4 Days Tour to Kandy, Sigiriya & Nuwara Eliya

Tight schedule but full amazing tour experiences

I want to express gratitude to Mr. Ushan from Lanka Tour Expert for his support in preparing the itinerary. I would like to thank Mr. Asanka for his service for the last 4 days tour. He was helpful in providing information, suggesting alternatives of places to visit (including restaurants), recovering my lost phone, and accompanying us to pharmacy to buy medicines.

Response from the operator: Dear Sir/Madam, Greetings from Kingfisher Tours Sri Lanka! It was a great pleasure having had the opportunity to be of service to you in your visit to Sri Lanka. We are truly glad that you had a wonderful tour with Kingfisher Tours Team. The best part of any journey is hearing that our guests had an amazing time with us! There's no greater testament to our passion and dedication to this goal than anything. As a Travel agency and tour Operating Company, Kingfisher Tours Sri Lanka is committed to provide the best product to our each client. As a professional and a reputed tour company, we always concern and give the priority to needs of our all customers along with the maximum satisfaction. We do not think twice to go for an extra mile to give maximum service to our clients. Thank you very much for the review posted on TripAdvisor and share your travel experience with us. It would be great having you back with us for another tour to give you another memorable experience. We are looking forward to seeing you again and bring you another great memory of rest of Sri Lanka.

via Tripadvisor

DON'T do it!

I'm originally Sri Lankan and live in Canada, and I've travelled to 49 countries and done multiple tours over the years, and unfortunately this has to be the worst and most unprofessional tour I've been on. We worked with Aashik to customize the tour to visit all the places we wanted to over 5 days, and he mentioned that we would be getting a driver that was a tour guide as well to explain the sites to us. It wasn't off to a good start because our driver Althaf was about 15-20 mins late picking us up from the airport. Day 1 and 2 were overall not too bad, although the driving itself was a bit aggressive (i.e. lots of illegal passing, speeding up, only to slam on the brakes because of traffic), and when we went to Dambulla, we expected our guide/driver to come in and explain the significance of the temple, but he basically said the temple was known for its statues, and sent us off alone. Althaf also mentioned that his driver’s license had expired 2 weeks prior so someone else may be joining us, which was a bit alarming. I had to call Aashik to see who this stranger was joining us on our trip, and he assured me that all was well with his license and no one would be joining us, and he would give Althaf the information he needed to actually play tour guide at the sites we were going to the following day. On day 3, Althaf was supposed to pick us up at 8am at our hotel in Kandy, and was over an hour late picking us up (and kept saying he was 15 minutes away and traffic was bad). Had he just been honest, we would have taken a tuk tuk to the sacred tooth temple since we didn’t know he was going to keep us waiting for an hour. We knew we had limited time, so wanted to see the temple and the Kandy viewpoint before catching a train at 11am, hence why we wanted to start early. When we get to the temple, he sends us off on our own again, because he had to go and pick up our train tickets from someone, so once again, we walked around the temple clueless and got zero historical information or facts about the temple. Because of the late start, thanks to our driver, we only had time to do the temple and had to skip the viewpoint before catching our train. We were taking a train from Kandy to Nanu Oya (close to Nuwara Eliya) – it was a scenic 4 hour train ride, and our driver was supposed to pick us up at the Nanu Oya train station (which would have been a 2.5hr drive for him). When we get to the train station, our driver says he’s 20 minutes away, and will see us soon. We wait about an hour at a coffee shop, and when we call, he says he’s still 20 minutes away and sends his live location (which was 1.5 hrs away). He explains how he was driving from Kandy to Nanu Oya, and speeding so the police pulled him over, and because he had an expired license, they wanted to take him back to the police station, but he managed to bribe someone and get out, and was on his way. At this point, we called Aashik, frustrated because by then we had wasted over another hour waiting for this driver. Aashik offers to pick us up because he’s in the region, but he too was over an hour away. There is no comment about the level of unprofessionalism being late, not once, but twice, and making us wait around for his driver. We decide to take an uber to one of the tea plantations so that the day isn’t a complete waste, and tell Aashik/Althaf to pick us up from there. On day 4, we had planned to go to Horton Plains National Park first thing in the morning to hike to World’s End. As we’re 5 km away from the Park, the car stops working, at which point our driver mentions that the car is 20 yrs old (which we suspected since the arm rest in the car was broken). The driver calls over another car that was going in the same direction, and wants us to essentially hitchhike with the strangers to Horton Plains National Park. Luckily, there was a tuk tuk that was passing us, which he hailed over instead and had us go with the tuk tuk, saying that his car should be fixed in 20 minutes and he would meet us at Horton Plains National Park. When we get to the park, we realize there is no cellphone reception, so we finished the 3-4 hours hike and prayed he would be waiting for us at the entrance since there’s no reception to try to call someone incase he wasn’t there, which luckily he was this time. The one redeeming thing about this trip. When we get dropped off at our hotel in Ella, we realize there is no AC in the hotel (which was our assumption for anything that is supposed to be a 4 star hotel). Luckily we reached out to Aashik, who was able to get us a booking at a different hotel and we switched hotels. On day 5, we ask our driver to pick us up at 9am, and we were a few minutes late getting our luggage downstairs, so he went to go eat, and asks us to wait for him to finish his breakfast, so we wait about 20-30 minutes for him to finish eating. At some point, the driver asked me to lend him cash because he didn’t have any and was waiting for Aashik to wire him money – more unprofessional behaviour. We had requested to be dropped off in Moratuwa, and as we’re driving from Ella to Moratuwa, we realize the driver took a wrong turn, at which point he informs us he’s taking us to the airport instead and then another car will take us to Moratuwa, and apparently this had been okayed by Aashik with no communication to us. I called Aashik, who said that they had booked the car for another tour which is why we were being taken to the airport, which would have unnecessarily added an extra hour to 6 hour drive. It’s a good thing we were checking google maps sporadically! Overall, this entire tour was the most stressful and unorganized I’ve ever been on. It’s unfortunate that Aashik sold me on the tour saying that guides would be provided at each of the sites, and if not, the driver would play the guide. Because it would have been better using Kangaroo or another taxi service to do this tour given the amount of actual information we got from our “guide”/driver or just to use another tour company that was more organized and on time. I don’t recommend you book with this company if you want to actually enjoy your vacation because it will be one thing after another.

