The best!!! I can not recommend Bob and his team at Saga Travel highly enough. I have travelend 2 trips planned and booked by Saga Travel and both were perfect. The documents were well organized and accurate. The response time to emails timely and helpful. The excursions we were on were what we wanted so they had listened to our desires and found the best match. Great prices and ease of travel Have recommended their services to many friends and am planning on booking 3 trips with them within the next year - not all to Iceland but using Iceland air to get to Europe. read more

I recently was on a two week tour of Iceland as part of a family trip for 8 people. (I did not book the tour.) I am posting this because I was very disappointed in the trip planned by and the service provided by Robert (Bob) Felch of Iceland Saga Travel and I hope that this review may help others who are considering using his services in the future. The tour was a very expensive trip that included air fare and hotels as well as a tour guide and van almost the entire time we were in Iceland. If you are not already aware, everything in Iceland is expensive, but this trip was excessively so. It seemed as though Mr. Felch's self-proclaimed contacts with Icelandic airlines, hotels and travel services led to being charged top dollar for everything. I got the sense that there was something amiss with Mr. Felch when I first had contact with him. He had booked all the flights (at much higher costs than I could find the same tickets by booking them by myself online), so I asked him, via email, to make sure I got an aisle seat. He responded by writing me: "You should call the airlines". Hmmm, I thought, why would someone pay a travel agent who tells you to do his job for him? Then we arrived in Iceland and met Óli Schram, our guide, who Mr. Felch described as: "one of the top guides in Iceland and our favorite". While Mr. Schram could be engaging, he had some very significant flaws as a guide and as a person. For instance, he repeatedly used his cell phone to talk and text while driving which is both illegal in Iceland and extremely dangerous. I asked him to stop doing it and he made a joke of my request and then ignored me. He also refused to ever lock the van where all our possessions (including some valuable electronics) were despite my requests that he lock it. He told me there was no crime in Iceland. I explained that I understood that, but would still be more comfortable if he locked the van. But he wouldn't. I don't really know why other than the fact that he was ornery. He also spent much of his time making disparaging comments about the annoying American tourists he regularly had to drive around his country - though he made sure to tell our group that we were much better than the average American. Even more troubling, the trip that Mr. Felch planned for our group called for us traveling (mostly in a van) for 6-12 hours per day. One day we literally spent 12 hours traveling. Each and every day we would wake up early to get in a van and drive. That is not my idea of a vacation. The only place Mr. Felch planned a day without driving was the ugliest city in Iceland (Isafjordour) which has nothing to do. It's in the Western Fjords of Iceland that took us 12 hours to drive to, including a 3 hour ferry ride. (By the way if you are planning a trip to Iceland, skip the Western Fjords or just fly in. There are other parts of the country that are much nicer.) I can't imagine planning a trip for people that involved an average of 8 hours in a van each and every day. It seemed as though Mr. Felch, in planning the itinerary had no idea how long it took to get from one place to another in Iceland. He also seemed to have no idea what was really worth seeing and what was a waste of time. He put numerous tourist spots on the itinerary that were well worth missing. Nor did he seem to have any idea which hotels were really nice and which were just average or not really worth staying in. As a coda to his poor work, on the flight back to the US he booked the 2 hosts of this expensive trip the 2 worst seats on the airplane (in the last row next to the toilets where the seats don't recline). Iceland is a beautiful country. There are a lot of fun things to see and do. The best things, in my opinion, are the hiking in beautiful locations and soaking in their natural hot springs. If you do book a trip to Iceland you may be far better off booking it yourself online and making your own judgments of what to do based on reading some good guide books. But if you do want to use a travel agent, I would strongly recommend finding someone besides Mr. Felch and Iceland Saga Travel. read more

I feel compelled to defend Bob Felch and SAGA Travel. A couple of years ago, my husband and I asked Bob Felch to arrange hotels, a rental car and an itinerary for one week in Iceland. He obviously knows Iceland well and he did a great job for us. I'm not sure what went wrong with CJH's trip but we had just the opposite experience. We did not book a guide because we wanted to have time to hike and explore Iceland on our own. it is very easy to travel Iceland on your own if you have an itinerary. Perhaps CJH should have done the same. Iceland is very expensive and that is just part of the deal. Having contacts in Iceland does not mean that you pay less? If someone arranges your trip, you obviously pay more and private guides are expensive in most parts of the world. It is unfair to criticize someone if you do not present details. What flights did CJH find for less money? Was it the same flight at the same times and on the same dates? We paid more for a flight at more desireable times. One needs to compare apples to apples. I cannot comment on the guide as we did not have one. As for tourist spots, Iceland has few (maybe 3) so I don't know how Bob could have planned numerous tourist spot stops for CJH and his family .....the Blue Lagoon is a tourist spot and I can see how one might want to skip it. There are two others that I can think of that are highlights of Iceland so why would you want to skip them? You have to realize that the population of Iceland is around 300,000 and 98% of the people live in Reykjavik. There are very few people in the rest of the country so how can there be a lot of tourist spots? Also, the hotels/inns in Iceland (perhaps other than in Reykjavik) are modest. That is also part of the deal. Lastly, if one circles Ring Road in one week, there would be a lot of driving. I don't know how much time CJH spent in Reykjavik versus traveling Ring Road. We traveled half of Iceland...we did not go North or West. Bob discouraged us from driving Ring Road around all of Iceland in the time we had....he told us it would require 2 weeks unless we wanted to be in the car the entire trip which he thought would not be a good idea. Perhaps, CJH did not make his expectations of hiking and soaking in natural springs clear to Bob? So CJH's Bob Felch sounds very different from our Bob Felch....sounds like an unfair review to me even if CJH did have some legitimate complaints. My husband and I would highly recommend Bob Felch and Saga Travel. Cindy & Marshall Rankowitz read more