Maria Gabriella Landers certainly warrants a very high place on the WOW List ! In a word, in addition to WOW!, our trip was perfect. We were in Italy for the month of October, extending into the first week of November, Maria and her team worked out a great itinerary for us, incorporating a week in the middle of the month for an event previously planned by my university in Veneto.
After our week in Venice and Vicenza, we resumed our itinerary prepared by Maria. To help explain how impressive Maria’s team is, I will start at the outset of our trip. They work with a flight monitoring service (called Cranky Concierge) that assisted us throughout the trip when we needed it. For example, Cranky Concierge arranged for our airline to give us limousine service upon arrival at Heathrow Airport to transfer us to another terminal at Heathrow for our connecting flight to Milan. It was a short connection time so the special attention was much appreciated when the British Airways Customer Services representative came to our seat on the airplane to arrange for the special transportation. It was this type of accommodation that we enjoyed throughout the trip. Guides met us at every new city.
Transportation from the airport to our hotel as well as transportation from city to city was always punctual and the drivers could all speak English. Another impressive fact in this regard is the beauty of the vehicles transporting us throughout our tour. We always felt very special (if not regal) being transported in those big black beautiful vehicles. I could go on and on with details about the perfection of the itinerary, but I will not make this review too lengthy.
Some of the most memorable parts of the trip were the knowledge and communications of the guides Maria provided us, the unusual events she planned, the cities she chose for us to experience, the quality of the hotels where we stayed, and the excellent weather she provided for us ! I want to underscore my comment about our guides. Every one of our guides was very impressive in their knowledge of the area and their ability to communicate. They all spoke very good English and they were all very charming. This is the second trip that we have taken following recommendations of Wendy Perrin (with the first one being with Marisol Mosquera’s team in Peru) and we now look forward to getting recommendations for another part of the world soon.