via Tripadvisor

Awesome tour guides

Our guides, Althaf and Ruhuman, were exceptional. They drove us from Colombo to Sigiriya to Kandy to Nurawa Eliya to Ella and back to Colombo and they did so under challenging driving conditions and always with amazing skills, good spirits, kindness and care for us. We are so grateful for them. We saw so much and we had an incredible experience thanks to these two wonderful guides. We will remember them and our fantastic time in beautiful Sri Lanka forever.

Response from the operator: Dear Sir/Madam, Greetings from Kingfisher Tours Sri Lanka! It was a great pleasure having had the opportunity to be of service to you in your visit to Sri Lanka. We are truly glad that you had a wonderful tour with Kingfisher Tours Team. The best part of any journey is hearing that our guests had an amazing time with us! There's no greater testament to our passion and dedication to this goal than anything. As a Travel agency and tour Operating Company, Kingfisher Tours Sri Lanka is committed to provide the best product to our each client. As a professional and a reputed tour company, we always concern and give the priority to needs of our all customers along with the maximum satisfaction. We do not think twice to go for an extra mile to give maximum service to our clients. Thank you very much for the review posted on TripAdvisor and share your travel experience with us. It would be great having you back with us for another tour to give you another memorable experience. We are looking forward to seeing you again and bring you another great memory of rest of Sri Lanka.

via Tripadvisor

Great tour

Great tour but short , Kingsfisher tours made everything wonderful on this trip . We would love to hire them again for our next trip to Sri Lanka . Very much recommended.

Response from the operator: Dear Sir/Madam, Greetings from Kingfisher Tours Sri Lanka! It was a great pleasure having had the opportunity to be of service to you in your visit to Sri Lanka. We are truly glad that you had a wonderful tour with Kingfisher Tours Team. The best part of any journey is hearing that our guests had an amazing time with us! There's no greater testament to our passion and dedication to this goal than anything. As a Travel agency and tour Operating Company, Kingfisher Tours Sri Lanka is committed to provide the best product to our each client. As a professional and a reputed tour company, we always concern and give the priority to needs of our all customers along with the maximum satisfaction. We do not think twice to go for an extra mile to give maximum service to our clients. Thank you very much for the review posted on TripAdvisor and share your travel experience with us. It would be great having you back with us for another tour to give you another memorable experience. We are looking forward to seeing you again and bring you another great memory of rest of Sri Lanka.

via Tripadvisor

Perfectly planned holiday

what a wonderful experience we had with kingfisher is unbelievable ! Our guide shan and his knowledge of the country made us feel like home and we are very comfortable traveling with him. We booked the tour months before our arrival and everything was perfectly organized and we were greeted with garlands. Sri Lanka is very beautiful and the culture, people made us feel that we need more time here Thank you Kingfisher Tours for everything

Response from the operator: Dear Sir/Madam, Greetings from Kingfisher Tours Sri Lanka! It was a great pleasure having had the opportunity to be of service to you in your visit to Sri Lanka. We are truly glad that you had a wonderful tour with Kingfisher Tours Team. The best part of any journey is hearing that our guests had an amazing time with us! There's no greater testament to our passion and dedication to this goal than anything. As a Travel agency and tour Operating Company, Kingfisher Tours Sri Lanka is committed to provide the best product to our each client. As a professional and a reputed tour company, we always concern and give the priority to needs of our all customers along with the maximum satisfaction. We do not think twice to go for an extra mile to give maximum service to our clients. Thank you very much for the review posted on TripAdvisor and share your travel experience with us. It would be great having you back with us for another tour to give you another memorable experience. We are looking forward to seeing you again and bring you another great memory of rest of Sri Lanka.

via Tripadvisor