Part 1
We flew American Airlines, Philadelphia to Miami to Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv airport was busy with a lack of directional signage when exciting the plane.
As soon as you start walking you see large groups congregating with tour company leaders. Unless you know beforehand that you need to procure a small card which is your ‘Israel visa’, You can easily miss the small self kiosks that look like Global Entry kiosks. You lay your passport on the machine and have your picture taken and the machine prints out a business size card that has your passport photo on it. You then proceed further amongst the crowds and look for the ‘ mosaics’ where Tauck tells you the Tauck contact will be. These mosaics turned out to be quite small and bland above an exit area and not obvious at all, crowded with more groups and a couple of people holding signs. We were just about to call the local contact when we spotted a man holding two signs with four different tour company names on them, all black print , one said Tauck…not the usual proper green Tauck logo. One of the others was Viking. Seven people including us congregated by him. We were the only Tauck people. Three had not gotten their little Israel Visa cards so we had to go as a group and get those first. Then we bypassed the crowds in the general passport control which our funny guide Mars said he saved us a two hour line, and went thru I guess a VIP control with no line at all. More walking to a transport area and then another wait for our driver . It took us about 40 minutes through fairly heavy traffic to get to the hotel.
