Originally Posted by johnny99
I've done 2 tours with VBT: Canadian Rockies and Tuscany. VBT is a lot cheaper than Trek or Backroads, especially if you want the package deal that includes international air fare and hotel rooms before and after the trip. VBT does a good job for the money. The guides are local residents who really know their stuff, but are also high on customer service. Accomodations are not as nice as the high end Trek or Backroads tours, but maybe a little nicer than the budget tours from Trek or Backroads.
The number of meals you get depends on the particular tour. In Canada, VBT provided all our lunches since there really wasn't any place to buy lunch. In Italy, we bought our own lunches at local cafes on most days. About half the dinners are included; on other nights we stopped in bigger towns where we had a choice of places.
My main complaint about VBT is that they keep making their tours easier and easier. The Canada trip I did with them crossed over the continental divide twice as we looped through both Alberta and British Columbia. The current tour with the same name took out all the long climbs (and also a lot of the big mountain scenery). I think the VBT Tuscany tour is the only one they have left with climbs every day (around 3000 vertical feet per day). If you like climbs and views, you need to read the tour descriptions very carefully.
I spent a summer leading tours in Austria for VBT a few years back, I wasn't too impressed. None of the guides who led that tour were Austrians or even native German speakers ( I speak German because I grew up there), none of the guides I worked with knew a whole lot about Austria, and none of the guides I worked with were competent bicycle mechanics or even interested in being on bicycles. From talking to the guests it was pretty apparent that the sales staff in Vermont was telling the guests whatever they thought the guests wanted to hear in order to sell them a tour. One woman was told that there was no need to actually ride a bicycle in order to get ready for the tour, just working out on a stationary bike was enough. She had so much trouble staying upright on her bike that she kept making wrong turns and getting lost, and she ended up crashing her bike and face planting into a bike path. Luckily she wasn't seriously injured, just scrapes and bruises. Another woman injured her knee before the start of the tour and was told "Don't worry, lots of the wives spend the whole tour riding in the luggage van and they have just as much fun as the people who actually ride bicycles". The trip leaders/guides were polite to the guests in an ass-kissing sort of way, but I heard a lot of snide comments about Americans from the guides when the guests and/or management weren't around. Being an American I wasn't too thrilled by this.
The best part about that job was bicycling around France in between tours (VBT's European office is in Beaune, France). I cycled through the Pyrenees, part of the Alps, Alsace and Burgundy, which was really cool. I also went to Paris and saw Jim Morrison's grave, the Louvre, and some other really cool museums. I improved my high school French a lot, because the French people are really friendly and helpful but they tend not to speak anything but French.