Aug 24, 2024
Fantastic experience - Fantastic place, very friendly and professional guide from Betsy she explained everything clearly !
Thank you.
Review provided by Viator
Aug 5, 2023
Great trip - Lovely tour guide, very helpful and organised. No waiting around in queues or at entry points. Long day and completely worth. Our hotel wasn’t listed on the pick up points and when I rang up there was no problem to get collected right outside our hotel, very accommodating.
Review provided by Tripadvisor
Apr 12, 2023
Pamukkale tour - The guide was very friendly & informative. The breakfast & lunch were descent too. The Pamukkale view is amazing. Experience at cleopatra pool, Heriapolis is great. The tour also took to local factories to market their local produce of gems/rocks/jewelleries & wine/turkish-delights. I need to mention that these were no cheap & priced like UK highstreet shops - need to be caution there. The same eatables & some products were foubd at half the factory price in a store at tea-break stop. Otherwise the trip is excellent.
Review provided by Viator
Aug 20, 2021
The Whow experience - Last minute decision to take a day trip with the family. Although no star references to this day trip, I will give 5 stars and compliments for driver/guide Jasin and guide . Early start 05:30 Hr. After about 1.5 hours a breakfast stop. Breakfast is not included but variety at the restaurant is more than sufficient and reasonable priced. A further 1.5 hours arrival at Tezcan Onix where you can buy Sultanite and onix jewelry (too expensive). Continue to the ancient City Hierapolis with the Pamukkale and Cleopatra Pool. You have 3 hours here.. The guide give a quick explanation what is where and you get time to walk around, go into the Pamukkale and Cleopatra pools.
The over 4000 year old city ruins are very impressive with a beautiful view over the valley and mountains.
After a cold and warm buffet lunch a wine tasting and back to Antalya.
This trip through Arbek Travel is well worth your time and money. Great driver/tour guide.
Well done
Review provided by Tripadvisor
Oct 14, 2022
Tour good, food not. - Ancient City Hierapolis, Pamukkale and Cleopatra Pool. Worth the hours of travelling. The ancient city Hierapolis, Pamukkale make the time spent travelling well worth it. Have a dip in Cleopatra pool - so don't forget the swim suites. Breakfast is Turkish presented in a box, so take your own if necessary as there is nothing to purchase. Lunch we did not touch as the flies had got there first!! The restuarant and toilets were dirty.
Review provided by Viator
Oct 2, 2022
Great trip for couples and families - Pamukkale is awesome. I advice you to visit it first when you travel around Turkey. It's a great place to take a lot of photos:)
Just one drawback for me: you should be careful when swimming in the Cleopatra Pool because there are a lot of stones at the pool bottom and it's easy to twist leg
Review provided by Tripadvisor
Aug 4, 2024
Good but could have been much better - Beste was a great guide and very knowledgable. No complaints about her. There are however issues with the logistics.
1. The bus was hot. The AC was running all the time but it was inadequate.
2. The stopovers at the Shops (Wine, Stone) was forced. I know it’s mentioned in the itinerary but these disrupts the flow of the journey and the overall trip could have been cut short by another 2 hours if these were avoided.
3. The place that served lunch was awful! Dirty, loud and many of the dishes were already finished.
4. Someone on the bus was constantly vaping. Unfortunately there were multiple families travelling with kids (including the smoker). I would have expected the guide to step in and stop it, but nothing of that sort happened.
So overall, this could have been a much better experience if the logistics were better.
Review provided by Viator
Jul 4, 2022
Very poor spa experience - The spa falls are not what is advertised it is big white cliff with milk like water in about two spa baths and there are hundreds of people there the food is to spaced out so take snacks with u the breakfast was two boiled eggs bread cucumber had dinner was nice chips and drinks are extra and had to pay extra when we were there for admission and to swim in one of the lakes and ended up in a leather factory watching a leather cat walk at the end I was not impressed for the price we paid the host was amazing he was lovely but it definitely is not what the pictures look like and would not make the time out of my holiday to go again sorry but I was really disappointed
Review provided by Tripadvisor
Sep 2, 2020
Do it - but some notes to the organiser.. - So there is a 6.30am start, but this is because it takes so long to get there. Please bear this in mind when booking as we had a family on our trip complain about the distance....sorry, we cannot teleport there. The coach is comfortable and air conditioned and you are constantly advised to wear your mask. Although typically, the English seem to have a problem with this and either wear under their chin or don't cover their noses which is annoying for everyone else on the coach - plus the guide who has to constantly remind you.
You travel for around 1 hour to 1.5 hours before you get breakfast. This is a "buffet style" but is only bread, honey/jam, olives, cucumber, tomato and ONE boiled egg. You do get tea or coffee. This was not enough for us and read reviews before going so packed additional food. I would recommend to do the same or buy some things from the shop there. It seemed reasonable pricing. You stay here for about 15 - 20 minutes before you need to be on the coach. One guy got off to get something for the garage 2 minutes before we were due to leave, and we had to wait around for 10 minutes before he came back...even though the driver said they would leave if people were not back - this never happened disappointingly and happened again later in the day - we were waiting 20 minutes for people to get back after the time stated! I would prefer if they would leave them.Harsh, but it eats into our time.
