“A couple of years back my wife and I visited Scotland on our great, once in a lifetime, around the world, retirement indulgence. But our visit was pretty ordinary and we were disapointed in the Scottish leg due to my inability to plan it well. Because we both love Scotland, we recently decided to go back and do it right. As you can imagine, visiting Scotland is a big deal when you live down under, so we got in touch with all sorts of businesses who sent brochures and bundles of information. We saved dozens of websites to a "Scotland or bust" folder of favourites on our computer and generally, we just got in a lather, where it all started to look just like our 1st trip. We could see another disaster looming. Then we found "Secret Scotland". What a relief. The owners, Mike and Aurelia, asked us what we would like to do, where we'd like to go, what we'd like to see etc, and modified one of their self drive tours for us. We chose the "Borders to Orkney 14 day tour" and within a few days it was emailed to us with the modifications in place. The "Secret Scotland" tours include sights that are off the beaten track by mainstream tour operators and excludes some of the more touristy sights should they be poor value for money or have an alternative way of seeing them. You get a lot of tour, in our case over 100 pages, for your money and because it was such good value we decided to buy a Recommended Accomodation list for this route, from them as well. The B&B's, hotels etc, on this list have all been checked out personally by Mike and Aurie and havent paid to be included, which makes us feel better, after a couple of not so great incidents on our last trip. So, all we can say is "well done" to Mike and Aurelia. They certainly did go the extra mile for us and we cant wait for the slowly approaching departure date to get here because we are now confident that this trip will be just brilliant thanks to "Secret Scotland".”