Kimkim Trip Reviews

We went for the 7 day self guided tour de Mont Blanc thru kimkim and had an amazing experience. Julien was fantastic communicating frequently and arranging everything to perfection. Highly recommend kimkim and Julien.

Trip was nice. Hotels were fantastic for the short notice we had booking this trip. Dimitris did a good job here. We specifically asked for booking of all transport in Greece. To and from ports and airports. Dimitris had this lined up for us in the beginning of the trip, but not toward the end. Attention to detail when booking trips is important. If a client asks for all transport within Greece to be arranged, please communicate clearly as to whether or not this is done. There was some confusion in regards to this.

We just had a great trip to Colombia. We were there for 13 days. It was our first time with Kimkim. Usually we planned our trip completety on our own but this time, we tried Kimkim because we decided to go on a trip not a long time before leaving and we were very busy to do all the research we usually do. The planning of the trip went really well. Andrea listen to our interests and respected our limited budget. She answered quickly to all our questions and suggested some great improvements. The trip went really well except for some minor thing. First, one of the driver didn't show up at the right time in Medellin (and we think he might have been to the wrong airport too because there is 2 airport in Medellin). We were not able to reach someone at Kimkim for several hours but once we did, they were able to help us really fast and solve all the problems. They refund us back for the expenses we had to make because of this problem. We had a city tour already booked for the morning but we were still able to do it anyway in the afternoon. Also, at the end of our trip, we found out that there was a day missing in the planning. We were taking the plane back on the 19th August at night but the planning said we were leaving on the 18th despite having said the right date at the beginning! But Andrea solved the problem really fast: she booked us another night for free in Bogota. All in all, we liked the trip and we were really glad to have all the transportation included in the package, we always had great hotel in central neighborhoods. We think that a few improvements could prevent future problems: provided all vouchers (hotel and activities), give exact address of the hotel in the plan, write what compagny is in charge of the transport with a phone number. Also, maybe give more than one contact we can reach in case of a problem. We understand that one person can not be accessible 24/7, it is normal, so accordingly, it would be great to have more than one contact in case of a problem needed to be solved quickly. Also, we had a limited budget and had asked for cheap hotels or hostals. In the end, we had really great upscale hotel like the Hilton. It was great, but we had asked for cheap hotels. Maybe our budget finally was enought for good hotel but if it was the case, we would have like better the make the decision for ourselves if we would have prefer to have the overall cost lower than our budget or if we wanted nicer hotels instead. I'm being critical but I would still recommand Kimkim to my friend and family. They were many waiting for my experience before booking with Kimkim and I will encourage them to do so mostly if they want to spare time while planning a trip or if they want to do a more elaborate trip with a lot of logistic with transportation.
Thank you for this great experience in Colombia.

Our trip was planned perfectly. We were very pleased with everything. The process was easy, the local tour guides were all very wonderful!!! We had Alexandra with us the majority of our 6 days in Peru and Franco was our guide up Machu Picchu. Alexandra is the best and when we come back we would request her to be our personal guide if she's available. Although I really really liked Franco it felt like he was a little overwhelmed as he had multiple tours during the time we were there. Still a great time and both took awesome pictures for us and of us. We really appreciate them capturing these moments. The hotels that we stayed in were excellent and in the perfect locations. We stayed at Aranwa for our first and third night in Cusco, Casa del Sol Machu Picchu Boutique in Ollantaytambo for Machu Picchu and Antiqua Casona San Blas in Cusco. It was one or two of the hotels I suggested and had changed after receiving Clara's suggestions and after I agreed to the itinerary because I researched where we wanted to stay and the type of hotels we wanted to stay in. Do not agree to any itinerary prior to researching your hotels. We were charged for each change, a service fee which I feel is a little much, so I warn you prior to agreeing to any itinerary do your own research first on hotels and rooms to ensure you are comfortable where they are suggesting you stay. I didn't and we were charged additional fees. Just a warning because their suggestions might not be what you really want and you won't know until you research.

Our tour was laid out so perfect we didn't experience much jet lag at all. Peru is our most favorite place to visit and we are very excited to return. This was our first time in this beautiful country and it's already top of our list. Going through KimKim was a little scary I must say as it was our first time using an on-line travel platform but it was the perfect platform to use for me as I was able to send my questions and receive responses that I could easily find again. I would definitely use KimKim again.

The only problem I had which was not KimKim at all is that our local travel agent Clara left the agency (That's why I gave her 3 stars) and we weren't told. I would send messages upon messages and I was getting a little scared that I had lost money because I got nothing in return. I contacted KimKim, they got in touch with the local agency and we were assigned to Liz who was great at responding but the local agency should have done a better job communicating that Clara had left. Other than that, I think if we had Liz from the very beginning or if we had known that Clara was leaving and a proper and speedy transfer was done it would have been a 5 star review for the local specialist.

