Romance

phone call when she asked about our interests. She proposed activities tailored to what we described, such as a food tour, wine tasting, and cooking class. We refined the itinerary over time, and Anthia provided great recommendations. Overall, the trip was a perfect balance of activities and opportunities to relax.Anthia picked great accommodations that provided beautiful views, high-end finishes, and proximity to shops, restaurants, and other sites. We loved all our hotels.Anthia demonstrated excellent customer service by providing welcome gifts upon our arrival and checking-in multiple times. She responded quickly to our questions to make sure that we had everything we needed.We had so many enjoyable moments that it is difficult to pick a highlight. We loved the private tour of the Acropolis followed by a walking food tour of Athens. We had a beautiful sunset cruise and a wonderful wine tasting and cooking class in Santorini. The honeymoon suite at the Agali House on Santorini also stood out.Our trip was amazing, and we would not make any significant changes.Written May 30, 2022

the trip due to a last minute health issue but it turns out that’s for the best as they aren’t as mobile as they used to be and many of the areas we went wouldn’t have been navigable for them.Back to the travel agency experience though… I had worked with a couple other travel agents when trying to plan our trip. I like to call my travel style Selective Luxury or Cost Conscious Luxury. Meaning, I want luxury experiences, but money is an object. I don’t want to spend much more than I need to for luxury experiences, but I’m ok spending a bit more to get a luxury experience and to ensure the get the level of service and experience that we expect. That makes it difficult to work with some travel agents. It seems like travel agents fall in two camps: 1) bulk travel agents who basically have a cookie cutter plan that they effectively try to force fit you in for their efficiency, or 2) full service luxury travel agents who do amazing things but don’t want to talk unless you’re willing to effectively give them a blank check. I initially tried Amex Travel, and I had good experience with them on some domestic trips, but in this case I kept finding travel agents that only fell in the two categories above. I needed something in the middle. Then I came across Greece Insiders via KimKim. Chris was our agent. HE WAS AMAZING.He took the time to understand what we’re trying to do, who was going on the trip with us, what types of experiences we were most interested in. He gave me a lot of options to start with so he could start seeing what I was drawn to. There were things that immediately resonated, things that didn’t and stuff in between. But he continuously learned our style and expectations. He was also flexible… Remember those categories of travel agents above? It seems like neither of those two categories are willing to work with you if you want to book any lodging via AirBnB or similar sites. They have their own channels they prefer and those channels typically have minimum stays of a week or more. In our case, our trip was going to be 10 days split between 3 places - Athens, Mykonos, and Santorini. I wanted luxury accommodations, preferably homes with swimming pools, hot tubs, several bedrooms, at least two master bedrooms, several bathrooms, and large gathering spaces where we could eat and hang out. So we had very specific expectations. I was able to find places in all three locations that fit the bill through our favorite short-term rental site. Chris was more than happy to work with that and was able to even work with the owners/managers to help us coordinate chefs and other services that we had come in occasionally on specific days.He pulled together the perfect vacation for us. It had the right amount of activity, relaxation time, exploration, and experiences. I would absolutely recommend Greece Insiders and Chris in particular. FABULOUS!

the Athens airport to meet us in person, have a drink, give us our ferry tickets and present us with a gift of Greek goodies for us to enjoy. We highly recommend Eleni. She was thoughtful in her hotel choices, tours, restaurant recommendations and we wouldn’t hesitate to use her again.

Chris arranged an amazing trip for us! Clearly he knows how to properly vet the tour companies to use as the entire experience was seamless. It was nice to have Chris available to ask questions during our trip.

balcony on New Year's Eve.The private guided tours were all outstanding. Nota gave us a wonderful tour of the Acropolis. She is a huge source of information and explained to us the Roman agora, the Persian wars and the interesting unique structure and history of the parthenon and the other temples on the Acropolis. It would have been impossible to appreciate the site without such a knowledgeable guide.George was an extremely interesting person, a painter, saxophonist, owner of nine cats (!) and an expert on prehistoric Mykenai. He gave very passionate explanations about this amazing place.We very much enjoyed our food tour with Eleni. She is a treasure. I must have gained many pounds sampling lots of dried fruit, raisins, cheese, fine meats, sweets, Greek coffee and wine. The market was a lot of fun to watch and these beautiful food shops were fantastic.Penny was also wonderful and did a great job showing us the intriguing site at Delphi. It was extremely interesting and the scenery was beautiful.!Our driver, Yiannis, who took us on two trips, is a very special person. We very much enjoyed our conversations with him during the long drives and our walk with him through beautiful Nafplio. The company is lucky to have him.All in all, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience! We highly recommend Greek Insiders!

happy we did. We had fabulous hotels in perfect locations, private tour guides, private drivers and small group tours organised prior to leaving home and it all worked perfectly and gave us an amazing experience. TravelLocal made our planning very easy and our holiday wonderful. Thannkyou Al;exandros and Elena and we would highly recommend anyone traveling to Greece to access your services.

really learned a lot during our short stay.

So many spectacular sites and seemingly so little time. Our local agent, Alexandros, through TravelLocal really got us to the best sites and with great guides. All logistics were flawless (how often can you say that). The Hania area in Crete and Delphi were true standouts.

just us and were fantastic—food tour in Athens, Acropolis, Mt Zas hike and small villages tours on Naxos, etc. Hotels and all transportation were great. We felt very taken care of and the tours gave us a lot of history and context for what we saw, as well as a chance to meet and interact with locals.

travel guides, first we had Elena who initiated our itinerary and hit the nail on the head, gave us exactly the type of trip that we wanted and was looking for especially for our honeymoon! Then we had Lydia who finished off the tail end of our planning before getting to Greece and she was incredibly communicative and responsive to when we had questions and helped us get all of our things together prior to going on our trip! From the moment we arrived in Greece, everyone whom we had come in contact with was so incredibly nice and fun it felt like we were hanging out with friends! When meeting with each of our tour guides , even Lydia our travel guide one night, Being in a new place it was so refreshing to have amazing conversations about the culture and just being in the company of good genuine people. Lydia would check in with us through out our trip to make sure we were okey and it was incredibly comforting. We kept saying to ourselves each day it can't get better and somehow they both topped it off when we had different types of food tours ,Wine Tours and the sheer beauty of each archaeological site was just amazing. We never felt rushed in any way being that it was our honeymoon we wanted to remain active but also have some down time and their itinery gave us a lot of time to explore on our own, places that we wanted check out. We did all of the mainland and we had the same driver each day we traveled which was like one big road trip with a great friend! There was even one day we were supposed to do a hike, the weather ended up being crappy and our driver yannis was on the case in no time he made some calls and we were able to still do something with the day and make it so much fun even though we didn't get to initially do what was planned! That being said I cannot recommend them enough! From the moment we got to Greece, till the moment we left , everybody was so incredibly nice our experience was phenomenal and we cannot wait to use them again to go back!