9 Days Best of Turkey Tour Package

After you arrive at Istanbul Airport or Sabiha Gokcen Airport, our team will meet you at the exit gate with a sign carrying your name.

You will be transferred to your hotel in central Istanbul for check-in.

The rest of the day is free, which helps you settle in before the touring part of the journey begins. You can relax near your hotel, take a short walk in your neighborhood, or simply recover from your flight.

Overnight stay in Istanbul.

Meal: Breakfast

08:30 - Pick up from your hotel and transfer to Sultanahmet for the morning city tour.

• Blue Mosque: The Blue Mosque opens the Old City route with its six minarets, large interior courtyard, and the hand-painted Iznik tiles that fill the prayer hall with soft blue light. It is still an active place of worship, which keeps it grounded in present-day Istanbul rather than only museum history.
• Hippodrome of Constantinople: Once the main gathering place of Byzantine public life, the Hippodrome is where chariot races, celebrations, and political drama all played out in the shadow of the city's monuments. The Egyptian Obelisk and Serpent Column still stand here as reminders of how layered the square's history really is.
• Hagia Sophia Mosque: Built in 537 AD as the largest cathedral in the world, Hagia Sophia was later converted into a mosque and remains the single most visited monument in Istanbul. Walking inside, you read centuries of Byzantine fresco, Ottoman calligraphy, and original Roman engineering all at once.
• Grand Bazaar (Free Time): The Grand Bazaar closes the guided morning with over 4,000 shops across 61 streets, a marketplace that has operated continuously since 1461. It is the best place in Istanbul to move from monuments into the city's commercial and cultural energy at your own pace.

12:30 - Guided tour ends at Grand Bazaar. The afternoon is free at your own pace.

Overnight stay in Istanbul.

Meal: Breakfast

Slower morning in Istanbul before the afternoon departure.

13:30 - Pick up from your hotel and transfer to the pier for the Bosphorus Cruise.

• Bosphorus Cruise: Sailing between Europe and Asia on a single afternoon gives you the broadest possible view of Istanbul, shorelines, palaces, bridges, and fortresses that no ground-level tour can replicate. The strait itself carries the city's whole identity as the place where two continents have always met.
• Landmarks from the water: The cruise passes Dolmabahce Palace, Ciragan Palace, Beylerbeyi Palace, Rumeli Fortress, the first Bosphorus Bridge, and a long sequence of historic waterside mansions. Seeing these from the water shows the scale and variety of the architecture in a way that surprises most travelers.

17:00 - Cruise ends and transfer back to your hotel.

Overnight stay in Istanbul.

Meal: Lunch

04:00 - Pick up from your hotel in Istanbul and transfer to the airport. (Pickup time and airport may change.)

07:00 - Flight from Istanbul to Cappadocia. (Flight time may change.)

08:00 - Arrival in Cappadocia. (Arrival airport and time may change according to availability.)

Transfer from the airport to the north Cappadocia touring area.

• Devrent Valley (Pink Valley): Devrent Valley rewards revisits at different times of day, and tour operators who run afternoon routes see a completely different color palette than morning groups. The valley's character shifts dramatically with light, which is unusual even by Cappadocia's standards.
• Pasabag Open Air Museum: Pasabag's fairy chimneys survived to their remarkable height because hard basalt caps at the top protected the softer volcanic tuff below from rain erosion. Remove those caps and the columns would have worn down to the valley floor centuries ago, leaving nothing to stand inside.
• Avanos Pottery Workshop: Children and adults both engage actively with the Avanos wheel session, and family groups often find it one of the most enjoyable moments of the entire tour. The instructor has taught thousands of beginners and has a patient, encouraging teaching style that keeps the experience fun rather than pressured.
• Goreme Panoramic View: At Goreme Panoramic View, your guide often takes the group photograph that serves as the day's commemorative image, with the full valley backdrop behind the group. Asking for that organized photo before everyone disperses to take individual shots is worth doing first.
• Zelve Open Air Museum: Zelve Open Air Museum charges a separate entrance fee from other museum sites in the region, which surprises some visitors who assume all Cappadocia sites use a single pass. Your Red Tour guide handles all entrance logistics, so this is purely informational context rather than a practical concern for tour participants.
• Uchisar Castle (exterior view): Byzantine communities who used Uchisar Castle valued it primarily as a refuge, a place the entire population could retreat to in times of threat. Tunnels honeycombing the rock allowed people to move between levels without exposure, a defensive feature visible from outside as a dense pattern of connecting passages.

17:00 - Transfer to your hotel in Cappadocia.

Overnight stay in Cappadocia.

Meal: Breakfast & Lunch

09:30 - Pick up from your hotel in Cappadocia.

Transfer to the south Cappadocia touring area after hotel check-out.

