It could have been The Best of Sri Lanka

We have just returned from The Best of Sri Lanka tour with Titan. It was our first experience of group touring with this company Titan had been recommended by a number of well-travelled friends.
Although we did have a very enjoyable time some issues arose which in the end became more than an irritant and have made us question whether we would use Titan again.

1. We felt that the size of the group (35) was too large and merited the tour having a Tour Manager and Tour leader so that where necessary it could be split into two. Our Tour Manager/leader was softly spoken and the people at the rear could not hear him and often hadn't caught up when he was giving information.

2. The first few days were fine with extremely interesting visits to ancient temples and palaces. Our Tour Manager has a very good knowledge of the history of Sri Lanka and gave interesting talks on the social, economic and political structure of the country. However on Day 6 when we were due to travel from Habarana to Kandy he announced that he was changing the itinerary for the next day and this continued for the rest of the holiday.
On day 6 he factored in 2 unscheduled visits to what he called factories but were in fact retail outlets aimed at tourists and added two activities (Kandyan dancers and Temple of the Tooth) that we were meant to be doing on day 7. Obviously to do all this as well as the planned itinerary (Dambulla and Spice Gardens) we became very short of time and this resulted in our visit to the sacred Temple of the Tooth being cut short to about 30 minutes!

Day 7. This should have been a morning visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens followed by an afternoon optional visit to the Elephant Sanctuary. Our leader moved the Elephant Sanctuary to the morning and in the afternoon offered a trip into Kandy mainly to take people to more retail outlets.

Day 8. On the itinerary we should have been continuing on to the the Tea Plantations and Nuwara Eliya but of course we had to visit the Botanical Gardens first and this meant very disappointingly we were only allowed an hour and a quarter there and not the morning we had hoped for and this must have affected the time allowed in Nuwara Eliya to explore the little town.

Day 11. This was meant to include a short tour of Galle an old town I had been really looking forward to visiting. There was no time to do more than look at the battlements of the fort and visit a Dutch Church - about 45 minutes in total. My suggestion would be that the group could have been dropped off and given a designated time to look round and have lunch instead of driving on to a restaurant further down the coast. Those of us who wanted to look at the architecture and old buildings could have had an hour or two to do so.

Day 12. This was meant to include a tour of Columbo including the fort and Pettah district. In fact except for restroom and snack breaks we saw the city from the coach until being taken to the airport for our long flight home.

3. Sri Lanka is a beautiful country to visit but as one person commented the tour was very sanitised. There was no time allocated to allow people to spend time independently looking around any of the small towns. This would have been very possible in Nuwara Eliya where the town was only 10 minutes walk away from the hotel.

On the plus side we did see a large part of Sri Lanka and the quality of driving from our coach driver was excellent and he had a wonderful assistant to help with supplying water etc when needed. Generally the hotels were of a high standard and the meals extremely good. If our Tour Manager had kept mainly to the itinerary and not added in visits to retail outlets ( which we had no interest in and the tour was busy enough as it was) we would have been very positive about the whole experience. However if all such tours are similar we will think again before booking with Titan. Incidentally I have done some tours with other companies and never experienced this before and there has always been time allowed for people to explore independently if they wished.