Tauck
- Pre-trip Good
- Tour Guides (Dina, Iris, Andrea) Excellent!
- Cruise Director (Vincenzo) Okay
The Ship- Cabin Excellent
- Public spaces Excellent
- Cabin Excellent
- Dining Room Very Good
- Bar (and everything else) Excellent
- Buffets (breakfast and lunch) Very Good
- Dinner Very Good
- Desserts Excellent
- Pre-cruise (Milan) Good
- Special events
- The Last Supper Super
- Schloss Vollrads Very Good
Ports
- Milan (I know it's not a port, Alan F!) Very Good
- Basel/Zurich Very Good
- Breisach (Alsace region) Excellent
- Heidelberg Very Good
- Rudesheim Excellent
- Dusseldorf Okay
- Amsterdam Good
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day 1, milan, the duomo, the galleria, and beef cheeks
Pre-cruise hotel: C. The Principe di Savoia is an old hotel with many nice old elements, like the tiny but beautiful elevators. The bathrooms are deficient in some ways because it is difficult to retrofit such an old space into a modern one. The shower floor was slippery, even though it has speed bumps. Someone is going to hurt themselves! (I noticed that the separate bathtub, on the other side of the long, narrow room, had an actual pull-cord alarm. I would probably bleed to death trying to get to the alarm after I slipped in the shower!) In the bedroom area, we had a very pretty fresco above the headboard.
Pre-cruise hotel breakfast: A. Very good food*, and even better service. I could have included this in the category above, but that wouldn't be fair to the breakfast crew. I don't want to nitpick, but I did notice that they were still serving matzoh, instead of bagels, although Passover ended the evening two days before!
Pre-cruise materials given in Milan: B+. It would have been better if I had them before I left home.
Pre-cruise planning: F. On our departure from the hotel, the porters are going to pick up our large bags at 5 am, inside the room! Usually bags are left outside the door in the hall. I guess they are worried about theft, but how creepy is it that someone is going to enter our room while we are sleeping? Later, at dinner, I pointed out to one of the Tauck guides that most people dead-bolt their room doors, and this is apparently a problem they had not considered. I went to sleep that night with a baseball bat in my hand.**
Welcome dinner: C. The hors d'oeuvres were plentiful, but not particularly flavorful. (Mostly, they tasted like pastry shell, and then there was a tiny ice cream cone, which I expected to be sweet, maybe strawberry, but was some kind of paste.) By the time the Tauck guides started to speak, there were 81 of us standing around now for more than one-half hour. Many, I observed, were over 75+ years old. So the welcome speech should have been done while we were sitting at dinner. The dinner was typical banquet food. There was a tasteless appetizer, even though there were two sauces. (It included a flavorful olive tapenade, though, if you like that sort of thing.) The risotto was was good, but with vertigo-inducing plating. And the beef cheeks, were tender, with flavor, but I noticed that no one at our table of twelve cleaned their plate, including moi. (Not Italian, I know. How come no one knows how to say "please" in Italian? Think about it.)
Welcome dinner name tags: D. Few were left attached to their namesakes.
The first day, overall, I'd give Tauck a C grade. (My only point of comparison is one A&K tour, which was excellent, but of course it was a much smaller group. I don't remember about the name tags - probably didn't have them. And it was one of the other guests that pointed out to me, that Tauck prides themselves in not having name tags.)
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I met all three Tauck tour guides in the hospitality room. Each deserves an A+ and their own like button.
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* Penny does not like runny eggs, but there was an omelet station available for people who like sedentary eggs.
** Alternative fact #1. That's what she said #1.
*** There will be references to umlauts in this thread. Not to be confused with omelets, umlauts are the symbols sometimes used over vowels and are rarely runny. On the other hand, there is no such thing as an umlaut station. I have no idea what I mean by that.