Advice about All day train trip to Meteora Greece

I took that trip with a friend in September 2019. It was a long day on the rails, but Meteora was one of the highlights of my trip. Such an amazing place. This was my second visit to Greece and I made it a point to go to Meteora. I booked it through Dolphin Hellas tour company in Athens. It all went as you described. I do not know about "visit Meteora travel" but imagine it should be similar.

We booked an overnight tour through Visit Meteora travel. The trip was wonderful! We took the train and were met by a wonderful driver at the train station in Kalampaka and taken to our hotel. That evening we were taken on a guided Sunset tour which was beautiful, the following morning we were picked up again at our hotel and taken on the half day tour. After the tour we were driven to the train station for our return trip to Athens. The tour included everything, except meals, and we were always picked up and returned to our hotel, the guide we had was funny and knowledgeable. I would highly recommend them based on our experience in May 2018, however I don't think I'd want to try the one-day tour because there is so much to see, and the train trip was very long each way.

My experience was very much like Terry’s, train there one morning, night in a hotel, two tours visiting various monasteries plus an ancient church in town, then I had the second afternoon free for poking around Kalambaka and lunch. Could not even imagine doing that as a 1-day trip, as the train trip is 5.5 or even 6.0 hours each way, and quite boring. Would hardly include any time in the Meteora area.

We did this add-on Meteora trip before our Greece trip and spent two nights there, returning on the train and had no problem. Our friends attempted the same trip at the end of the same Greece trip and got caught in a “surprise” train strike. Nightmare trying to get buses back to Athens for them. Evidently the strikes come and go? This was in 2018 or 2017.