Istanbul Tour Guide?

In 2007, we used a fabulous tour guide named Levent Somalaz. However, I can no longer find him on the Internet....maybe he retired?

If anyone can recommend a tour guide for Istanbul, I would really appreciate it!

I'm also looking for this information! Thanks!

I'm also looking for this information! Thanks!

We used Kosagan Tours http://www.toursinistanbul.com/lale.html to take us round the Topkapi Palace.

We used Kosagan Tours http://www.toursinistanbul.com/lale.html to take us round the Topkapi Palace.

and were well pleased. Kagan was our guide and he was very personable and knowledgeable, and I heard similar comments about his wife, Lale. All the best, Tony

Thank you, I will check them out!

I did a walking tour in Istanbul of Haiga Sophia, hippodrome area , and Chora church and lunch at a restaraunt near the Chora church.

The tour guide was Cihan Sevil. Here is his email address: chnsvl@gmail.com

He was one of the best tour guides I have had ever. HIs depth of knowledge, and passion for his city was apparent.

He is in his late twenties. His knowledge of these Byzantine sites made for a great day. We also talked about modern Turkey, culture, early Christianity, Sultanmet history. He met us at our hotel Sari Kanak , which was located near the Blue Mosque. After our visit to sites nearby, he called for a taxi to take us to the Chora church area and a taxi back to our hotel. This tour was post cruise while we were staying in Istanbul .

There was just the two of us and Cihan. I hope to get back to Istanbul again

and would hire him again in a heart beat.

I also organized a tour for 8 from our ship for a tour of Suelimanye Mosque and Topkapi palace, museums. I used Ekol tours and our guide Hassan meet us at the port and we had a large van. he gave us plenty of time to exolore the various areas of Topkapi on our own. With eight people many of us had different interests while on the palace grounds.Everyone siad that this tour was beyond their expectations.

whatever you do you are in for a treat. I absolutely loved Istanbul.

I did a walking tour in Istanbul of Haiga Sophia, hippodrome area , and Chora church and lunch at a restaraunt near the Chora church.

 

The tour guide was Cihan Sevil. Here is his email address: chnsvl@gmail.com

He was one of the best tour guides I have had ever. HIs depth of knowledge, and passion for his city was apparent.

He is in his late twenties. His knowledge of these Byzantine sites made for a great day. We also talked about modern Turkey, culture, early Christianity, Sultanmet history. He met us at our hotel Sari Kanak , which was located near the Blue Mosque. After our visit to sites nearby, he called for a taxi to take us to the Chora church area and a taxi back to our hotel. This tour was post cruise while we were staying in Istanbul .

There was just the two of us and Cihan. I hope to get back to Istanbul again

and would hire him again in a heart beat.

 

I also organized a tour for 8 from our ship for a tour of Suelimanye Mosque and Topkapi palace, museums. I used Ekol tours and our guide Hassan meet us at the port and we had a large van. he gave us plenty of time to exolore the various areas of Topkapi on our own. With eight people many of us had different interests while on the palace grounds.Everyone siad that this tour was beyond their expectations.

whatever you do you are in for a treat. I absolutely loved Istanbul.

Thank you! Now I will have to do my research on what sights we will want to see in the timeframe that we have from the ship!

Margaret,

i did tons of reseach using this site, Trip Advisor, Moon Travel book, read three histories of Turkey and two novels.

Here is a new web site I found that was also helpful. It is called triposo and highlighted Turkey. I had this app on both my ipad and phone.

half the fun for a vacation is doing the research.

We've used Ekol travel three times and have had excellent guides.

We just returned from Istanbul via the NCL Jade. Since we didn't want to miss a thing and wanted a local tour guide, we retained the services of

Denizhan Pekoz from *********** Tours. Denizhan was an amazing tour guide. We had a wonderful day. He responds to email quickly and was very helpful. We paid him 100 Euro for a private walking tour (we used public transportation--the tram to the old City and the ferry back to the port). He was waiting for us at 9 am when we left the ship and we toured for 9 1/2 hours. Making everything better, we did not exchange currency. iFor the costs where Turkish currency was required, Denizhan paid the fees and we reimbursed him in Euros at the end of the tour.

