Activities

Cappadocia usually runs on three main tours - red, green and blue.
Our itinerary: (photos at the end of the blog post)

Day 1 Pasabag and Pottery Town
Day 2 Goreme Open Air Museum, Rose Valley and Derinkuyu Underground City
Day 3 Free and Easy

The first two days would usually run this way":

the person picks you up in a van around 6-8am depending on when your activity begins — do note that if you have a 5am activity like horse riding, or a 3am pick up activity like hot air balloon riding, then you will just begin your day much earlier
8-10am - first location
10-12pm - second location
12-1.30pm - lunch (usually a communal lunch buffet spot)
1.30-3pm - next location
3-5pm - last location OR drop back at your hotel

Travelling time between locations are around 30 minutes to an hour as the main tourist zone is very small actually though it looks much larger on the map.

Location of Accomodation

Our stay location was not great, but since we booked a mini tour package for this leg of the trip we didn’t really have a choice.

We ended up staying in a Cave Hotel in Urgup - this is NOT AN IDEAL LOCATION. It is 30 minutes away from the main tourist zone which while isn’t a problem, becomes one when you realise there’s not much food in the area. This annoyed us quite a bit as we were hungry early and later during supper hours and didn’t have easy enough access to food.

To book a tour or not?

Yes:

Booking a tour means all your flights and check in/move to hotel from airport is settled. When you are in Turkiye, knowing the possibility of scams it is very tough to ensure that you are safe + sent to your hotel in one piece without potentially being scammed along the way from finding a taxi. This solves that problem
If you book a tour, the agency(ies) will bring you to most of the hotly visited tourist sites and you do not have to decide which/decide that for yourself. If you are on a first visit to Cappadocia or you’re short on time I think this is the best option to ensure you are also on time for your flight. Having the van around, we saw some families bring their luggage with them as the driver drops them at the airport to catch a connecting flight at the end of their day tour.
You get lunch catered buffet style and while it isn’t the most amazing food, this is a compromise for convenience.

No:

You cannot decide which locations you want to go - obviously this is the biggest drawback of a tour. Some locations were amazing and breathtaking but your time there is limited. That being said, we got at least 1 hour to 1hour 30 minutes per site so we thought that was quite well planned.
You may be exhausted, we were by the end of the second day.

However, we gained so much from randomly choosing a tour - we ended up with friends, and we had a free day 3 that we chose horse riding!

We recommend HORSE-RIDING instead of hot-air balloons as a much more affordable and certain activity. If you are put off by the high cost of riding the hot-air balloon, this is a very good alternative. We chose this over the ATV riding because we didn’t know if the weather would suit us.

If you choose the hot-air balloon ride you need

to start the day at 3am
to ensure the weather is right for the balloons to go up - the problem is that the organizer will only tell you if the weather will be right almost near to the take off. The problem with this is that if the weather doesn’t work, you won’t have the chance to do anything else because once the sun is up many of the early morning/dawn activities will have ended i.e. you can only go for ONE and if that fails the morning is wasted
to be okay with the dynamic pricing. For reference, in June the price was almost 250 euros per person when we asked around (think more or less)

If you choose the horse-riding activity

you get to be sure your event will happen - regardless of whether the weather permits the hot air balloons to go up, the horse riding will happen, and assuming you go on a clear enough day, which during summer most days are dry and rarely raining, then you will get beautiful sunrise views.
horse riding was much more affordable. It was SGD29 per person.
you do not need to wake up at 3am! We were picked up at 4.50am and the ride started at 5.30am, finishing by 7.30am'.