Tesfa Tours

I had an excellent trip through the Simien mountains in March 2020. I only deduct one star for the contradictory and confusing tipping policy. Our guide Amare was excellent, had pretty good English, was kind and friendly and unbelievably fit. The food on the trip was outstanding - plentiful, tasty vegetarian food (my vegan boyfriend was delighted, I am a meat eater and really enjoyed it too) with great variety and small touches like napkins, tablecloth, snacks on return after each day's trek and a bottle of wine one night, plus a couple of campfires! The scenery was fantastic, trek strenuous but done in accordance with our abilities. The tipping policy was really the only negative. The email you get basically says 'we aim to give fair pay negating the need for tips, and no one will be expecting tips, but if you wish to give tips please give this amount (followed by list of quite large tip suggestions).' It also says to give one tip for the whole group of staff so they can divide it out equally. WE were all set to do this on the last day but on the penultimate day we were asked by our guide to tip the mule drivers as they would be leaving. So we did. The following morning we were then asked to tip the cooks, and were advised to leave quite a bit more than we were expecting considering there were only two of them. By this point our anticipation of how much to tip had been blown out of the water. We then had a hard time guessing how much to tip each individual and seem to have offended the driver with our tip. It ended up being completely in-transparent (the exact opposite of what Tesfa tours stands for) and emotionally charged. I would much rather pay a bit more and tip nobody, it is so much easier and less stressful. Though this may be a British sentiment.

Tesfa Tours helped us to plan an 18 day trip in Ethiopia in Oct.-Nov. 2018, for which Tesfa arranged our itinerary, lodging, many meals, inland flights, drivers, and guides. The trip included six cities/regions, as well as two community treks, during which we hiked between a series of community-run campsites, which were run by local people who prepared our huts and cooked our meals. In addition to the stunning mountains and unforgettable sunsets, these treks gave us access to "the real Ethiopia," and a chance to talk and interact with everyday people. The treks also provide a valuable means of community sponsorship/development, so you can be assured that you are actually helping people with your travels. Before booking with Tesfa, we had read all the travel books and talked to other agencies, but we would have never on our own been able to plan as authentic a trip as we received from Tesfa, and I doubt we could have found it anywhere else either.

In September, we booked a 4 day trip to the Gheralta Mountains in Tigray. Over the course of our 4 month correspondence, I assured Teshale that my friend from Norway and I were fit and that our 18 year old sons were doing rock climbing and were looking forward to climbing up to the cliff churches. A few days before our trip began, we were told that our itinerary was changing for one night to a different guest house but we were still scheduled to be in the Gheralta Mountains where I knew most of the trickiest cliff churches to reach were located. We said that would be fine as long as we got to see some great cliff churches. Unfortunately, it appears that due to the high season and the lucrative nature of joining our group with others, we got bumped from the Gheralta mountain cliff churches that you actually climb to and we spent all of our time in another mountain range - I believe it was the Amaro Mountains or something but we didn't have paper and never wrote the name down but we could easily see the Gheralta mountains from where we were and two different guides pointed that range of mountains out to us so we know that we were never in the Gheralta Mountains as our booking indicated. We spent our first 3 days walking up these other mountains to some quite easily accessible cliff churches. The guest houses were nicer than we had hoped for, the literature that we were sent ahead of time had prepared us well for what to pack and expect and the guest house workers and views from the beautiful plateaus were great. We were a little bummed that the hiking wasn't as strenuous as we had thought but our guide Ibrahim and the other 2 people who made up our group told us about the great cliff church we were going to climb to on our 4th day so we contented ourselves with what we were getting to see and didn't worry so much that it wasn't what we had signed up for. On our last day, we backtracked through a dusty riverbed that we had already done but again, I was looking forward to climb this great cliff church on our way to the airport so it didn't bother me much. Our guide Ibrahim reminded us that it would cost us 150 birr to see the church and we said goodbye to our 2 new friends (who had also had their schedule re-arranged and now had an additional 3 hour drive that they hadn't been expecting) and my group of 4 got into another car. I'm not sure what went wrong but somehow we were not taken to the church that you had to climb but we were taken to another really low cliff church that required no scary climb and we had to pay a 250 birr entrance fee and listen to a different guide explain information that we had already heard in past days. I have only given one other bad review in my 8+ years of travel advisor but I feel I need to warn others about Tesfa. How can I recommend a company that takes an itinerary laid out months in advance and then keeps changing it to suit their business of the day? And yet, how can I give a bad review to the guest houses and Ibrahim who were so delightful and professional and tried so hard to make our trip great? I live in Addis so I can go to other tour companies (and you can be sure I won't be making arrangements with Tesfa again). But my friends from Norway and other who come to Ethiopia for just a week or two will not have that opportunity. So I have decided to give Tesfa a mid-range rating with the clear warning that if you have your heart set on doing certain things that you've seen on the internet or seeing certain places that your friends have visited and recommended, I would not go with Tesfa because the schedule you receive may change even just a few hours from when you last go over the plan.

In April 2014, I used Tesfa Tours for a trekking holiday in the North of Ethiopia. The trek was a fantastic experience and the work that this company does for community tourism in Ethiopia is amazing. Mark Chapman has put together a great team and I would have no hesitation recommending him and Tesfa Tours. 100% happy customer :)

Very profetional tour