| ABOUT US |
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| Value for money | the price covers nearly everything, including wine with meals and restaurant tips. Other tips will be calculated, collected prior to departure, and will be distributed in your behalf to the providers, freeing you of these calculations and hassle during your holiday. |
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Meals | we are giving ever greater priority to, and spending an increasing amount of time on, selecting restaurants and menus in order to continue to provide a high quality culinary experience. We ask restaurateurs to prepare food of the region rather than attempts at international dishes. While most lunches are usually included in the price, on nearly all our tours at least one evening is left free. Most clients welcome the opportunity for independence. Others would rather not search for a dinner, in which case our tour leaders will be happy to suggest suitable restaurants and to make a booking for you. Drinks are included (except in Russia) - With every meal, something to drink appropriate to the country is provided. In the vast majority of countries there is wine and always there is water and soft drinks. Coffee or tea is also included. |
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Care for our clients | we aim for faultless administration from your first encounter with us to the end of the tour, with personal service as a hallmark. And if anything does go wrong, we will put it right or compensate appropriately. We want you to come back again and again — as most of our clients do. |
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| Financial security | in the unlikely event of the company failing, Our clients’ money would be fully protected by bonds deposited with third parties and supervised by the Civil Aviation Authority and the AITO Trust. |
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Special access | the emphasis of the sightseeing on most of our tousr is on places which are difficult of access or are rarely open to the public –on treasures which lie beyond normally impenetrable portals. Our privileged access takes the form of visits to sites outside their normal opening hours. |
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  rte Travel specializes in cultural and music tours, organizing unashamedly highbrow cultural programs to Europe, as well as the occasional cruise, Africa, China, or Middle East adventure. We aim to provide the best planned, best led and altogether the most enjoyable Musical and Cultural Tours available. Quality, not quantity is of prime importance for us. As a result we don’t offer a wide range of programs, but rather a limited number of quality tours —we like to call them seminars—These are some of the features which distinguish our programs:
First rate lecturers | all our tours are accompanied by expert lecturers – art historians, archaeologists, musicologists, historians – selected for their scholarship, communication skills and companionability. They are the key ingredient of our tours, and we select them with great care. Though their scholarship is unimpeachable, their ability to put their learning across is equally important. Their brief is to enlighten and stimulate, not merely to inform. We use the term ‘lecturer’ because it emphasizes their primary role. They are also leaders in that they have charge of the tour. They are not guides —though some of what they do might constitute guiding— because being professional academics, writers and curators, the nature of the information they supply is significantly different from that which is usually provided by conventional tour guides. The lecturers are accompanied by a manager—one of our select team of professionals or a member of our office staff
Meticulous planning | the planning of every tour involves thorough research and meticulous attention to detail.
The work of planning a program does not cease once it is published in the brochure. We are continually making slight adjustments to take into account changing circumstances, especially if traveling to Italy.
Small groups | the average number of participants on a tour is around 20. The maximum on most is 25, but some have a lower limit.
Travelling in comfort | the hotels we use are usually rated as 4-star, with most of the rest being 5-star. We select our hotels with great care. Nearly all the hotels we use have been visited —and often stayed in— by a member of our staff. We look for certain standards of comfort, but also set a high priority on charm, style, and a welcoming atmosphere. A most important consideration is location, with a strong preference for the historic centre of a city. Quietness, too, is a major consideration. We have many criteria; few hotels can satisfy them all. Were we to confine our tours to parts of the world where a high level of modern comfort can be guaranteed 100%, we would have to reduce drastically the range of tours we offer, confining our coverage of the world’s cultural heritage to places which are near to the most developed resorts and business centers. We pursue the alternative course.
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