I just wanted to let you know my trip was awesome! You guys did a great job. All of my rides were on time; my apartment in Lugansk was great. Kiev driver Constantine was wonderful! I will recommend your company to everyone I know. It is rare in these days to find a company that delivers exactly what they claim, and your company did this and then some. Thanks again, you guys are the best!!
I can tell you all of your services were great and very helpful I could not have made the trip without it! I would like to thank Dnepropetrovsk agent Natalyia for all the help. I will definitely use UkraineTour when I make a return trip to Ukraine. I can tell you that i will highly recommend your company to anyone traveling to the Ukraine. Thanks again!
We had a great time, and both our Kiev guide Helen and our driver Konstantin were outstanding. The really went the extra mile for us in finding my grandparents’ grave in Berdichev. Please express our thanks to them!!!
I will be delighted to recommend you most highly to friends who are planning travel to Ukraine or Russia.
We could not have been more satisfied with our tour and our Sevastopol guide Alex. We really needed more time to have a perfect day. We loved all the places that Alex picked out for us; we enjoyed the cafe break and all the walking around the town to see the sites. Even though the rain was constant we found that everything was so interesting that we did not complain to ourselves. What we really loved was the personal stories that Alex told us and his thorough knowledge of the history of the area and times. We will keep in touch with him in the event that we return on our own sometime. Thank you again for your service!
My wife Alice and I had a private tour for 2 arranged for and looked after by UkraineTour from September 13 through 29, 2010. From the time we landed in Kiev till our wheels went up on the aircraft leaving Lviv for home we were totally looked after. Our visits to 3 villages and one town to meet family worked out very well. Our drivers knew the locations and how to get there all in very nice vehicles. The drivers were patient and never did we feel rushed although we knew we had stayed longer than we had promised. UkraineTour drivers went out of their way to show us sites and all made frequent stops as we took many photos along the way. The tour guides we had were very knowledgeable and gave us a very good overview of Kiev, Ternopol, Chernivsti and Lviv. Our hotels were much better than we had expected, they were exceptional. In all cases we were met by the hotel staff, advised of our tours the next day, transportation arrangements for the next village or city. They could not do enough for us. The rooms were all prepaid and included either a buffet or sit down breakfast at each hotel. The breakfasts in all cases were again above expectation. Our hotels were all centrally located and many great evenings were spent walking amongst the locals in the squares of the cities we were in. We also had enough free time to do our own shopping and sightseeing.
Never did we feel uncomfortable or out of place. Any minor hiccups we ran into were immediately looked after by local agents of UkraineTour.
Truly anyone planning a trip to visit family or tour In Ukraine – these are the people to book with. My wife and I had planned to make this a one-time experience, but we had not been home for a week when both said we think we want to go back next year mainly because of the great experience we had booking the trip through UkraineTour. I would highly recommend them to anyone as they seem to arrange custom tours to fit anyone’s needs.
I’m back in Ottawa, and wanted to let you know I really enjoyed my trip to Yalta. Thanks very much for facilitating everything; things went very smoothly.
Just a short note to say what a wonderful tour we had while we visited your country last month guided by Helen Spiyan! Your Odessa guide was most helpful in getting everything we needed both educational and physical! We learned quite a bit about Jewish life in Odessa at the turn of the century, during the Nazi regime and even present day. We had a wonderful experience on a local farm having lunch and winetasting and getting to know the family… Thank you so much for arranging this tour for us.
I am back from my trip and I can’t say enough to thank you for putting the perfect trip together for me! The itinerary was complicated and tight because of my demands, but it went off pretty much without a hitch. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Kiev was impressive and I had a great time there both during the first few days and the last two. Of course, the first were spent getting accommodated to the new environment but staying in UkraineTour Kiev apartment was a good experience. The location was super and I easily adapted to the city, feeling comfortable getting around. My Kiev driver couldn’t have been better. He spoke English well and we spent a lot of time together, especially on the drive to Odessa via Uman and Ananiev. I think I wore him out a bit but he was always helpful. “Helen”, my guide in Kiev was perfect and she is a gem. Her command of the language is excellent and she really seemed to enjoy showing me the city with top enthusiasm; it inspired me. She seemed to really enjoy herself which made my experience all the better! She gave me every minute we agreed to and more.
I toured the park in Uman on my own and that was ok; by then I was already confident in my ability to get along. We also went around Uman to the Jewish cemetery and I was able to wander around. Ananiev was an adventure off the tourist path and your driver was patient and helpful in finding the appropriate points of the city for me to get a feel for where my family came from.
I loved Odessa for its vibrant life and European grandeur. I was able to wander around a lot on my own before meeting Odessa guide Elena the second day. The next morning I wandered through the rest of the best part of the city because the “Aivazovsky” hotel was so well located. It was worth whatever extra they were charging for the classy accommodations and location. It really was a very nice hotel. Elena was very helpful and I bonded well with her. We toured the catacombs and Jewish sites, memorials, and she even invited me to her home where I shared a meal with her and her family; it was a great experience and we spent way more than the allotted time together.