I can very highly recommend Fatih Copuroglu. We used him in 2011, and felt that he was an excellent guide. His contact information is in the link, and if you would like to read details about our experience with him, you can find a review in our travel blog, linked in my signature.

We've used Ekol travel three times and have had excellent guides.

We are going to Istanbul this summer and have used Ekol Travel once in Ephesus. I am looking at other options, did you really like them in Istanbul? Would you mind emailing me so that I can ask some more questions :) Thanks...

tory2468@gmail.com

I did a walking tour in Istanbul of Haiga Sophia, hippodrome area , and Chora church and lunch at a restaraunt near the Chora church.

 

The tour guide was Cihan Sevil. Here is his email address: chnsvl@gmail.com

He was one of the best tour guides I have had ever. HIs depth of knowledge, and passion for his city was apparent.

He is in his late twenties. His knowledge of these Byzantine sites made for a great day. We also talked about modern Turkey, culture, early Christianity, Sultanmet history. He met us at our hotel Sari Kanak , which was located near the Blue Mosque. After our visit to sites nearby, he called for a taxi to take us to the Chora church area and a taxi back to our hotel. This tour was post cruise while we were staying in Istanbul .

There was just the two of us and Cihan. I hope to get back to Istanbul again

and would hire him again in a heart beat.

 

I also organized a tour for 8 from our ship for a tour of Suelimanye Mosque and Topkapi palace, museums. I used Ekol tours and our guide Hassan meet us at the port and we had a large van. he gave us plenty of time to exolore the various areas of Topkapi on our own. With eight people many of us had different interests while on the palace grounds.Everyone siad that this tour was beyond their expectations.

whatever you do you are in for a treat. I absolutely loved Istanbul.

Azulann, could I have an idea of how much both these tours cost? Thanks!

You don't need a tour guide in Istanbul. All the sites, Hagia Sophia, Cistern, Topkapi and Harem have wonderful audio guides in English. The city is easy to walk or take a tram if you don't want to walk everywhere. You don't need a guide at the Spice Market or Grand Bazaar.

It is a great city, you will love it.

In 2007, we used a fabulous tour guide named Levent Somalaz. However, I can no longer find him on the Internet....maybe he retired?

 

If anyone can recommend a tour guide for Istanbul, I would really appreciate it!

levent solmaz is still guiding

his email is

info@leventsolmaz.com

prish,

The ekol tour was $110.00 per person which included large van transport to sites and tour guide for 6hours and all entrances fees to Topkapi, harem, and archeology museum.

The walking tour with our guide Cihan was post cruise. We used a travel agent for booking private transfers(3), tour guide, hotel for three nights. It was one fee, so sorry I do not know what the actual tour guide cost.

We used EKOL tours when we visited Istanbul this past October.* I did a lot of research, through CruiseCritic and Trip Advisor, and emailed a number of guides.* EKOL emailed me *back promptly, quoting attractive rates.* Because of their input, we decided to fly into Istanbul 3 days early. Originally I was going to do a lot of touring on my own, as Istanbul is an easy city to get around.* However, they discounted their daily rates the more you used them.* In retrospect, that was a wonderful idea as our guide had tickets in advance, allowing us to get into attractions without having to wait; his knowledge of the times when to get into the Mosques allowed us use our time efficiently.* His name was Semih; he was knowledgeable, personable and spoke very good English. Since we had him for the three days, he was able to adjust our itinerary due to circumstances beyond our control, like the weather. He was a gem. Because of him, we feel we really saw so much that Istanbul has to offer.

We impressed upon EKOL in advance, that we wanted to maximize our time and were not interested in going to rug demonstrations, etc. and our guides honored our requests.

Once we decided to use EKOL in Istanbul, we were able to negotiate with them attractive rates for our other ports of call in Turkey.* Therefore, we used them in Kusadasi for Ephesus, Bodrum and Marmaris.* Our guide for Ephesus studied architecture in college and he was the perfect guide to tour such a rich architectual site.* He even travelled down to Marmaris to meet us and we went inland to the Dylan river plain and saw the tombs carved into the rocks.

