Siena Cathedral Complex OPA SI Pass with Digital Audio Guide

The cathedral complex was breathtaking! I was looking forward to this visit but it still exceeded expectations! One of the highlights of our trip. We had done Florence a couple of days before but I think I enjoyed this cathedral more. The audio guide was super detailed and interesting and easy to use. The library, museum, facciatone, baptistery and crypt was also super interesting, not to be forgotten.

The ease of ticket and avoiding the lines was great, however once in the Cathedral - even though it said I had downloaded the guide - I couldn't get it to go from one number to the next without closing out of the app and restarting it. It was time consuming and frustrating & I found myself so irritated by it that after the 10th one I just stopped listening & decided to walk around and enjoy the experience without a guide. I'm sure I could have called to ask for assistance but my time was limited & I didn't want to waste it on the phone instead of enjoying the experience.

The audio guide’s narration was, at times, a bit theatrical and boring in the way it presented the content. The young man who handed us the audio guides was more preoccupied with replying to voice messages on his cell phone than with taking the time to explain the pass we had purchased. This was my first time using Headout, and it doesn’t measure up to other popular apps that offer similar experiences.

The audio guide wouldn't download because it said THE TICKET CODE WAS INVALID. The staff on site gave me a password that allowed me to download the audio guide, but it kept disconnecting frequently (the staff themselves mentioned an “UNSTABLE NETWORK” every time I entered), so I had to keep re-entering the password they gave me In the Baptistery and the Crypt, there was no connection, so it wasn’t possible to listen to anything. The same thing happened to the person with my second ticket. A very frustrating experience. In the end, for the floor in the Cathedral, I found all the descriptions on Wikipedia—much more complete—and at least that way I was able to learn about what I was seeing.