The Natural Adventure Reviews 

We booked the Lycian Way Trekking Challenge with The Natural Adventure Company. All the logistics - transfers, hotels - were very well organised. The hiking itself certainly was a challenge- over 20km with ~700m elevation and descent a day, but the spectacular views kept us going. The route descriptions were incredibly detailed but the downloadable online maps were the most helpful. The only walk we didn’t enjoy was the second part of day 1, but I understand this was a last minute change due to new fences on the original route.

Superbly organised great walking notes and maps and fantastic local family run pensions with helpful and considerate owners and staff. Superb experience. Would highly recommend.

We had a wonderful week walking the Dalmation coast and visiting Dubrovnik. Part of what was great was the wonderful weather and absence of crowds, but the organisation of the holiday was very good too and we met some lovely local people and stayed in a good variety of different types of accommodation.

Only a full reccomendation for the organisation of walking tour " Classic Provencal Walks: Alpilles and Luberon". For the next walking tour for sure we will probably choose the same company due their high standard and proffesional perssonel in organisation.

Just returned from a great walking holiday in Crete. I would definitely recommend The Natural Adventure Company, and will book with them again. I received great customer service from Maria my contact at Natural Adventure. She was able to answer my questions with excellent knowledge and confidence.
The materials provided for the walk were really comprehensive and navigating the walks was trouble free.
All the local transport was on time, and all hotels were excellent, with great accommodation and food.

Really Good

The walk
The villages
The history
The culture, esp. the friendliness of the locals.
The accommodation, excellent choices and good quality

Could be better

Transport from Tripoli, need to make clear in notes that pre booking a taxi is the ONLY option, you can’t get a taxi from the bus station (I had to take a local bus to a closer village, then a cab).

Evening Meals

Notes need to be clear that there are no evening meals available at Elati, the cafe is closed, my Farmstay host put something together for me as a favour. Your local operator should check this beforehand. Similarly in Nymfasia it’s a long way into town for a meal and the hotel will do a meal for me. Better to get hosts to do an evening meal in these places and include it in the

Route Marking

Very inconsistent and wrong in places, necessitating some retracking, outside your control (but it means the maps and route notes you provide are even more important.

Whole info package, disjointed bits of information in different places, with no clear separation of what you need when you are actually walking, and background information. The worst I have seen and I’ve used a number of companies. I appreciate you are a reseller of a local product but. . .

The A4 maps of a whole days walk on one page are useless. I went on openstreetmap.org before I left and made up 4-7 maps per day at a useable scale and used these together with the route notes. The app is fine in theory but chews a lot of data/battery and 2 out of the 3 times I tried it there was no mobile phone signal.

It would not be a lot of work for your team to do the same and provide your customers with a nice guide book containing maps at a useable scale with helpful annotations, linked to the route notes.

The route notes maybe prepared by your local partner but are so cryptic to not be that helpful in some cases and in others are simply inaccurate.

Many of your walkers would not be that experienced and would take comfort from a clear guide book.

The maps showing the locations of the accommodations are hopeless, again a couple of hours work would provide a helpful map, particularly as the accommodations are not that well signed. E.g for Elati The map is of little value and I kept having to find someone to ask that spoke English.

Booking my trip was easy and straight forward over the phone. Friendly and fast service.

We did the "Alpe-Adria Circuit" in August 2019. Sold as a walking holiday this was an introduction to a UK-based company contracting service provision to a local operator based in Italy. The Natural Adventure Company proved reluctant to provide us with useful pre-departure information. We were told to wait and see as everything would be revealed when we reached the first hotel. However, we were joining the holiday from 3 weeks of other walking in Slovakia and the Czech Republic and had to force the issue to get the identity and location of that first hotel in Austria to which we had to report. We were given that information only as we were leaving the UK. We picked up all the self-guided details that we needed from the Italian company (Fun Active Tours) who actually provided the service in Austria, Italy and Slovenia. They were efficient and helpful, but dismayed that we had not already received this so as to help with our preparation - and enjoyment. Others walking at the same time had been sent well in advance all of this material as hard-copy by their German and Austrian equivalents of the Natural Adventure Company.

Arrangements on the ground - bag and taxi transfers - were efficient and effective. The hotels used were mixed ranging from rather old-fashioned to cutting edge but each, with one horrendous exception, was excellent in its own way. The "Bellavista" in Camporosso, Italy where we spent 2 nights, was dire. The room was smelly and dirty; there was never even warm, far less hot, water for showers; taps were broken, as was the safe and fridge; one section of the shower screen was missing; and electrical fittings were loose. The experience of each of us in our group was similar. It was so bad that it was laughable.

It transpired that what we (and 5 others - each either Austrian or German) were doing was actually designed for cycling with bits of interesting walking interspersed; but we didn't have bikes! So there was a great deal of tramping (24 km one day) through seemingly endless forest on tarmac bike paths. The forest enclosure meant that we could have been anywhere in central or northern Europe and the incredible mountain scenery which was the reason for us being there was mostly well-screened from view. It was such a relief each time we emerged from the forest to enjoy the Julian Alps. They are, when you can see them, awe-inspiring.