The stop after breakfast is Pamukkale. You get into the venue which is all open, so bring sun cream as there is no shade other than in the shops. The guide gives you some spoil about the "theatre" and then lets you do your own thing before telling us you need to be back for 1.45pm (we had 3 hours here). So we explored the theatre which is 100% the best thing there. Then walked around some of the old ruins down the far end towards the south entrance. Hardly anyone down there.
Then we went to Pamukkale where the calcium pools are. You have to take your shoes off to walk down and MUST wear a mask - although most people took them off once they got further down. It was so crowded and cannot social distance here. We walked down to two pools but didn't go to the end. Some bits are really slippy but they weren't as bad as the other reviews make out. You cannot see the bottom of the pools. They look lovely but some have stones in so you need to be careful. It is a long walk down to the bottom. We didn't bother - great view from the top and once you have seen one pool then you dont really need to see anymore.
You can then head up to Cleopatras pool which is inside and you can get a locker. This is 100TL each. Not a bad price really, if you want photos then either you have to have one person in the water and stand around the edge to take photos or ask the photographers there to take some at a price (we didn't do it so I don't know how much this is). But you cannot take your phones or cameras in the water. I personally wasn't overly fussed with this pool but my boyfriend really liked it. The water is really warm like a bath and there is a deep part. Nobody has masks and it can get very crowded. Just be careful of the pillars in the pool as you tend to knock yourself on a few.
Inside this area is also a cafe and seating area. There are some dogs here too - well behaved but do beg for food. The ice cream there is pretty good. You can get a 5 ball cone for around £4.50 so a little steep but it tastes good. Drinks and other food available but we had our own. There are showers and toilets in here also. Toilets were a bit rank as people were just doing poos and leaving them in the toilet??! dirty.
The bus driver was selling water onboard which was good i think it was 25TL a bottle.
The guide was very knowledgeable on things and did a few speeches. Sometimes it was hard to understand some things he said but we got the gist of it. But he explained everything really well.
Once we finished at Pamukkale we headed to an Onyx shop. This is one of the unnecessary stops for me. Remove it entirely. They take you to a small area and give you a 5 min talk about the stones etc then take you into their shop where everything is in Euros - and quite expensive. I think the lowest value item was a small stone elephant that would fit in the palm of your hand for €15. Then you end in their cafe. My concern here was that we were told we could leave things on the bus but the driver went off and left the bus open and our things unsupervised?
After this (around 2.30) we went to a restaurant for lunch. It should have been around 2pm but as people couldn't get back in time it delayed us by 30 mins ish. So we were all starving by this point. Good news is lunch is a buffet but plentiful. Multiple options including pasta and watermelon. Drinks here are extra and you cannot bring your own drinks in, or they will charge you for them as well. Really nice food too! You are here for around 30 minutes.
After this we had two more stops on the way home. The first was a leather factory. Again, please remove this from the tour. Completely pointless and ruined the whole day overall. You go into this room which is a cat walk to watch two "models" exhibit clothes (cringe) . My favourite part were the winter coats, in 35c summer heat....
You are then shown into the main shop area - only a few of us actually got off the coach to go in here. They have so many staff, and they follow you around like a lost puppy, seriously close and i'm sure ours didn't have a mask.
He kept walking with us until we left the shop/factory asking us if we liked anything and if my boyfriend wanted anything - like i was stopping him buying anything?
i am pretty sure the majority of British people HATE this. I wanted to leave straight away. It was as if they thought i was going to steal something. On the way out another sales staff asked where we were from and put his hand out to shake hands. We ignore his question and asked where the toilets were and he shouted "WHERE ARE YOU FROM?" my boyfriend asked again where the toilets are and the guy just looked at us blank. So we walked out to find them. It was so rude and the rubbish the owner said about "no hassle sell" - Sure. the cheapest jacket i saw was €690 but i only looked at a couple. Prices were sky high. Apparently one person in the group showed interest and the salesman offered him €295 for the same €600 jacket. You can buy cheaper leather in the UK and probably look loads better too. I think the guide gets commission for bringing us there but this was just shocking behaviour from their staff and not related to the day at all.
I was also told at this point by another passenger that I had paid a lot more for my trip on trip adviser than if i booked in Turkey at one of the reps. I think this was about £10 more expensive too.
We then started our way back to the hotels. But not without another cheeky stop at the same place we had breakfast for a look around for 15 mins. They do take card here so don't worry if you don't have cash. I paid for the Cleopatra pool on card, i paid for the bus fuel in the shell garage to cover the tickets as we didn't have any money. A little dodgy but sorted us out.
The trip back was pretty smooth. We got back around 6pm so it's pretty much 12 hours out. Worth it for the day trip. But as i said, get rid of the "sell to tourists" stops and just extend the time at Pamukkale so we weren't rushing. Otherwise i would have given more stars.
Review provided by Tripadvisor
Apr 7, 2023
Not worth it - The tour guides were fantastic, and the actual city itself. This excursion is overpriced transport and mediocre lunch that doesn't even include drinks. The restaurant you're taken to is completely in the middle of nowhere so they deem acceptable to overcharge for drinks. Hire private transport so you can go at your own time. 3 hours for the site is not enough time.
Review provided by Viator