Best of France with Trafalgar Tours

You will more likely get reviews of Trafalgar Tours on Trip Advisor. As this is a Rick Steves forum, nearly all comments will be about his tours. Best of luck in your search, though.

You’ll not likely get a lot of replies on TA either. TripAdvisor is mostly DIY travelers. What you may be able to find though is help with your itinerary.

If you provide the basic itinerary, posters can help you tweak it.

I expect you mean this tour?

https://www.trafalgar.com/en-us/tours/best-of-france?optionId=92

To me they are trying to cover too much territory in too short a time frame. You have all one-nighters except 2 nights on the French Riviera and 2 nights in Bordeaux plus 2 nights at the end in Paris.

For context I will tell you I have done 12 Rick Steves tour, 13 Road Scholar tours and 3 Seymour Travels tours. So...I enjoy tours, hahaha! On a couple of the Rick tours there were some one-nighters and they are exhausting to me. I prefer to get somewhere and settle in for at least 2 nights. Now I'm to the point where even 2-night "stands" are more than I want to do.

Were there particular places you wanted to see that are included on this tour?

Here is the link to Rick's France Tours, you can see he has a number of them.

https://www.ricksteves.com/tours/france

Here are the Road Scholar France tours:

https://www.roadscholar.org/find-an-adventure?query=france

You can see that both companies cover smaller areas than the Trafalgar tour covers. I did not look at prices for the Trafalgar tours vs the Rick tours vs the Road Scholar tours. Keep in mind the different tour language. Trafalgar has a long list of things they "view" which means they see it from the outside. Generally with Rick and Road Scholar they list where they actually visit. Neither Rick nor Road Scholar have any additional add on tours to see special things - you see everything listed and both tour companies include tips which Trafalgar does not. Adding tips and optional tours can bump up your price.

I have enjoyed every tour I've experienced, including 4 with RS! The positives (all arrangements made for you, once you join the group) can also become the negatives, for the same reason! By definition you are ceding these choices to someone else.
Are you a solo traveler? For me, safety is as important as what I want to see/experience, so sometimes I have traded some independece for the security that someone knows who and where I am supposed to be if, say, I don't show up in the morning or if there's a significant language barrier.
Many tours will detail the day-to-day itinerary and include travel time. It would be a red flag for me (everyone is different!) if you are mostly driving from one iconic photo opp to the next, or if some of the stops are really shopping traps. Read carefully!
Safe travels!

I just looked back at your prior posts and saw you might be interested in Provence. I have done the Road Scholar tour "Provence: The Art of Living" and it was wonderful!

https://www.roadscholar.org/find-an-adventure/3729/Provence-The-Art-of-Living

I loved everything we saw! I had never really been a fan of rose wine but it was marvelous on this tour. The Road Scholar France tours do generally have wine included at dinner or sometimes lunches if you are interested in sampling the wines of the area you visit. I have done 3 Road Scholar tours in France - the Provence one, the SW France one starting in Bordeaux and before covid I did the Brittany and Normandy one. All were excellent.

To balance that I will add I've done Rick's Paris and the Heart of France, Best of Paris and the 21 Day Best of Europe that included time in France. All were excellent as well.

I did one Trafalgar tour early on because it was the only fit I could find to use an airline voucher before it expired, and a few other constraints.

They sell every seat on a bus, there was an excursion every day that was extra cost, tipping the guide is all but mandatory (they give you an envelope with your name and a speech about the necessity of turning it in), and they encourage waiting to buy things at their special place.

It was not a good experience for me, and I don't think it was good value for cost but clearly it suits some.

I have never taken a Trafalgar Tours, but some of us on this forum are fans of Gate 1 Tours, which tend to be less expensive than RS Tours. They are larger groups and they do sell optional excursions and you do tip the guide and driver, but on the 2 tours we took, there were none of those awful shopping stops where I assume the guides get kickbacks.