Vassilakis Estate - Olive Tour Crete — Attraction in Municipality of Agios Nikolaos

This was recommended to us via a friend we met at our resort and again by the car rental agency. As it was a free tour and my boy really wanted to see an olive farm we decided to head down in the afternoon (last week of August) .

The drive from our Sentido resort was a short 30 mins away. When we arrived, the place had a few people and we were asked to wait for a few mins while the existing tour came to an end.

The lady that took us around was a member of the family that owned the estates. She described how the olives are grown and on to how they produced olive oils and stored in giant vats. Apparently one tree can produce 80kilos of olives, 4 kilos are required to create a bottle of olive oil!

The kids enjoyed the tour, especially the tasting at the end, both son and daughter finished the entire bread bowls! Apart from the soap and shampoo, we got to try various olive created products.

There is no obligation to buy, but we bought a few items. It's cheaper to buy here then at some of the shops. We were even tempted to buy an olive tree!! Not sure how customs would have taken it!

We realised a couple of things when we got back to the hotel, was that we forgot to ask to get the bottles wrapped in bubble wrap for transport. We also found that we had purchased a pesto jar with the seal broken and thus this leaked when we arrived home. Luckily it was slight and we had already wrapped it in...

Nice olive oil factory with "free friendly tour" It is for free and nice to see how they use this factory during other moments. That being said, this tour is all about selling their products at the end of the tour. When we answered we were from The Netherlands, the tour guide was not pleased. Next she asked my name and started to laugh when i answered??

The tour itself went quite fast and showed a (non running) factory and a show of different olive oils. The bottling areas could be seen from behind a window, the storage area was shown and the lights were switched off while walking upstairs. The tour even "continued" when a quad safari stopped at this location, making it impossible to talk or listen anymore.

At the end of the tour, most time was spend on promoting the products which were being sold by offing the products to be tasted and pushed to buy (more) (same herbs were cheaper at the local souvenir shops!)

It was for free, we bought some nice olive oil and snacks and left. Will try to find an other, operational mill...

We took the “Olive Oil Discovery Tasting Tour” and were quite disappointed with the experience. The tour costs €20 per person, and the tasting itself lasted only about 5 minutes, of which nearly 3 minutes the guide spent attending work-related calls through her headset. At first, it started with small interruptions, but then it escalated to the point where she was unable to even finish a sentence. She was also urging us to finish quickly and move on to the next part of the tour. As a result, we received no complete explanation and learned almost nothing about the tasting. I actually learned more from the piece of paper with information they gave us. Honestly, a recorded message or a short video would have been a better experience. From a customer service perspective, it felt poorly managed, rushed, and not worth the price. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend it.

On the positive side, the later part of the tour (through the factory) was led by another staff member who was very friendly and improved the...