Travel and enjoy! (Connections Travel)

Member Name: jennyf16

Product:	Connections Travel
Date:	30/08/08 (54 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: see lots in very short space of time

Disadvantages: huge group, lots of 18 year olds

Connections are one of the many tour companies dealing with tours for those travelling and/or on gap years.

I travelled with Connections in Australia in April/May this year. My tour was the Beach and Bush tour taking us from Sydney to Cairns with an internal flight (at extra cost) to Alice Springs. The whole trip was 19 days.

Connections have several starting points that they pick up from. There tends to be two, one budget and one a big higher range, for our tour one was a hostel and the other a travel lodge. The pick up was all one time and we were greated by the tour guide before all getting on board for the journey.

We had a tour guide and a driver and this worked well - although I'm not going to say much on either of these. The first journey was a very long one so we all had to do introductions - great and worth doing with a huge coach of people as you'll then remember at least some of the names. We then played some team games up and down the coach, passed the time and were fun too.

The accommodation was all in hotels on the East Coast the only downside to this was that it was single sex. I thought it was as stated in the brochure but at one point myself and my boyfriend were thinking of travelling with another couple and were told we'd be able to all 4 of us stop together, this wouldn't have been the case. The rooms worked well though and you tended to stay with the same people so build up good friendships with them. The accommodation in the outback was tents - but with no electricity (as we'd had on the coast) here our tour guide let us have mixed sex tents. This view on sharing with opposite sex depends on the tour guide (I must admit our guide in the outback was sooo much better).

There weren't many included activities but plenty that you could opt to do. There wasn't any food included really, most of it was to be bought yourself, can work out well but at times it's nice to spend time with the group.

As the group was quite large it contained a wide age range of people, the youngest being 18 and the oldest late 30's. You could clearly see the immaturity in the 18 year olds - very annoying!

The connections tour that I did was one part of a very long tour around the whole of Australia. As such, some people only did the Sydney to Cairns part, some picked the tour up in Alice Springs and just did that part, some were travelling from Sydney all the way to Darwin etc.

This certainly wasn't one of the best companies that I've travelled with but a large part of it was due to the tour guide on the coast but I enjoyed it all the same and would consider going with them again.

Summary: good tour company but does depend on the guide