Overall we really enjoyed the excursion - we had been to NYC so many times before but had never managed to do Liberty & Ellis Island. Jeffrey was very entertaining and had many interesting stories about the sites and general NYC life. The only problem we had was at the start when our groups ended up on different ferries - both for our group and the other group. So this took about 20-30 minutes to sort out when we got to Liberty on the first ferry. Eventually the 2 guides and the bulk of the group arrived on the next ferry. Not a great start but after this everything was very good. The issue was that some of us got through expedited security checks and so ended up on earlier ferry. I suggest the guides ask people to wait on the dock until the guides get the group back together before boarding the ferry. We would do other walking tours on our next trip.
Larry was a great tour guide, only complaint is was not a lot of free time, got into room quite late and some dinner/ market choices were questionable. We are from USA so Larry explained why for the 95% of foreigners want to see a Walmart. I would still recommend Expat for the younger traveler. You definitely get your money's worth!
We had a great trip, with a fun group of people, including our informative, multi-talented and hard working guide. We saw a great range of landscapes and wildlife and enjoyed the range of activities and not being stuck in the van most of the time. Particularly enjoyed the energetic hike to the Bonanza Mine and the view from the tops. Staying at the same accommodation for several nights made things more relaxed. The flight into Wrangell-St.Elias was good, despite the poor weather, and probably would have been great with better weather. We were disappointed that our request for twin beds had not been passed on to the accommodation providers, which resulted in a couple of poor nights sleep. We raised this with the guide the first evening, who contacted the company owner who was going to try to sort it out for the rest of the trip. Put at one of the later accommodations I was told that they had had no contact from the company about providing twin beds for us and when they contacted the company got a reply along the lines of "Oh, I thought I'd contacted you about it". We were also disappointed with the rooms at the Inlet Tower Hotel. The first room we were shown when we arrived had no working blind on the largest window, which would have made it very difficult to sleep with the long daylight hours. The blind was sitting on the window sill and had dirt and fly droppings on it, which suggests it had been like that for some time. We were given an alternative room which had two leaking taps, one in the same room as the beds, and one of the set of taps only had hot water. The room we had at the end of the trip also had a leaking tap in the room with the beds and only had a venetian blind on the largest window, which still let in a considerable amount of light.