Weather in Chernivtsi was rainy throughout but Kolomyya weather was fine, sunny and warm, despite being not too far west. Weather in Kamyanets was cloudy mostly and some rain during my tour which was unfortunate. Kamyanets-Podilsky “Taras Bulba” Hotel was ok and was definitely well-located. Breakfast was good in their restaurant.
All over, people were helpful when they realized I spoke only English, so I generally got along well. Back in Kiev, the stay at the Hotel “Ukraina” was great. I had a small but nicely furnished room on the 7th floor with a balcony looking out over the Independence square. The weather was perfect and it couldn’t have been better for the last day. There was a lot of traffic so the tour went overtime and we also made up the boat trip that day. Your Kiev driver was super reliable, and was always there on time, always! We trecked through the entire Pirogovo folk architecture museum and got lots of exercise. It was quite deserted while I was there so I got personal experience with the artists (musicians and painters) and Helen was the interpreter. I wish I had had more time for shopping in Kiev because everything was such a bargain compared to here. Now that I’m back, I wish I had stuffed my suitcase with more souvenirs for myself and everyone back home.
So, overall, I would say the trip was amazing and in most ways easier than I had anticipated. It was a good mix of experiences with each city offering unique atmosphere. I hope to get back to Ukraine in the future. Once again, I thank you for being patient and making alterations in my trip to suit my desires.
The trip was absolutely amazing and we thank you for helping to organize our trip. For the most part it was a good trip. Overall, the guides were great and very helpful. The accommodation was very central which was excellent. The train tickets were as requested and everything went well. And the orientation tours were pretty good.
Overall we had a very good experience in Ukraine, met a lot of really nice people, sampled loads of excellent food and kept our costs within our budget which was an added benefit. We definitely plan to go again to Ukraine, and now that we found some family there, it may be sooner than later! We will let all our friends and family know of our trip and how amazing it was and hopefully help to promote Ukraine, as a destination for Canadians regardless of cultural connection. We will also recommend UkraineTour services as we feel you did a good job in setting us up in reasonable accommodation that met our budget and obviously could arrange fancier places given a higher budget.
The high light of the trip for us was getting engaged at the top of Mount Hoverla on Ukraine’s Independence Day! We had a picnic lunch at the top, listened to some music, and then I asked Krista to dance. Just prior to the song ending, I spun her one more time, got down on one knee, and asked her to marry me! She was so surprised and happy….and I got it all on video! :)
Thanks for all your help and patience in organizing this trip, as looking back we were in communication since the start of March!
Just a note to let you know we got home last night.
The Ukraine part of our trip was very nice and all of the guides were on time and helpful. We especially like our guide Helen in Kiev and Igor & Elena in Odessa were also good.
The hotels I picked were very nice especially the new InterContinental in Kiev.
We will certainly recommend UkraineTour agency to our clients. Thanks!
I’d be happy to recommend UkraineTour to others thinking of going to Ukraine. The apartment and hotels you booked for us in Kiev, Lviv, and Ternopil were all top quality and we had very few issues with them. Having never been to Ukraine before, we had all heard stories about terrible Soviet-era hotels, but we were pleasantly surprised to find that this was no longer the case. Not only were the accommodations every bit as clean and comfortable as anything you’d find in a mid-priced North American hotel (except, maybe the beds, which were still pretty small and thin) we were also surprised at how safe and relaxed we felt when walking almost anywhere in the city.
We were especially grateful to have an air conditioner in the Kiev apartment since we arrived the middle of a heat wave with temperatures in the mid-30’s. The tour we took in Kiev had a professional, English-speaking guide and she was very knowledgeable about all the major sites we visited (St. Sophia, Pecherska Lavra, Independence Square, etc.) I’m not sure I’d recommend the 8-hour train ride to Ternopil though… although everything was fine and on-time it was extremely hot and the windows in our cabin would not open at all. We were amazed that when the train stopped in various towns along the way we were greeted not with vendors selling the usual pop and candy, but with local women selling homemade perohy, baked goods, fruit, etc. I think our entire cabin was filled up with great fresh food by the time we got into Ternopil!
In the end, our trip was a complete success in that we re-discovered our grandparent’s village and met a lot of family members we didn’t even know we had. It was a once-in-a lifetime experience to discover our family roots in Ukraine with my father and brother and I’m glad that UkraineTour was there to help make the hotel and travel arrangements and relieve some of the stress of the unknown.
Just want you to know Mr. Del Chiaro and I had a meeting since he returned and everything went very well. He enjoyed everything and the guides were all very good and he liked the hotels except the Yekaterinburg one. He said the lobby was 3 star but rooms were not but one night no worries. Loved the “Bristol” hotel in Yalta. He loved the stops along the way on the train and he got to see everything he wanted to except this one little train part from Lake Baykal the other way through the mountains about a 6 hour stretch with lots of tunnels. So he said he might go back to do that! His weather was great except for the 30 hour stretch he did on the train and they had storms so that worked out too.
Thank you for all your help with this. I greatly appreciate all the work.