I am really satisfied at Andean Travel who was the local agency. They are professional and offered the best layout for our first tour of Peru. They met us on time at the time we agreed on each day. The drivers were all courteous and the tours awesome.

Brahim was really great to work with. He made planning this trip really easy.

The guide to the eastern Peloponnese was exceptionally engaging
The Atlantis Hotel on Santorini was one of the best stays of my life
The pool side bartender at the Porto Naxos hotel was also very engaging

Our guide Kristjan was knowledgeable, efficient, and tremendously flexible. All necessary attributes in dealing with our family!

Sharon was excellent - very prompt, responsive, knowledgeable, proactive and was extremely valuable in setting-up our trip plan, how we can make the most value of our limited time and resources without compromising the experience. Equally, Amnay, our tour guide and driver was excellent, particularly at keeping us safe and secure; providing us with excellent restaurant recommendation, enriching our gastronomic experience and accompanying us any time of day and night. The other local guides, specially Mohammed of Fes, were pleasant, knowledgeable and flexible in accommodating and answering our questions. Thanks super Sharon and Amnay for this memorable experience for our family.

We had a wonderful trip to Jordan Israel and Palestine. The guide and drivers were very informative and always punctual and took very good care of us. They checked us in at each hotel and tourist site and organized e.g. donkey ride through Petra for our youngest. The children especially developed a good relationship with Mahmood who entertained them as well.
The hotels were all excellent except the last hotel in Tel Aviv (Grand Beach). My request was 5 star only and this hotel was not 5 star and the service and rooms were not great. Also location wise it was far from Carmel Market and Jaffa.
The guides all adjusted the schedules as appropriate and rebooked experiences for us when needed so we would not miss out on anything and get the best and fullest trip. E.g snorkeling, Jerusalem tour. All in all the trip went exactly as planned and by using kimkim all the stress and organisation hassle on site was taken out and we could just enjoy the trip which was fantastic. Jerusalem, Palestine and jordan were amazing historically and with respect to nature.

We had an amazing time in Bali. We planned the trip with Ayu from KimKim and later communicated with Thomas who seamlessly continued where Ayu left off. Our driver Agun was most helpful throughout the trip, friendly and always showing us the best. And if we had any questions during the trip Thomas was available on Whatsapp, which made the experience easier as it was our first time in Indonesia. We can't wait to go back to Bali again!

Kunchok was great, he helped us get everything we need and ensure we were safe :)
Would recommend anyone that want a safe and fun trip to find him

Bergen is a beautiful place to be and walk
We had a guide John great person
Who took us through the little streets
We were very lucky we had great weather
Than we took the ferry to balestrand
Just so beautiful and looks like a postcard!
Time to relax ,walk and bike
After two days We took the ferry to Flåm stayed few hours(rainy) but still beautiful
And from Flåm we took the train to Myrdal (must do) and back to rainy Bergen
But still beautiful
Must do climb the 722stairs and walk till the funicular we enjoyed the view ,the place
Was fun
Thank you Ingrid

From the beginning to the end, the experience was a thumbs-up! I contacted Carmen for organising a trip in Jordan for my wife and I and was initially hesitant because this was a new platform and everything seemed almost too easy. But, I went with it since Carmen was very professional and reactive throughout the planning phase. The mobile app with all the trip information and contact details useful for us was a nice touch. Margherita, who works with Carmen also managed to help us during the trip to change a few reservations on the fly and this also worked out flawlessly. It was a really pleasant surprise to have absolutely no unpleasant surprises for 2 whole weeks in a completely new country!

Haitham was our driver who accompanied us through the entire trip and he was much more than a driver! He was a local who seemed to know the country inside out along with all the interesting hidden gems that only a local would know. It was a pleasure having him with us throughout the trip and we hope to keep in touch.

The sign of a good holiday for us has always been leaving with a smile and having made a few new friends along the way and our trip to Jordan was exactly that.

So, all things considered, the money was well spent and I would definitely consider using Kimkim in future for our next vacation. I especially recommend this to first time visits to any country where one lacks any context of local knowledge. It helps being put in touch with trustworthy locals who seem to genuinely care about your experience.

