Has anyone done the City Travel Review program before?

tia1990

So there are a lot of reviews for the Berlin program, but I'm a skeptical person and I don't want to be scammed. Is it for real?

This is the program: http://www.goabroad.com/providers/city-travel-review/programs/ctr-berlin-travel-writers-reviewers-travel-researchers-111876

If you've done it before, what did you think of it? I understand participants have to share accommodation, which is fine (I guess). I would rather have my own room, but I suppose I can cope with sharing. I do like my own space, but oh well.

Is there anything else you can tell me about the program?

Thank you :smile:

Reply 1

Saz_

Hey I'm a bit late to this but I went to Berlin for a month with CityTravelReview in 2015.

It's not a scam, but I was quite disappointed with it to be honest. I enjoyed the writing side, however when I read about it online it really emphasised about the language learning, which was a complete disaster. I think they hired tutors externally and they only managed to split it into very advanced and complete beginners, so for people like myself which are somewhat intermediate, it was either get thrown into the deep end of poorly taught classes, or go back to basics.

Like I said though, the writing side was interesting, it's not really an internship, we got split into 2 groups to make a travel book about different tourist destinations. I kind of got the vibe of a school trip where kids got to feel important.

The staff were all over the place, I think 2 of the day trips the guides got lost. I also had a medical emergency at one point and they weren't too helpful. (I say emergency, but it wasn't anything serious by any means, just urgent.)

The apartments are shared, I think most if not all are 2 rooms, so 2 people share 1 and one person gets a room to themselves. It's apartments of all girls or all boys, so not mixed. Another thing to add is, there's supposed to be wifi, but it never worked as I think it was a top up service which one of the guides didn't top up enough for 20 people.

Met some cool people but if Berlin is appealing to you I'd recommend you save the money and just go there independently for a while. It's a great city.

Reply 2

martha-1

Original post by tia1990

yes the project is real and has run for over 10 years now. I did it quite recently and really enjoyed it. Accommodation is in shared apartments but i applied for a single room. There are limited ones available. I personally found the flats nice and in a much better condition than places i stayed before. All basics were there but no towels and some creature comforts from home i missed. We had a really nice team and i was lucky with my language teacher who had limitless patience with our training group. If u just wanna learn german maybe another project would be more suited. For me we had a good mixture of workshops and activities. I wanted quite a bit of freetime as i wanted to travel on weekends outside of Berlin. Berlin is a really vibrant place with a lot to discover. I would advise to simply check past projects, facebook past project gallery and then maybe speak to a ctr project co-ordinator who should tell you the basics and then weigh up pros and cons to make up your mind from there if it is for u? Is definitely not for everyone and was not honestly what i first expected but i had an exceptionally positive experience and for me at least was well worth it with fond memories. I was though also lucky with the other team members they selected who were all fantastically enthusiastic and socially i got a lot from this too :smile:

Has anyone done the City Travel Review program before?

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