I’ve recently completed the Cosmopolitan tour (15 days) of Europe and thought I’d post a review as the previous reviews by others helped a lot in deciding which tour and in fact which tour company to choose. I have also done a Contiki tour which obviously has a very different age group and list of activities to Cosmos and I will compare the 2 throughout this review.

First off – I think the type and age of people on your tour depends a lot on luck. For our tour there were a lot of 45+ people, many who couldn’t walk fast or had trouble walking up and down stairs. There were only a few couples 35 and under. As a younger, fitter person myself I found this extremely frustrating eg. in the walking tours as the pace of the tour group was very slow.

Not having done a Globus tour I’m not sure how different the standard in accommodation is between Cosmos and Globus. The standard ranged from what I would class as 3-4 star out of 5 (decent quality rooms) to 2 star (very basic rooms). . However if you remember that you won’t be spending that much time in your rooms in the scheme of things it isn’t that important. I’ll post a more detailed review of the hotels we stayed in later. The quality of hotels was pretty much on par with the hotels on the Contiki tour however the hotels in Contiki were much closer to the centre of the cities whereas the Cosmos ones were much further out. From some hotels it was easy to take the trains or buses into town whereas from others it was too difficult eg. Fluelen (Lucerne) and Prague. Also Cosmos has organised for each hotel to have porters bring you your luggage to your rooms. However obviously because of the work involved this can take quite a while. If you are young and/or have packed well ie. have smaller backpacks or suitcases, I recommend grabbing them yourselves. In the mornings they organise pick up times from your rooms and have the porters bring them downstairs to be loaded on the bus.

The pace of the tour was similar to that of Contiki with the exception that everything seemed to occur much much earlier eg. Wake up times were often 6am whereas they were at least an hr later on Contiki. This applies to meeting times etc… We thought it was because they wanted to give the older people more time to get ready? (am I being ageist now?). . These early starts made it quite tiring later in the trip although we did sometimes have later wake ups (6.45 am). .

The tour itself was well organised. The tour guide we had was very knowledgeable and in our opinion very good. She didn’t try and push the optional extras down everyone’s throats. You were allowed to sign up at the last minute but if you had already booked then tried to back out later this did create some problems from what we heard (didn’t experience it ourselves). . There were some people who did all optionals and some who only did 1 or 2. We only did a few ourselves so I can only review what we did. I’ll do that in my next post.