Kombi: Hop-on-Hop-off-Bustour Florenz + Uffizien-Tour ohne Anstehen

The information provided about Florence was well-proportioned and informative. On the negative side, although the bus had a rain cover, it had large holes in several places, and in one spot, easily 30 x 100 cm was missing. Because of this, those seats couldn't be used, and the attendant arrived far too late with a roll of paper towels to dry the seats. It's a shame that so little attention is paid to details like that.

​I took the City Sightseeing: Florence Hop-on Hop-off Bus Tour, and unfortunately, it was a very disappointing experience. ​First of all, when I bought my ticket on the website, it stated that there were two routes available in Florence: the Blue Line and the Red Line. I specifically wanted to ride the Red Line, but once I arrived, I was told that the second line wasn't working at all. I had no choice but to take the Blue Line instead. ​Secondly, the audio guide (Russian version) was of very poor quality. While some recordings were okay, others—voiced by a different person—sounded terrible, almost like badly generated AI. The voice pitch jumped, the volume kept fluctuating, and it was quite hard to understand what was being said. ​Thirdly, there were very few sights along the route, and the audio guide provided almost no useful information. During the entire one-hour ride around the city, I learned virtually nothing about Florence. On top of that, whenever the audio guide was describing a landmark, it was frequently interrupted by live announcements for bus stops, making us miss half of the information. ​The icing on the cake was when our bus broke down right in the middle of the road! Nobody bothered to inform those of us sitting on the upper deck. Passengers only realized something was wrong after we sat parked in the same spot for over 10 minutes. When someone finally went down to ask the driver, we were told the bus couldn't continue the trip. We were advised to walk to another bus stop and wait for the next bus (and there were only 2 buses operating in the entire city!). ​After that experience, I decided not to get back on the bus at all. Overall, this was a terrible experience, and I doubt I will ever buy a Hop-on Hop-off ticket again. I definitely won't recommend this service to my friends.

Compared to other city hop on hop off tours. This one was very disappointing. Long waits to get on buses almost an hour. Half the bus had unusable broken seats and the audio played more music and adds than tell us about the city. We drove past many notable sites without mention of what they were. There were no references to left or right in the audio guide either. One route was not available at all.

The driver and ticket taker for our bus 351 were so courteous. When we mistakenly thought our tickets hadn't been returned, the ticket taker was patient and professional. We later found out that someone else in our party had received the ticket and forgot they had them. We all felt the ticket taker was so calm and polite. He should receive special recognition for his professionalism. He is a great reason we will keep riding and recommending Hop'On Hop Off and your company to other travelers. Thank you!

The meeting point was exactly where the tour details said it would be. We were checked off on the list and at the appointed time we met our guide. The guide was engaging and gave us some great insights to what we were looking at. We were able to hear everything she said because of the microphone/headset system that she/we were using. Once she had completed her part of the guided tour, we were free to do our own thing. Although it was busy, it didn't feel as busy as the Uffizi Galleries which was absolutely no fun. I would recommend this tour experience.

The Uffizi tour was canceled at 9 PM the night before and rescheduled to a later time without asking beforehand if the new time slot was possible (which it wasn't). The correspondence with the local tour operator was very unsatisfactory, as they were not cooperative in any way; we were merely told that we could request a refund. When we tried to request it, we were told they were not responsible and that this would be handled through Headout. When we inquired there, we were referred back to the local operator again. To this day, no refund has been issued.

The queue times to get on the bus were ridiculously long. We waited forty minutes for the first bus we boarded and then after getting off we waited almost an hour for the bus, we were not able to get on the first bus as it didn't have room for everyone at the bus stop. Because of all the waiting we were only able to do one more stop. Again we had to wait about 40 minutes, we were lucky to get on the bus as there were a lot of people in the queue behind us that didn't get on. There was a lot of road works so queue times were expected but I felt it was really badly organised and staff didn't inform us of what was happening or the potential for extremely long queues. One bus had half the seats upstairs out of action due to damage.