So, thank you Carmen, Margherita and Haitham! :-)

It was a phenomenal trip—thank you, Dmitris for all of your planning, and Andreas absolutely made our trip! We got so insanely lucky with you guys. ❤️

We very much enjoyed our trip. The planning process as well as getting around from place to place were all very easy, thanks to the arrangements that were made for us. I love that we were taken to all the places we wanted to go, including high quality restaurants, without having to do the planning ourselves. However, I don't think we were quite prepared for the amount of driving that the trip entailed, which definitely wore us out. It would have been nice if the team were a little more upfront about how many hours of driving the trip would involve. Also, we were given the luxury tent in the desert, which was separated from all the other travelers. I wish we would have been given the option of the standard tent instead of the luxury tent. The running water in the tent didn't actually work and we didn't use the outlets since we were there for such a short time. I would have preferred to sleep in the standard tent and save the money, had I been given the option. A tour guide at the kasbah also would have been nice, since we didn't really know much about what we were looking at. I do feel we could have done this trip for less money, although all the arrangements were very nice. It would have been overwhelming without the support of kimkim. Overall, we had a great time on our trip and enjoyed the country very much.

We planned a trip to Colombia and got advice from Laura. We have seen wonderful places in Colombia and had excellent hotels. Also the city guides we booked seemed the best in town with a lot of knowledge and fun in doing their job. We had a short trip of 2 weeks, and it was worth in experience 4 weeks plus!

My trip last week included retracing family history on the maternal side of both my mother’s and father’s side of the family, celebrating 500 years of the founding of the oldest city in the Pacific, being singularly called out to belly dance in a Lebanese restaurant (and convincingly holding my own) in the middle of Panamá City, thence to receiving the warmest, kindest, globalist, most beautifulest birthday greetings from around the world on my seminal 25th-again-for-the-62nd-time-birthday for which I’m so grateful to be celebrating... what a week, I honestly don’t know where to begin...

So I’ll begin at the beginning. Panamá.

Everything about Panamá is fascinating. It’s so easy to overlook how fascinating it is, but the fates would have it that I would be in Panamá both for my birthday and for the 500th años celebration of the founding of Old Panamá City – there is nothing to overlook about these fascinations! Exploring Latin America is like going into your neighbour’s house for the first time. Your neighbour has always been there but for some reason or another you’ve never entered into their home… and then, for some reason or another you get an opportunity to enter, and for the first time you find yourself crossing over the threshold into an alternate universe and it hits you how remarkable it is to live next door to someone, greeting or commiserating on their news regularly but having no clue about what the inside of their home looks like! I think we have all been there. Latin America is that unseen habitat that you see every day … but until you’ve crossed the threshold, you’ve never seen quite in this way!

My Panamá trip took the form of a well-planned experience with kimkim, crafted to understand the stories of the 80,000+ AfroAntillians (West Indians) who travelled to Panamá before WW1 to seek better since sugar plantations gave them no hope of overcoming impoverishment and the Americans promised work to West Indians with the building the Panamá Canal - the largest engineering undertaking at that time. I visited the museums where their stories are carefully curated, walked along the coasts where their bones are buried, prayed at the churches that gathered their sorrows, celebrated their offspring who stand on their proud shoulders and tell their stories, retraced their steps from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Coast, connected with descendants who have not silenced their songs, learnt to cook their food on their stoves and in their kitchens and soaked up as much as I could about a brave and resilient people who sacrificed life and limb to move mountains and join oceans under the most trying of circumstances at the isthmus of a newly created country called Panamá.

The population of Panamá is only 4 million, much smaller than neighbouring Colombia or Costa Rica. Two million of these inhabitants live in the busy metropolis, Panamá City. A 360 turn brings you views of the Pacific Ocean, the National metropolitan park, colonial buildings in the Casco Viejo district or any one of the 78 international banks jostling for space on the skyline. There is a high standard of living here, despite a very rainy climate, Panamanians enjoy a relaxed lifestyle with a 80% Catholic religion but a freedom to practice various faiths evidenced by the presence of churches, mosques, temples and synagogues. The mixed population smiles easily maybe due to the benefits of their location … at the crossing of the world. With well established ports, plane and sea routes, Panamá is easy to get to and well worth a visit.

On the maternal side, my mothers’ mother’s father, (my great grandfather), shopkeeper, Ren Arthur Brathwaite never returned to Barbados after leaving to seek work in Panamá. Fearing the worst, Adele, on not hearing any news of her husband’s promised return, migrated south with her five children to seek work as a Panamá widow in Trinidad. My grandmother, Angene, at eight years old, was the youngest child of this union. On my father’s side, my grandmothers’ father, George Merritt went to Panamá on a five year work contract, from 1916 to 1920, but was never heard from again. This was my father’s maternal grandfather. It is suspected that George remained in Panamá and started a new branch of the family tree there. The memoirs of both of my great-grandparents are buried with them in Panamá. No one would know if they perished under the harsh, unsafe and unfair labour practices of the time, or if they survived and started new lives and families in Panamá. I do know however that in every geography lesson in secondary school whenever we spoke of the Panamá Canal, I felt that the stories that were being told, were stories that directly linked to me.

