Never get involved with Coral Travel or Odeon Tours

I dislike complaining. But Russian and Turkish travel agencies Coral Travel and Odeon Tours made everything to spoil my holidays. Their attempt was unsuccessful, but very serious...
At first, Coral played with flight time table: while buying a tour I was promised to have a flight at 6.00. In fact we left at about 18.00. We were notified that flight would be postponed till 16.00 , but after arriving to our airport, we found out that the flight was postponed till 17.30 or something like that. In fact, we left about 18.00.
Further worries were connected with work of hotel guide (from Odeon Tours). First of all, we didn't get his contacts and were informed that he could be found at hotel reception the next day at 9 o'clock. Luckily, we didn't need his service...
When we met the guide, he suggested us to go to different excursions. Later we found out that suggested prices were at least twice higher than prices of other tour operators. For example, we liked prices and excursions suggested by Maxwell travel agency, their office could be found accross the road from our hotel (Sea Gull Hotel). The hotel guide talked out of renting a car or a bike. In my opinion, he didn't want his company to be responsible in case of car accident. More on that - he significantly overstated the price of bus ticket to Kemer (it seems, for the same reason)... He even stated that if we would have some accidents during our excursions with other travel agency, nor Odeon Tours, nor Coral Travel would be responsible.
But that's not all. There was an evident deal between our travel agency and the hotel administration. We were told that hotel wouldn't provide us packed lunch when we visit excursions held by another tour operator (but the hotel would provide it if went to Coral/Odeon excursions).

To summarize, I liked my holidays in Turkey, but it was despite the behavior of my tour operator.

P.S. I read a lot of negative reviews on Sea Gull Hotel. Don't believe them! Our room was cleaned regularly (thanks to Fatima, who decorated our room with flowers), staff was responsive (and most of them spoke Russian) and food was good. It would be good to have free sport inventory (such as tennis rackets), but what do you want - it is not a 5-star hotel. At least there was rather normal fitness center: not super, but it had enough inventory for you to keep shape.

Two useful illumos-related links

I've just found two interesting resources:

• planet.illumos.org site - it's always interesting to know what is happening in opensource Solaris. I'm still looking at this project. We'll hardly make something like OpenIndiana our main platform, but for me it's a preferrable alternative to Linux where FreeBSD is not the best sollution (e.g. I'd prefer to use something Solaris-based for hardly loaded file server because of some stability issues with ZFS in FreeBSD and we still should decide what to do with our existing SXCE-based terminal servers). And planet.opensolaris.org became very quiet now..


• src.illumos.org - sometimes you just have to look at some subsystem to understand what has gone wrong. Web access to code is useful thing to have for such cases.
  

And I would like to play with stable OpenIndiana release. In particular it's interesting to see how do it deal with multipath on our EMC Clarion storage.