which we all universally enjoyed.

The mixture of different nationalities worked very well and it was a help that everyone spoke English in the group.

There was so many wonderful sites to see that it would have been nice to spend more time at the majority of them. However this is not possible, but to give you an idea of which spots might be omitted from the itenerary : personally I would be happy to drop the CPC First Congress Site from the agenda (but ONLY because it was slightly less interesting than the others, and NOT because it was disappointing).

In general the meals were good or very good. It is so difficult to remember the really good ones, especially as I enjoyed so many of them. My one strong suggestion would be to see if it was possible to have LESS food during the lunchtimes as very often we felt that there was too much food provided during the middle of the day. We ejnoyed the rest that the lunch break provided, but less food would not have been a problem.

Our Xi An guide definitely had the most strongly accented way of speaking English. She was extremely knowledgable about all the tour spots and gave us lots of information. Because she tended to speak quickly and with a very strong accent, it was sometimes difficult to understand her. Also she tended to speak for 5-10 minutes at once delivering lots of information, but too much, it would be better if she delivered her extensive knowldedge in smaller pieces of 3-5 minutes each - this was done by David who had a wonderful way of delivering information, even though his English was good, but not as good as Rai, our guide in Shanghai.

All three guides were very knowledgable and happy to share their knowledge on the places visited.

The buses were clean or very clean. My impression was that the drivers in XiAn and Shanghai were more careful than our driver in Beijing.

Without question it was a pleasure to be with David in Beijing for three days. He was charming, entertaining, and spoke to us like his friends and not like a bunch of tourists that he would not see again. He was a definite addition to our Beijing experience.

I would say that Beijing Holiday Inn Central Plaza was excellent in all aspects, XiAn hotel (have forgotten name) had a good lobby, good location in the city, food was fair or good, but not as good as Holiday Inn in Beijing.

On the guides names, could I suggest that they use their Chinese names and give us this written down so we get a chance to perfect our pronunciation of their names. Personally I feel it is slightly insulting to the guides for us tourists to be so lazy that we expect our guides to adopt English names. I would like to use our guides Chinese names if at all possible.

I feel sure that because of your desire to continually improve Travel China Guide will remain one of the best companies offering tours in China. I would have no hesitation in recommending any of my friends and family to go on a tour with Travel China Guide.

Travel China Guide organised a highly enjoyable and entertaining China tour. In just 9 days we got a great flavour of some of the many wonderful highlights China has to offer its visitors, and all with a minimum of fuss and with great attention to detail, both before and during the tour.