We traveled with a China tour-guide service that provided us with a motor coach and driver, which we shared with one other family that is friends with my Mom. Having the motor coach was extremely convenient, efficient and practical, especially since we were covering a lot of ground in a short amount of time.
There was fantastic food at some restaurants and not so good food at others, sometimes there wasn’t enough food! Nevertheless, the myriad of attractions to visit made the trip 100% unforgettable and worthwhile. There was more than enough sites to fill-up each day. Tour guides were generally very nice, knowledgable and prideful about their homeland, with the exception of this mean guide in Wuxi who was not helpful at all, rushed us and didn’t want to take us to the required places on the itinerary.
My biggest complaint would be the daily bombardment of being pressured into purchasing items at specific locations that the tour guides would take us to. In the beginning it was cool and we would buy a few small things, but after we saw our tour guide get a percentage of the money each and everytime, we quickly became cautious in what we purchased and where we were going. This is common practice for tours in China, and we got used to it by the third location or so… by the end of the trip I could pretty much walk out of the pressure buying situations without a second thought.