VELTRA tours & activities, fun things to do

a disappointing river tour

The tout was ok but much shorter than advertised.
We were only taken for an hour ride on the boat and were back at our hotel at 3 pm instead of 5!
So instead of half day tour it s a 2 hours tour.

Canal Cruise- private tour

Good way to end a busy afternoon shopping and exploring.
So interesting to see ramshackle day 100 year old wooden houses next to well maintained brick homes.
Only downfall personal guide’s English was not good.

Very interesting trip, it is an eye opener to foreigners. Hope the tour agent could at provide a bottle of water.

I have mixed feelings about this tour.

The good:
- This tour did not offer pickup from my hotel, but CityDiscovery gave great directions as to alternative pickup points and means of transport to them, so I was still able to join after a ride on the Metro.
-The bonus visit to Wat Arun was nice.
-I greatly enjoyed the trip through the canals to see some of the more rural living conditions.

The bad:
-Roughly half of the tour time (when including driving there) was dedicated to taking our group to a jewelry shop!!! This was not appreciated by anyone in our small group. We were driven there, given a free welcome soda, and then shuttled to watch a 10 minute movie (with about 1 minute of actually interesting information about the gem mining process). We then were made to walk through the jewelry display cases. While the sales agents made it clear that we did not have to buy anything, it was just for advertising, it was still an unwelcome use of our vacation time and not appreciated. When we were finished browsing (probably ahead of schedule) we again had to wait for our tour guide to be called back.
- The tour guide, while friendly, was not very good. She provided basic information, but was not very good with answering questions, and left us to wonder around Wat Arun by ourselves. Neither did she explain anything we saw during the canal tour. While this would have been hard to do with the boat in motion, a few stops here and there with some short explanations of what we were seeing would have been appreciated.

Overall:
-The canals and Wat Arun are well worth the visit, but I did not at all appreciate the extra use of my vacation time, and I don't feel that the tour guide added much, if anything, to the experience.

because the gates were closed we couldnt go up the canals. so we just went up the river and back. so it was a bit of a fizzer. but that wasnot your fault.

Higly recommended tour! We were picked up e exactly on time. Excellent english speaking guide. Especially the boat tour was great. A very nice way of exploring Bangkok.

A stop at a jewlery shop was unnecessary, but I guess it's hard to find any tour that doesn't include something like that in the end.

a fantastic tour ,, i was the only one on my tour which made it a bit more personal , my guide was very friendly and picked me up on time from my hotel and was then driven to the river city complex , where my long boat was waiting , after a short ride down the phraya river , we turned left into the canals where you pass local houses along the canals with local people going about there daily lives , including fishing , you get to see parts of bangkok you would not normally see , during the boat ride the guide points out loads off different temples and places of interest, you also visit wat arun , the temple of dawn which is very interesting.
if you have half a day free while in bangkok i would recommend this tour