We invite you to travel in three of the world’s most intriguing and fascinating countries. Our Turkey Tours, our Istanbul Tours, our Guatemala Tours and our Jordan Tours will offer you special travel experiences, and you will return home feeling you have gained a unique appreciation for Turkish. Jordanian and Guatemalan culture. Most importantly we can offer you a truly wonderful time as you explore these countries.

Our tours to Turkey, Jordan and Guatemala are limited in size, so your group will never overpower the Turkish Bazaar, the Jordanian Desert or the Guatemalan village you are in. In fact,it is because our groups are so small, that we can offer so many totally unique travel experiences in these countries.

Please explore our web site, it will give you an overview of who we are, and the special places in your travels to Turkey, Jordan, and your Guatemala travels that we can offer you.

We are tour designers; we are not travel agents or tour operators. In fact, we work with both. In North America, we design tours exclusively for Clarke-Way Travel Ltd in Toronto. Clarke-Way Travel, a member of the Carlson Wagon Lit group, is a full service agency, offering travelers a complete range of services, from air tickets to health and cancellation insurance. To find out more about Clarke-Way Travel, please visit their web-site at: www.clarkewaytravel.com.

In Turkey, Jordan and Guatemala, we work with many certified operators, and we choose them depending on client need. For example, we will use different operators for a custom deluxe private tour of Istanbul, for our Ancient Kingdoms tour of Eastern Turkey, or for a small group exploration of Gallipoli. For all custom and private tours of Turkey and private tours of Guatemala and Jordan, our decisions will be determined by your interests and your budgets, not on the package preferences of our operators. All our tour operators in Turkey, Jordan and Guatemala are fully certified professionals who take great pride in their service and, as we, are very proud of their reputation in the world of travel. The difference is that, on our tours of Turkey, Jordan and Guatemala, they work for us!

We also specialize in offering custom tours to all our destinations for other groups and organizations. For example, we have designed a three-week tour to Western Turkey for The Travel Society--a private club of people who are interested in travelling all over the world. You can visit their web-site at www.thetravelsociety.com. We also design tours to the Biblical sites in Turkey and Jordan as well as Holy Week (Semana Santa) in La Antigua, Guatemala for church congregations, tours of Gallipoli for historical societies, or explorations of the glories of classic Maya civilization for anthropologists.

Aldpar can also offer you an exclusive private tour of Turkey, a private tour of Istanbul, and a private tour of Guatemala, or a tour of the Holy Land including Isreal from our base in Jordan and we are very proud of our enthusiastic references. Please explore this site for more information.

Custom tours of Turkey, luxury tours of Istanbul, Tikal tours in Guatemala, custom tours in Jordan, as well as our superb East Turkey Tour including the Black Sea, Ani, Mount Nemrut Dag, Mount Ararat, Lake Van and Antioch, are all available to you. We are a click or a toll free call away.

If you have come to our web-site, you are obviously interested in touring Turkey, Jordan or Guatemala. Also, you either have visited, or are going to explore the web-sites of other operators. Before you explore any further, we urge you to bring the following questions to every site you visit, and then compare the answers you get to those we are providing, We are confident that your doing so, will make your decision about choosing a tour to Turkey, to Jordan, or a tour to Guatemala much easier to make, and will help you to determine whether you are a traveller or a tourist.

1     How many people will be in the group?
2     What kind and what size of bus will be used?

All Aldpar tours are small. The largest group we have is 18 people on our Western Turkey tour. This group travels in a luxury air-conditioned 40 seat coach so everyone will have his or her own seat. Ancient Kingdoms, our comprehensive tour of Eastern Turkey, is limited to 10 people who will travel on an air conditioned Mercedes Sprinter with a capacity of 25 people, again insuring that everyone has his or her own seat. On our Guatemala tours and Jordan tours, groups will never exceed 12 people and they will tour in air conditioned Mitsubishi Coasters or equivalent vans (2 if necessary) depending on the area, and the size of the group.

