Sicily Tour Suggestions

Overall, the trip was great and our guide was amazing. Karin Kibby was one of the best guides I have experienced. I'm not going to focus on the 95% of things that were great, but on opportunities I hope you will address to make this trip extraordinary.
One suggestion to consider is offering two types of trips, the standard tour and an active tour. An active tour would include some hiking options as Sicily has amazing national parks and hikes. I completely understand this trip is geared to people of several age groups.
I highly recommend the Rick Steves Sicily Book be offered in an audio form. It would have been much easier instead of trying to glance up and down at pages and figure out where you are, especially in dark locations and on windy streets. For example, when we arrived in Erice we were told to use Rick Steves book on a very windy day. We all felt kind of lost.
Palermo – If I knew what the Hotel Ambasciatori was like, we would have stayed at our previous hotel the Palazzo Cartari and just eaten the cost. The is a stairway to get to the elevators and the room choices were either facing the noisy street, or a dark dank shaft with intermittent smells of burning electrical devices.
The walk with luggage to the train station over unmaintained broken-up sidewalks was terrible. I highly suggest in the future you have a taxi right around the corner to take the luggage to the bus and let everyone walk. In Trapani, the walk was long and beat up the wheels of our luggage on rough streets and similarly a taxi could've been arranged for the luggage like we had in other locations.
Salt Harvesting - The salt flats were the singularly most unremarkable part of the trip. Others who visited Mozia, stated that it was boring use of time including eating a picnic lunch with a swarm of mosquitoes. We were lucky because of the weather, we did not have to go there, and our guide arranged an amazing visit with our local guide to the Marsala archeological museum with ancient remains of ships, which we enjoyed a lot. In addition, we got to see Marsala and had a great lunch. There are so many more exciting and wonderful things to see in Sicily and it's unfortunate that we had a miss out on some things for this rather blasé experience. Another bonus for our group was our amazing guide Karin was able to use the lunch budget for an amazing street food banquet in Ortygia, which I recommend including in future trips.
Villa Romana del Casale. – The visit was truly remarkable. However, trying to use the Rick Steves book in the dark museum was almost impossible. I opted for the audio guide for €7.00 and it was amazing. For example, I found out where the word honeymoon comes from in one of the mosaics along with amazing explanations of everything. However, our guide knew nothing about the audio guides and didn't even really knew they existed. I highly recommend that you give people this option to really enhance the visit.
Mount Etna - I suggest flexibility on the visit timing. We went on the worst day of the trip and endured fog, high winds and snow. There could have been an option either for the day before or the day after to enhance the visit.
Siracusa - I was very surprised the Neapolis Archaeological Park was not included in the itinerary. The site is five minutes of the Rick Steves Sicily TV program. At my request our guide arranged for a local guide to meet several of us at the site and it was truly one of the highlights of the trip.
Catania – We should have had a guide. There was so many interesting things to see and using the book was very impractical. I think we missed out on quite a bit. In addition, this was the second worst hotel but adequate. Our rooms resembled a jail cell with bare cream-colored walls with a small window up high and horrible internet. Our room was next to the gym, which was noisy. When I brought this up to the receptionist I ignored.