Turkey 8-Day Luxury Private Tour

Welcome to Istanbul. Your driver meets you at the airport and brings you to your hotel, where the rest of the day is yours to settle in. Nothing is scheduled, so rest after the journey or take a short walk to get your bearings. The waterfront is lovely at the end of the day, when the light turns golden over the Golden Horn and the call to prayer drifts across the city. Your guide will call in the evening to talk through tomorrow.

Meet your guide after breakfast for a gentle morning in Sultanahmet. Inside Hagia Sophia, fifteen centuries of history sit under one enormous dome, with Byzantine mosaics alongside Ottoman calligraphy. Across the gardens, the Blue Mosque is still a working mosque, so visits are timed around prayers. Before lunch, step down into the Basilica Cistern, a vast underground hall of columns built to store the city’s water. The afternoon is free for the hotel, the hammam or a coffee in a quiet courtyard.

Spend the morning at Topkapi Palace, the seat of the Ottoman sultans, with its shaded courtyards, the jewels of the treasury and the tiled rooms of the Harem. The palace is closed on Tuesdays, so the order of the days is set to suit. After a relaxed lunch, step aboard a private boat for a cruise along the Bosphorus, the strait between Europe and Asia, passing Dolmabahçe Palace, old wooden yalı mansions and the walls of Rumeli Hisarı.

Take a slow breakfast before your transfer to the airport and a flight of about an hour and a half to Kayseri or Nevşehir. From there, your driver takes you to your hotel in the heart of Cappadocia, about an hour away. The afternoon is free to settle into your room, many of which are carved into the rock, and to look out over the valleys. Dinner is included this evening, and an early night is a good idea before tomorrow’s balloon flight.

Before dawn, weather permitting, you are collected for your balloon flight and rise over the valleys as dozens of balloons fill the sky around you. After a late breakfast and a rest, your guide takes you to the Göreme Open Air Museum to see its painted rock churches, then on to Uchisar Castle, the tallest rock in the region, for the view. The late afternoon is free, and the hotel terrace is the perfect place to finish the day.

A morning flight of about an hour and a half takes you from Kayseri to Izmir on the Aegean coast. Your driver meets you and heads south, stopping in Şirince, a hill village of whitewashed houses and olive groves above Selçuk, for a relaxed lunch at your own pace. Continue to your hotel near Kuşadası, about twenty minutes further, and spend the rest of the day by the sea. Dinner is included tonight.

Start early, before the heat and the crowds, for a private visit to Ephesus, one of the best-preserved Roman cities in the Mediterranean. Your guide walks you down the marble Curetes Street, past the terraced houses and fountains, to the façade of the Library of Celsus and the great theater, which once held some 25,000 people. You are back at the hotel by lunchtime, with the afternoon free for a swim, a spa treatment or a walk along the bay.

Enjoy a last breakfast with a view of the Aegean and a final swim if time allows. At the agreed time your driver takes you to Izmir Airport, about an hour and a quarter away, for the included flight to Istanbul, where you connect to your flight home; if you fly home directly from Izmir, we simply adjust the timing. We say goodbye there and hope you travel home with the colors of Cappadocia and the marble of Ephesus still in your mind.