Sintra Tours

We had a bad experience with Carla and do not recommend her. We selected a half day private tour for 4 with a cost of 287 euros that had no prescribed itinerary. We selected a meeting point from a drop down menu, and were told the day before that a car could not access it, so we accepted her suggestion of the bus station where we waited for 20 minutes while she was on the other side of the station despite an initial call from us. We had no communication about the itinerary until we arrived, including that tickets to Pena Palace are timed and therefore when we were able to get gain entrance would impact our schedule for the day. She indicated both that we had selected a planned itinerary and could decide what we wanted to do. Her ability to communicate effectively with us was limited, at best. We had to ask questions repeatedly to make plans and understand timing in order to determine what fit into the schedule and send her a message to remind her when to meet us after lunch (she was late). When we noted that she appeared to be more of driver than guide because she was just driving us to a palace and waiting for us to exit, etc., she got defensive and rude. She said it was our fault she was not able to do her job because we were rushing her. She also texted while driving and drove on the wrong side of the road at one point. After 5 1/2 hours, we saw 2 palaces despite purchasing tickets for 3, had 60 minutes in the City Centre for lunch, which we walked to because it was 15 minutes faster than having her drive us, and we finally paid to take an Uber back to Lisbon and sent her a note saying we had left. No one was willing to get back in her car and subject themselves to her driving again, even back to the bus station.

We caught up with Luis outside the train station in Sintra. He called Carla and she was there shortly. She was absent the best travel tour guide. She tool us to Pena Palace and a good restaurant for lunch and took us to several other places. She was a wealth of knowledge about Portugal and a great conversationalist. Thank you Carla and Luis - you have a wonderful business!

Our guide was very sweet and knowledgeable. My only issue was that we were not contacted until 20 mins before arrival and the schedule of the day was not known so the times I bough my tickets for Peña Castle did not work well. Which meant we missed a lot of other sites.