The tour itself was great as we got to see a lot of Yosemite’s landmarks in the day. It was also good to have free time to explore. Joe the tour guide was quite knowledgeable about Yosemite and provided a lot of knowledge about San Francisco. However there were a couple of issues potential customers should be aware of with this tour including:
1. Lack of comfortable amenities on the bus. If your tour group is full, try to avoid the last row of the bus as it’s very uncomfortable with little to no leg room. I am 5 foot 1 and struggled to fit my legs in. We told Joe our discomfort, and he did little to nothing to help us swap seats. Also note that you might have air conditioning water leak on you in the back of the mini-van.
2. The 14 hour tour duration is misleading. Joe even told us on all of his trips, he’s never once made it back to San Francisco by the proposed finish time of 8:30pm (we start at 6-6:20am). We got back to San Francisco at about 9:30pm. If this is the regular time, this should be updated on the website.
3. The lack of impartiality and favouritism by Joe towards other customers on the tour. We were asked to swap our seats to accommodate for another group, primarily due to the fact that we were the youngest on the tour group. This then led to us getting the back seats on the bus with no leg room. Joe did not offer to swap us with others after 2-4 hours of driving, and we were forced to endure it for 6 hours, even after making it known to him how uncomfortable it was. Also, we asked about the stops and he even mentioned how he was accomodating special requests for another group to be dropped off, but would not do it for us. He also happily swapped other passengers and offered to swap them back after a reasonable amount of time. This offer was not extended to us, which we thought was pretty poor service.
Overall a great tour soured by a below par tour guide.