Robert Harrington

Review of Hop on hop off/ Westcoast Sigh...

Hop on and off to see Vancouver. Westcoast Sightse...

Hop on and off to see Vancouver. Westcoast Sightseeing s Hop-On, Hop-Off service is a good way to see Vancouver. Overall, I like the service. The tour consisted of fairly comfortable busses with good open-air seat visibility and pre-recorded narration across two loops, the Park Loop and City Loop. The loops did cross, so we purchased the combined pass (I recommend you do) to flexibly visit the stops we were interested in as the day wore on. We purchased tickets on their great web site and picked up our first bus right next to our hotel in downtown Vancouver. We moved back and forth between routes to visit several key stops while seeing much of Vancouver and receiving some education on the city along the way. The narration was informative and somewhat corny. The scripting lacked some of the local charm and flexibility we ve seen with live narrations of similar tours in other cities. The scripting also repeated itself multiple times between stops sometimes, which was annoying. Some drivers did add some commentary, which we much appreciated (message to Westcoast, improve your narration scheme). The bus drivers were generally okay (some good, some a bit rude), and the condition of the busses were generally good. The company maintains a live, on-line bus location feed that s fantastic; we displayed the feed on our cell phones to time our station pickups. During our tour, the busses crowded up by mid-day, really too crowded at one point, forcing us to miss two pickups in a row due to no seats. Westcoast Sightseeing adds more busses when ridership is congested, but they add the new busses too slowly, forcing unacceptable waits (message to Westcoast, improve your timing scheme). We did see plenty of energetic young employees with electronic tablets at stops; these staff were very friendly and did a great job answering questions and trying to organize the bus flow. The price is okay; I think the combined two-loop ticket is the best value. We especially liked the Westcoast Sightseeing Hop-On, Hop-Off service for the Stanley Island portion of our visit; we exited the bus on one side of the huge park and hiked the forests, bay views, and gardens to the opposite side of the park to catch another bus back to the city very convenient. Overall, I liked the Westcoast Sightseeing s Hop-On, Hop-Off; it s a decent value for decent price, good stops, and fair reliability, all without having to worry about driving and parking in busy Vancouver. Westcoast definitely needs to make some improvements, but even with the current imperfections, the service is a reasonable choice for touring the beautiful and interesting city of Vancouver.