Ady & Meg.
Very unusual for us - this trip was booked at very short notice, due to another trip letting us down. We booked this trip purely based on the time of the morning that it was leaving - it was around a 12 hour trip (which ended up being more like 13.5 hours because of traffic) and we needed to be back in Bucharest in time for tea.
The trip involved visiting Peles Castle, the town of Brasov and Bran Castle by coach - these are all fantastic places to visit and we 100% recommend them. This review and our scoring is however mostly a reflection of the trip itself...
As you can see from the advert, the trip claims that it is a guided tour, and asks that you bring cash with you so that you can buy your castle tickets through the guide (we assumed that this was because of timeslot issues etc). However, what we discovered whilst on the trip was actually that we had to pay extra if we wanted the guided tour (as it was, we did not 😂), Peles Castle was actually already sold out, and we had to purchase tickets to Bran Castle online!
If this wasn't disappointing enough, the tour guide's attitude was the nail in the coffin (apologies for the Dracula pun 🧛😂) - he told us that he was willing to switch the trip around (visiting Bran castle first, and Pele castle later, which would have gotten us access to the inside of Peles castle), IF enough people on the coach wanted to do it - but people who hadn't paid for the guided tour didn't count. As it was, there weren't enough votes, so the trip continued as planned. When it came to booking Bran Castle, again the tour guide refused to share the QR code with us, as we hadn't paid extra for the guided tour! (Here is a link to their official website to book the castle: https://www.bran-castle.com/en/)
Upon reflection, and from speaking to others, we wish that we had actually travelled out of Bucharest independently, stayed the night in Brasov, and visited the castles independently.
Although it was tough to find the correct website to book Bran Castle (it's not the first website on google!) we are still glad that we didn't pay extra for the guided tour - this meant that we were able to explore the sites as we wanted to, and even had time to visit alternative viewpoints to where the guided tour went. We had around 90 minutes at each destination, which was about right for us, but we appreciate that many people would find this too rushed.
As we said above, this review is about the tour, not the castles - they really are well worth a visit, and were one of the highlights of our trip to Bucharest!
Flossie.
I was not invited on this adventure ☹
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