3     How long will your days be?

This is a very important question as, many times groups find themselves travelling from 7:00 AM until 6:30--7:00 PM. These long days are guaranteed to turn your trip into a mind numbing travel marathon to say nothing of the waits at check in or check out times. This phenomenon is especially true for tour groups in Turkey many of whom, for example, in their tours of Western Turkey, try to accomplish in ten days, what we do in twenty-one or twenty-eight days.

4     How much free time will you actually have to explore towns and villages in Turkey, Jordan or Guatemala on your own?

This question is a follow up to question three. Clearly, if you are on the bus for 10-14 hours a day, you are going to have very little time to go off and experience a tea garden in Turkey or a Mayan cooperative in Guatemala or a market in Jordan on your own. In fact, you will spend the balance of your days in hotels which cater especially for tourists such as you. You will shop in them, eat in them and sleep in them and in fact, on many tours to Turkey, these hotels become the only part of a country like Turkey people actually experience away from their group. It is also important to note that these tourist hotels are usually located out of towns or villages, so, even if you wanted to go exploring on your own, there is nowhere to go. By contrast, we always choose hotels which are in the center of towns and cities so everybody can get out on their own and encounter the country in their own way. These hotels are usually small and family owned, and they offer you the experience of actually being in a different country.

5     How many controlled shopping stops will you have?
6     Who has created this tour? Operators with a vested interest in the hotels you will use, and the shopping outlets you will visit, or independent tour designers who are interested in showing you the country?

These questions also follow naturally from question four, and are important if you are considering a tour to Turkey--especially Western Turkey--which has a highly developed and very sophisticated tourist infrastructure. Many large tour operators also have a direct financial interest in, or a very favourable rate of commission with, those large tourist hotels catering exclusively to bus tours, like the one you might be on. You should also know that there is a fairly direct relationship between the price you pay for a tour and the number of shopping stops you will have, as commissions for sales help to offset the cost of the tour. While this kind of vertical integration is not so common in Guatemala or Jordan, we do know that tour operators there use a very small number of hotels--all of which are larger and tend to be indistinguishable from North American hotels.

7     How many days is your tour and how many kilometers will you travel each day?

This is a very important question to ask as many tourists, and the tour operators who cater for them, opt for quantity over quality. If your preference is to see as much as possible over as short a time as possible, for as little money as possible-in other words, if you are a tourist-- we invite you to join one of the groups we have defined for you. We also wish to assure you that our tours do not respond to these demands, as we think the quality of your experience in Turkey or Jordan or Guatemala is far more important than how many sites you have seen, how many miles you have covered, and how many cities you have seen. In other words, if you are a traveller, you will find our tour appealing.

8     How many two night stays are there on your tour?

The answer to this question will give a good sense of the timing of your tour, as two night stays indicate that you should have some free time, and some time off the bus. On our tours, two night stays are the norm, not the exception and, many times, we have scheduled three or four night stops.

9     How many small unique restaurants will you eat in?

Again, this question is especially relevant for Western Turkey, as many groups find themselves confined to large tourist lunch stops at restaurants on the road and hotel buffets at night. In all cases in Turkey, the food is delicious, but in all cases, you not eating with Turks, you are eating with other tourists. Turkey, Jordan and Guatemala, are full of delightful small restaurants which can offer you a special experience in the country. These places are no good for large groups as they will overpower them, but, we have worked hard to find you special dining experiences in uniquely Turkish, Jordanian or Guatemalan Restaurants--places you can visit because your group is so small.

10     Does your tour have a host, as well as a guide?

This question will give you an indication as to the level of commitment your operator has for customer service. In Turkey and Jordan, guides are rigorously trained and very knowledgeable; in Guatemala, guides only tend to be present at the sites, and the driver will act as a kind of host. In both cases, however, the absence of a tour host dimishes the ability to foresee a problem with, for example, illness, or a special dietary need--thus dimishing the value of your tour. One or both of us host every tour we take to Turkey and Guatemala, and we work hard to ensure that everybody is having a wonderful time and to resolve any issues of difficulty that might arise.