We have used this company twice during two separate visits to San Francisco and had two drastically different experiences. When we visited in June of this year, we had a very positive experience with the City Sightseeing buses and we especially loved our experience with Suzanne, she was awesome! On this first trip, we had bought the 48 hour pass, but had to cut the tour short on the second day to catch our flight home. We had planned to do the side tour of the parks and beaches, but after we got on Suzanne’s bus, she was so knowledgeable about the history of the city, we changed our plans and rode her bus the rest of the tour before we had to catch our ride to the airport. We came back to the city this last week with my parents, and because we’d had a good experience in June, recommended to my parents that we should buy the 48 hour passes again. My husband and I have done the hop on hop off tours in several cities and it’s one of our favorite ways to see a city. You get to visit all the main tourist sites without having to pay for a rental car or taxi to get around. And we really enjoy listening to the live guides that these types of tours seem to be known for, you really can learn so much about the city, and each guide has different and unique information from the last guide.
Unfortunately our experience this last week with the City Siteseeing buses was drastically different than what we had in June. The first day we rode 5 different buses and never once had a live guide on the main route, but were never told otherwise when we bought our tickets. Our earphones and the jacks didn’t work very well with the audio recording. Because we had skipped the parks and beaches tour in June, we were really looking forward to it this trip. This hour long tour did have a “live” guide who spent the entire ride telling us about his entire life history, including medical history, social history, family life, etc. When we got to the Legion of Honor, he announced that we were there, but since it was 4:00 in the afternoon, said we couldn’t get out, he was only picking up passengers. When I asked what it was, he just repeated that it was the Legion of Honor. My dad informed us that it was a WWI memorial. We drove by beaches, a couple of windmills that seemed interesting, but instead of telling us about the sights on the tour, he pointed out the VA hospital in the distance where he’d had his hip surgeries. It seemed to us that the company had not invested time in training him as a tour guide, which was unfortunate. He was a very nice man who seemed to enjoy talking to the passengers, and if he had been trained better, I’m sure would have been a very interesting guide. Whether it’s true or not, our perception was that this company was only interested in paying drivers to get people around the city, but wanted to save costs/cut corners by having the recorded audio instead of paying a second person to be on the bus as a guide. Every bus we saw from the Big Bus company drive by all had live guides. I’m not sure if the fact that it was mid week or after the summer rush made a difference, but most of the buses we were on were full, so clearly there was still a market. After the first day, we still had sites in the city we wanted to see, but were so frustrated with our experience the day before, we decided to save time and used the city’s public transit system instead to get around the city and never used the hop on/off bus the second day. If there had been live guides, we would have continued using the hop on/off, just to hear what they had to say about the city, but since all we had was an audio recording, we knew we wouldn’t get any new information. After looking more closely at the brochure map, we did see in the fine print that some of the buses had the audio recordings, and if had just been 1 or 2, we would have even been fine with that, but to not have any real guides for an entire day was very disappointing. Since we’ve seen all these sites twice now, we probably won’t do the hop on hop off buses on our next visit to San Francisco, but if we did, I’m sorry to say we would use/recommend a different company.