5-Day Israel Highlights Tour

MUCH TOO LONG The daily tours are way too long. We were picked up at our hotel at 6:40 AM and returned to our hotel between 7 and 7:30 PM. This is way too much time gathering travelers and dropping them off rather than seeing Israel. The tour guides were helpful but their broken English was often unclear. Overall, the company is just too big and tried to do too much resulting in poor tours and service.

I booked a 5 day Israel tour through TourRadar. I am a solo traveler so I paid extra for single accommodation. This operator put in a different hotel for every single day of the tour. I also had to walk over to the gathering point with my luggage, and walk over to the hotels they booked for me from the bus drop off point. After the first day tour, the entire bus was going back to Tel Aviv, and I ended up to be the only person who need to go to Jerusalem hotel. So they dropped me off at a rest stop in the desert, and I had to wait for another bus going to Jerusalem to pick me up. They said 15 minutes of wait, but ended up to be over half an hour. Then the bus only dropped me off 500m away from the hotel they booked for me. In the hotel, they registered me as Armenian passport, even thought I provided them my U.S. passport information through TourRadar and through their online registration. Then I received another phone call from their office asking for my passport information again. This tour operator is highly unorganized and unprofessional. I would avoid any tours associated with them in the future.

BH's website markets “package” tours in various languages on different weekdays. Before booking we asked by email the languages to be used for the commentaries and were told “ENGLISH ONLY.” That was true for only 1 of our 5 days—in one instance, 4 out of a group of about 30 required everything to be repeated in German. Multilingualism is admirable, but it consumes time and limits the number of places that can be visited. BH's duplicitous response is typical of its attitude towards customers. Expect over-priced, unappetizing lunch stops and visits to approved (aka greatly over-priced) souvenir shops. Our guides were all informative but varied in quality—from the pompous, know-it-all “Danny” (who welcomed questions but then would snap he was about to explain that or it was too political—he had no problem letting the group know of his disdain for the British, Christians {who “promoted pogroms”} and the current Israeli government) to the personable and caring Itamar who read Bible passages on the way to various stops to put the sites into an historical context.

Best Tour Guide: Avi Best Experiences that I had with the tour: Baptism at Jordan River, Dead Sea Experience, Touching the holy stone and seeing the tomb in Jerusalem I highly recommend this company, the other guides Orion and Eyal are good too but I’m biased with Avi since I’ve been with him for three days. I advise you guys to see the places that you really want to visit in Israel if you’re on a tight budget, since they have separate day tours for each. The company is really good with transport and communicating with the customers. I have been bothering them non stop but they were very patient with me. I wish I booked 10-12 day tour which they had. I wouldn’t have been rushing. I just learned about it from my fellow tourists.

See almost everything with great guides. I was quite worried though when our driver hit 155 km/he on the return trip from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and then abused our guide in a very chauvinistic way.