Valentina, at EKOL was our point person.* She answered any email promptly, even with non-EKOL questions: visas, currency, hotel and restaurant recommendations. She arranged a car to pick us up at the ship and bring us to the airport. All the vehicles they used were clean, modern and air-conditioned.

Because of their discounts, we were able to keep our group small (myself, husband and our two friends). *Our small group added to our enjoyment, as we were able to tour at our own pace. We had the trip of a lifetime!* As I wrote earlier, we tend to be DIY travellers but lucked out with EKOL tours.* Planning on using them again to visit Capadocia.

We have used Ekol Travel several times and were always very pleased.

I used Ekol tours also last October. Valentina from Ekol was outstanding in answering my questions, changing some things close to departure.

I even got a lovely Christmas card by email from her.

Just back from Istanbul and I had a great walking tour arranged with Istanbul Walks. This was not my first visit to the city so I wanted to see places that I had not visited before and my guide Serhat did an excellent job. They offer a variety of tours both full and half days and are recommended on TA and by Lonely Planet. A full description appears on their online brochure. You can book online and pay ahead or directly with your guide. Pick-up at hotels is included so I would believe meeting you at the dock could be requested.

http://www.istanbulwalks.com/

Just back from Istanbul and I had a great walking tour arranged with Istanbul Walks. This was not my first visit to the city so I wanted to see places that I had not visited before and my guide Serhat did an excellent job. They offer a variety of tours both full and half days and are recommended on TA and by Lonely Planet. A full description appears on their online brochure. You can book online and pay ahead or directly with your guide. Pick-up at hotels is included so I would believe meeting you at the dock could be requested.

 

http://www.istanbulwalks.com/

Good to know about this as Istanbul walks was recommended by my hotel. I have been to Turkey three times and have always had outstanding guides, some of the best I have had in over 40 years of traveling in Europe.

We used Danytours in Turkey. Sezei was our guide. He was great.

Thanks, everyone.

Sorry that I have not thanked you all sooner. Been off on other cruise research for cruises that we are taking before this one.

Again, thanks for such great info!

Hi Everyone

To help those planning Istanbul tours, I can also recommend KSG Tours run by Kagan and Lale Kosagan. I have now done 3 tours with this company and all have been fantastic!

Kagan and his wife Lale are lovely people who are passionate about their city. Kagan always answered email enquiries quickly and worked with me to design a suitable itinerary for our group.

I got a group of 17 people together from my cruise critic roll call. We did the full day Istanbul tour with Lale in May 2014. Lale is a great guide; she has lots of energy, a great sense of humour and is really knowledgeable about the history of her city.

One of the highlights of the tour was the Topkapi Palace including the Harem Sections. Lale had an amazingly comprehensive knowledge of how the Harem was run; it was really fascinating to hear the stories from that time. I also loved the Basilica Cistern; it was a unique experience…it’s not everyday you get to go into an underground Cistern!

It was a great day for a fraction of the price the cruise line was charging for a similar tour! I can’t say enough good things about KSG Tours and will use them again if we ever go back to Istanbul.

Enjoy your day in Istanbul; it's a beautiful city!

Cheers

Amanda

We had used ekol tours last year in Ephasus and the guide and driver were great. This year in Istanbul we used ekol again. Unfortunately the guide was not as good. All tours are very dependent on the guide not only his knowledge but personality and love of his job. I would be hesitant to use Ekol again since there are other options out there but with the experience last year I had was so good we were very disappointed this year. Could go in detail but would not serve a purpose accept for ranting. Enjoy Istanbul.

We had used ekol tours last year in Ephasus and the guide and driver were great. This year in Istanbul we used ekol again. Unfortunately the guide was not as good. All tours are very dependent on the guide not only his knowledge but personality and love of his job. I would be hesitant to use Ekol again since there are other options out there but with the experience last year I had was so good we were very disappointed this year. Could go in detail but would not serve a purpose accept for ranting. Enjoy Istanbul.

Any chance you remember the guides name in Istanbul?