Alsace Cycling Holiday

Lovely route and exceptional hotels

This was our fourth experience of a Flexitreks cycling holiday and it maintained the exceptional standard we've come to expect. Perfect for our ages and abilities, the routes were a delight to follow and at the end of each day the hotels were excellent. As always, there was plenty to see along the way; short detours to particular attractions were invariably worthwhile.

Excellent bikes (I think mine was brand new). Good hotels, lovely towns and villiages. The only issue was that we were expecting to be able to eat in the Mechelin starrred resturants in the hotels were we were staying. Unfortunately they were closed on the evenings we were there and it transpired, though understandble, we would have had to book in advance. It would have been helpful if we had been aware of this. We did have perfectly good meals, and as I say rhe resturants were closed anyway, but advanced notoce of this would have lowered our expectations and avoided some disappointment. However we will know better next time!

great scenery - really good food and wine - some lovely old towns one problem - we booked for twin beds but hotels all has this as double - easily switched apart from one place that was full so my friend and I had to top and tail in a double.

Really enjoyed the holiday - found the hotels well chosen and friendly. Beautiful locations and well organised

Very well organised and great personal service from the Operator

This region was beautiful and we enjoyed it very much. There were a few things that were a bit more difficult than we anticipated. Originally we were expecting somewhere between 3 - 5 hours of cycling a day so that would give us time to enjoy the area. In reality the cycling was closer to 6 - 8 hours a day, which was simply too much. What seemed to cause this was not the cycling itself so much but the lack of directions when we entered villages/towns and it was very difficult to get through the villages and find hotels. This always seemed to add on an hour or so of time at the beginning and end of each day. Also additional time navigating through and backtracking along the way. Also, sometimes the directions were lacking critical information or were simply wrong. Therefore, we learned by the 2nd day that we need to check our route by Google maps ourselves and map this out. The maps provided were not detailed enough in the villages. This could very simply be rectified with the information packet. I also think that perhaps some of the directions when translated to English were not checked. Additionally, there were some areas of the trip that were heavy highway traffic, which we were surprised about. I think this trip may have been a bit better starting from Colmar and going from there. The first 2 days were not overly scenic. All the accommodation was very nice, staff was always friendly and helpful. One other issue we encountered the first few days of the trip is that the restaurants at the hotels were fully booked and without a reservation we could not eat there. After a long day of cycling then having to find somewhere else to eat was sometimes not ideal. It would be handy to make folks aware of this in advance of the trip and recommend reservations to be booked in advance as part of the package.

There are a couple of mistakes in the route notes for example page 10 at 47.9 it says turn left towards Selestat and it is a right turn also could have pointed out tha 53.6 to 54.5 was not necessary to get to our hotel. Also often the instructions quoted a street name but the street name was no where to be found at the turn. So more Green Arrows would be helpful hotels were good except in Onernai it was aliterate far from the city centre when it is raining but nice hotel ...menues for half board were too limited in choices for the class of restaurant