Recommendation: Tour provider for India

[MelonsOnSaleAgain]

My friend and I want to visit India early next year. We will look at the usual your providers like Kuoni, Trailfinders etc but I wondered if anyone has any recommendation for a smaller provider who have an excellent reputation.

Need to be Tour only with a meet at the airport as I am in the UK and my pal is in Australia so India is sort of in the middle!

We went with Cox and Kings the last time we went. You can get a quote without flights. We used companion flights so it’s perfectly possible. This was a tour of Southern India and did involve a lot of travel by coach. Hotel quality was perfectly acceptable apart from first night in Bangalore. Their hotel was not great (I always check out hotels tour operators suggest) and our fellow travellers were disappointed. We had changed the booking to somewhere we wanted, which was fabulous! So glad we did this! Although we had a coach on this tour, the group size was 8. It was well organised and memorable though.

Choice of hotels in India is very important. The major cities do have wonderful hotels and some a converted heritage properties. Check each hotel by looking at reviews and don’t go cheap!

I also know Audley Travel will do a holiday minus the flight and will organise a bespoke tour for you. I would actually do this. They generally use good hotels. Steppes are also reliable and Martin Randall do specific interest tours.

These days I always look at the travel section in the Telegraph for hotel and general travel info. I found an article on India dated 2017 and it’s still very relevant.

Cox and kings

Fantastic. Thanks both of you.

Over 10 years ago now, but we went with Transindus for Golden Triangle + Varanasi. They were v good, some lovely heritage hotels.

Voyages Jules Verne

Gadventures have a good reputation

Thanks for all these. I’ll sit and have a mooch online tonight!