Why this page exists at all
Behind this website there is a plain text file of verified facts, and inside it a list headed with the instruction not to write certain things. Prices we cannot stand behind. Times that vary. Sights that may or may not happen. Claims about third parties we have no business making.
Every other page on this site is written from the permitted side of that list. This one is written from the other side, on purpose. The individual guides each defend one absence in one paragraph — the waterfall page explains its stop, the villages page explains the nomads, the pickup page explains the missing times — but nobody has ever set out the policy underneath them all.
The argument for doing it is straightforward. If a company will tell you what it cannot promise, the things it does promise are worth more.
There is no star rating and no review count here
You will not find a score out of five on this website, and you will not find a count of happy guests. The reason is not modesty. Our own booking system returns no rating and no review total for any of the products on this brand, which means there is no verified number for us to publish.
We could put one there anyway. Plenty of sites do, and nobody checks. But a number invented for a website is a lie told to somebody who is about to hand over a day of their holiday, and once you have printed one invented number the rest of the page is worth nothing either.
So judge us on the things that can be checked instead: what is written into the tour as included, what is explicitly excluded, what the reservation costs at the moment you make it, and how long you have to change your mind. Those are all verifiable before you commit anything at all.
Some stops depend on the day's programme
The stop at the Manavgat Waterfall on the return is programme-dependent. It happens on some departures and not on others, and the entrance is paid on site when it does. We will not tell you it is a fixed part of the day, because it is not.
The same honesty applies in the other direction: it is a real stop that really happens, not a decoration on the tour description. What we cannot do is promise it to you in advance, on your date, from a web page written weeks earlier. If it is the whole reason you are booking, say so when you reserve and let us tell you what is realistic for your day rather than reading a maybe as a yes.
Nomadic families and wildlife are a chance, not an itinerary line
The route goes through the foothills where nomadic Yörük families move with the seasons, and there is a chance of seeing them. A chance is exactly what it is. They are people living their lives, not an attraction scheduled for the convenience of a convoy of jeeps, and any site that puts them on an itinerary as a certainty is either misinformed or making it up.
The same goes for animals in the open country. What is on the route as a certainty is the landscape and the stops: orchards, cotton and sesame fields, Roman aqueducts, the village, the lake. What passes through it on your particular day is not ours to promise.
Your pickup time is not on this website
Nowhere on this site will you find a clock time for the pickup, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. The time is different from hotel to hotel because the route the jeeps run in the morning is different from hotel to hotel. Printing one time would be right for a handful of guests and wrong for everybody else.
What we can tell you is the shape of it: the collection is in the morning after breakfast time, the meeting point is the main entrance gate of your hotel, the day runs about eight hours, and the return is late afternoon. Your actual time arrives with the confirmation, once we know which hotel we are collecting you from.
For the same reason, no hotel is named on this site as a guaranteed pickup point. We collect from Side and the surrounding resort areas, and the honest way to answer the question is to have you send us the hotel name and answer it for your hotel rather than in general.
At the zoo stop, we do not promise a cub
There are two full-day jeep safaris on this site. The classic Taurus day does not stop at the zoo at all. A separate route does, and that is the one with the lion cubs and the photographs, sold as its own tour rather than as an option on the other.
On that route, several things are outside our control and we will not pretend otherwise. We cannot promise which animals will be present on your date, that a cub will be there, what age or size it will be, that photographs will be possible on any given day, or how long the stop will last. The ticket is not included in the tour and is paid on site.
We also do not publish what that ticket costs, because the figure is not ours to set and we would rather say nothing than quote a number that turns out to be wrong at the gate. And we make no claims at all about how the park is run — its licensing, its animal care, its standards. We do not operate it, we have not audited it, and a reassuring sentence about somebody else's business is not something we are entitled to write.
No weather promises, no crowd promises
You will not find month-by-month temperature charts here, water temperatures, or confident statements about which weeks are quiet. Those numbers are easy to copy from somewhere else and impossible for us to verify, and a holiday planned around a copied number is a holiday planned around nothing.
What the site does say about seasons is limited to things the tours themselves establish: that summer departures include water fights between jeeps and use open-top vehicles, that winter runs use covered jeeps without the water games, and which months each seasonal product operates in. That is the honest edge of what we know.
What we do promise
A page of absences would be a strange thing to end on, so here is the other list — the things written into the product itself, which do not depend on the day, the weather or anybody's goodwill:
- The full day runs about eight hours, with hotel pickup and drop-off included
- Lunch is included, at a lakeside restaurant by Green Canyon
- Guiding runs through the whole day, in English, German or Russian as well as Turkish
- The jeeps carry eight to ten guests with a professional driver — guests do not drive
- The reservation is free: nothing is paid online and no card details are taken
- Cancellation is free up to 24 hours before departure
- Infants aged 0 to 3 travel free, and the child rate applies from 4 to 12 on the full-day safari
How to read a tour page anywhere
If this page is useful for one thing beyond our own tours, let it be this: when you read any excursion description on this coast, separate the sentences that are written into the product from the sentences that describe a good day. Inclusions, durations, ages and cancellation terms are the first kind. Waterfalls, wildlife, nomads and perfect weather are the second.
Both kinds belong on a tour page. Only one of them is a promise, and knowing which is which is most of what it takes to book well.