Our week in Panamá started with a half day city tour of Panamá La Vieja and Casco Antiguo by Yesenia of Tucaya, one of the warmest and most engaging tour guides that I have ever met on my travels. So knowledgeable, she could not hide her ancestry, love or passion for her Panamá. She brought life to the history of these original spaces.

Even before the Canal, Panamá was a meeting point in the world. The first stop on our second day provided historical context to Panamá’s connections. Portobelo, on the Pacific Coast, was the centre of export from South America to Europe in the 1700s. The mostly leaf canopied two-hour drive with sweetheart Julio (dubbed el Presidente on this trip) brought us to this historic town that is centered around a trifector of ironies. The customs house, for the counting of the precious metals that were stolen from the El Dorados of Peru and Colombia to be shipped to Spain, the two forts that manned the Pacific coast and the ubiquitous Catholic church with a life-sized replica of a Black Jesus which is ornately paraded through the streets of Portobelo every October 21 to the deeply spiritual beats of African drums. At Casa Congo, the miscegenated children of African descendants from the Fundacion Bahia de Portobelo, showed us remnants of a rich culture in song and dance. We did not stay long on the Pacific side and returned to Casco Antiguo the following day to celebrate its 500-year founding, visiting churches and viewing new Panamanians in their ornate Montuno and Pollera attire, clear Spanish derivatives. Before the week ended, we were off to Parque Santa Ana to review food traditions with a cooking demonstration in El Chorrillo, a slum in Panamá, still reeling from an American invasion of 1989. Here, we also visited a popular milliner Mario, who carries on the tradition of the making Panamá hats, erroneously named, since the hats are actually Ecuadorian! We ended the day with a visit to the AfroAntillean Museum of Panamá.

Finally, on the weekend, we made it to the Panamá Canal. We had a tour and partial transit through the Panamá Canal with the boat guide making no mention of the workers who made the marvel possible, but that oversight was corrected at a gala dinner later that day recognizing the contributions of persons who came from all over the world to construct the Panamá Canal. Full circle. Special recognition was made to several persons who contributed to the building of Panamanian culture including Irving Saladino, the only Olympic gold medalist of Panamá. Thanks to mom for accompanying me on this weeklong expedition.

I must make mention of the eeriest part of the week for me and it was not crossing through the Panamá Canal where I envisioned the many West Indian workers at the Culebra Cut as they plowed through mountains by hand to join oceans, but it was walking around the intimate AfroAntillian museum and seeing artefacts of my youth. Symbols that make me West Indian, like the posey, the pressing comb and the coal pot and realizing that the symbols of my grandmother’s house bind me as much to my history as the stories of those who went before me, who took these implements with them on their journey and how they have become our artefacts, compassionately curated in a museum. If I’m being honest, this was my first experience of seeing myself in a museum. I saw people who looked like me with a history that I recognized with experiences that I could relate to. I needed to see this. I didn’t know it before, but I needed these groundings. It was my first realization that as a member of a diaspora, there are things that hold true to who I am, recognizable truths that when you leave home, you never leave your things behind. In some small way, you travel with them and they travel with you.

Panamá turn out to be the morale boost that I did not know that I needed but one that my spirit was greedily craving. I felt this because I cried when I left Panamá, tears of relief and joy. Somewhere along the way, along my way, I had lost my way and this, my first trip to Panamá, was a reminder of what resilience looks like… that no matter what the dream is or where it takes us, or how far away we are, we have things to fall back upon to remind us of who we are, why we do what we do and why we must never ever miss an opportunity to celebrate who we are. We never know what mountains we have to move today to make the world a better place for our future selves tomorrow.

I wanted to thank Preeti for being such a patient and helpful travel specialist. She always answered my questions in a timely matter and was very flexible. She really tried her best to accommodate us and I appreciate that. It was a pleasure working with her, she was fantastic.

We had and AWESOME trip. Everything was planned so well and we were able to see and do all the things we wanted to do. All the guides were super friendly and helpful. I would recommend this trip to anyone thinking of going to Iceland. They will help you plan a fantastic trip.

Great experience with excellent organisation. Ang Gelu was a perfect guide. Mny thanks for everything, all discussions and hospitality. Hope to see you next year

We had a very great experience in Norway thanks to Ingrid's advices! We planned our trip taking inspiration from "Nordic Road Trip for Nature Lovers - 14 Days", we've been put in contact with Ingrid, who did a great job by adapting the tour to our requests. We've had 16 fantastic days hiking and exploring the most scenic views in southern Norway!
We highly recommend this service, as we're totally satisfied with it.