The departure point was the "Tourist Info" in Albertinaplatz. The tour operator sent us a message the day before giving detail description of how to go there. So it started nicely.
The transport was a modern micro-bus, with comfortable clean seats and wide windows. The tour guide did a good job, she kept giving us details of the places the bus was passing through, with Mozart's classical musics in between.
The coffee-breaks were nicely designed within the tour, at two branches of "Landzeit". The first one had a nice terrace with a great mountain view. They even had Gluten free snacks, so it was a plus for me.
We first visited the Admont Abbey, with free tickets from the tour guide (I did not expect to have free tickets to be honest). However, I felt that 1 and a half hour is very less for a thorough-tour of the place, and it was a lunch break too. So the time of stay should have been at least 2 hours and a half for a proper visit.
Next, we started towards Hallstatt. The audio guide by the tour guide continued. The Scenic beauty of the journey path is not possible to describe in words. We arrived Hallstatt past 2.15-ish. We were given around 2 hours to visit HallStatt. Since me and my friend could not have the lunch earlier, it took us for an hour to sit and eat fresh lunch by the side of the lake. However, it was a nice afternoon with grilled fish on our plate and there was relaxing nice weather.
Again, I would say the time given to us to return to the microbus was very little for an actual Hallstatt tour. It would need minimum 4 hours to have a nice tour even a relaxing stroll around.
From Hallstatt we were taken to another place where we were given only 10 mins for taking photos. This was again another small amount of time, because grasping the beauty of the place by own eyes and taking photos cannot be done in the same time.
I was a bit sad at the end when because of my health condition I stopped to drink some water (it was half-a-minute late than the starting time of the bus) and the tour guide behaved a bit rude and said, "We don't have time, You can drink water in the bus". I mean, you can hurry up the tourists in any time but when they are drinking water? It was very rude, and I decided that at the next coffee break I will be the first one returning to the bus, and guess what?
I was the first, but this time the tour guide did not yell at other tourists who were late (even more than a couple minutes) .
Note to be taken that me and my friend were the "only" South Asian tourists in the trip. Although sub-consciously, the tour guide's attitude towards us might be influenced by our ethnicity, who knows?
At the end, the returning road to Vienna was far too long. By searching in Google map real time, I saw that the bus could easily take an another route which could save 2 hours of travel time (but the road needed "toll"). I am not an expert of routes but I felt that the journey time was way more than the actual trip time.
At the end, I would say fare-wise the trip was fair. I would easily give the trip a 5 star but because of the Tour Guide's rude yelling at me being half a minute late for drinking water, and the choice of longer returning route to Vienna, I would give this tour a 4-star.