• Red Valley: Standing at Red Valley's main overlook, you can trace the full length of the canyon stretching south toward Rose Valley and west toward the plateau above Goreme. Few single viewpoints in Cappadocia offer such a clear sense of the region's full topographic scale.
• Rose Valley (Gulludere Valley): Rose Valley, known locally as Gulludere, takes its name from the distinctive pinkish hue its limestone cliffs radiate when hit by late afternoon sunlight. Ancient rock-cut Byzantine churches are carved into the valley walls at various heights, their interiors still bearing faded painted frescoes from early Christian communities.
• Cavusin Village: Interior rooms visible through Cavusin's open cave doorways still show carved shelves, niches, and floor channels, evidence of organized domestic life inside what appears to be bare rock from outside. Some rooms connect to further chambers deeper inside the cliff, with narrow carved passages linking individual dwellings to shared corridors.
• Pigeon Valley: Several large rock formations in Pigeon Valley have eroded into distinctive shapes that guides and local residents have named over generations. Looking up from the canyon floor, the cliff rim takes on different profiles from different angles, with overhanging ledges and pointed ridges creating silhouettes that change as you move through the valley.
• Underground City: Rock carvings and scratched markings on walls in Cappadocia's underground city are believed by some researchers to be ancient wayfinding markers, helping residents navigate the tunnel network in low light. Others interpret the markings as property designations or structural notes made during the carving process, though their exact meaning has not been definitively established.

17:00 - Transfer to the Cappadocia bus station after the tour.

20:00 - Overnight intercity bus from Cappadocia to Pamukkale. (Time may change.) The bus journey takes approximately 10 hours.

Overnight on the bus.

Meal: Breakfast & Lunch

05:30–06:00 - Arrival at Denizli Bus Station and transfer to a hotel in Pamukkale to freshen up before the tour.

09:30 - Start the guided Pamukkale tour.

• Pamukkale: Pamukkale's hillside looks like a staircase built for giants, each wide step filled with warm turquoise water. Calcium carbonate from thermal springs has been depositing here for over two millennia, building up the smooth white travertine surfaces step by step. The UNESCO World Heritage Site in Denizli pairs this geological spectacle with the extensive ancient ruins of Hierapolis just above.
• White Calcium Terraces: Nothing quite prepares you for the physical sensation of stepping onto Pamukkale's warm white calcium terraces for the first time. The travertine is smooth and warm, the water in each pool is body-temperature comfortable, and the view across the Denizli valley stretches for miles. These terraces formed over two millennia of slow mineral deposit and feel timeless in the best possible way.
• Hierapolis Ancient City: Romans who came to Pamukkale for its thermal springs liked what they found so much that they built an entire city on top. Hierapolis was founded in the 2nd century BC and grew into a major Greco-Roman spa destination, its streets and monuments spreading across the hilltop above the white travertine terraces. Much of that city is still standing today, and walking through it is a genuine step back two thousand years.
• Cleopatra Antique Thermal Pool: Historical records cannot confirm that Cleopatra herself swam in this particular pool, but the thermal water here is Roman-era, the pool structure is ancient, and the submerged marble columns are genuine earthquake casualties. Warm mineral water at 36 degrees surrounds fragments of a Roman building that has been in the pool since the 7th century. Admission is an optional extra paid on-site, separate from the tour price. Swimming is not included in the tour price and is payable on-site.

16:00 - Pamukkale tour ends and transfer to Kusadasi/Selcuk begins.

Overnight stay in Kusadasi/Selcuk.

Meal: Breakfast & Lunch

08:30 - Pick up from your hotel in Kusadasi/Selcuk after breakfast and check-out.

Transfer to the Ephesus touring area.

• Ephesus Ancient City: Ephesus was not just a Roman city, it grew from Greek origins, and the layers of that history are visible in the architectural details if you know where to look. Your guide points out how Greek column styles gave way to Roman adaptations in different parts of the ancient city. That layered quality makes Ephesus more interesting than a site built in a single period.
• House of Virgin Mary: Recognized by the Vatican as an official Catholic pilgrimage site, the House of Virgin Mary in Selcuk holds a specific religious and historical claim that sets it apart from many contested sacred sites. The scholarly investigation that led to Vatican recognition, based in part on a 19th-century German nun's documented visions, is itself an interesting story that your guide can explain. History, faith, and landscape combine here in a way that is hard to find elsewhere.
• Temple of Artemis: Four times larger than the Parthenon, the Temple of Artemis would have dominated the landscape around ancient Ephesus in a way that modern visitors can only estimate by imagining 127 tall columns filling the field before them. Archaeologists have mapped the original foundation, and the site markers give a clear sense of the footprint, enormously wide, stretching across what is now a shallow marshy basin near Selcuk. One visit here reframes your understanding of ancient ambition.

17:00 - Transfer to Izmir Adnan Menderes Airport after the tour.

19:30 - Flight from Izmir to Istanbul. (Flight time may change.)

20:45 - Arrival in Istanbul. (Arrival airport and time may change according to availability.)

Transfer to your hotel in Istanbul.

Overnight stay in Istanbul.

Meal: Breakfast

Rest of the day at leisure in Istanbul.

Overnight stay in Istanbul.

Meal: Breakfast

After breakfast, please complete hotel check-out before 11:30.

According to your international flight schedule, our team will arrange your transfer to Istanbul Airport or Sabiha Gokcen Airport.

Your 9 Days Best of Turkey Tour Package ends with the final airport transfer. We hope the route leaves you with a real cross-section of Turkey rather than only a quick checklist of famous places.