Judy Fort

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

This tour was one of the worst hop on/off I've don...

This tour was one of the worst hop on/off I've done recently. My takeaways first:
1) Wait for a driver who narrates so you don't have to listen the recorded sales pitch disguised as a tour.
2) If you can combine this with the one bus I saw that has adult seats and not child school bus seats, even better.
3) Don't have high expectations of the bus showing up every 10-15 minutes.

We started off at a stop waiting for the bus to arrive within route hours for the park route. We waited 25 minutes for the first bus, and had we not already paid would have changed our plans for the day. When we got on the bus, it was an old school bus with old school bus seats (and the discomfort and lack of leg room you'd expect from this). We were provided ear buds for audio, but we did not need this as the English version was playing over the speakers. On this bus, if you needed to, you could select a different language. This was the only bus we rode we saw this option on. We sat in the closed section of the bus, and the back is open air as the top was removed. The audio "tour" honestly felt like a sales pitch. We'd hear about how we could book another tour or what tours were available at each stop, and very little history. There were several stops where passengers were waiting but could not get on because our bus was full. Passengers who were able to get on often had to split from their party as adjoining seats were not available. We got off at Granville Island stop.

After walking around, we were able to get on the city route when we got back to the stop. This bus only had the English over the speaker option, and had the same seating arrangement. The audio was also the same terrible sales pitch, and at several points we were played duplicate audio after we'd already passed a stop we might have liked to get off at, but didn't because the info was too late to do so.

After making a full circle on the city route, we got off again at the Granville stop to swap to the park route. We waited through four more city route buses before a quite full park route bus showed up (quite a long wait). Getting on was hectic, and even though we were the second party at the stop, everyone pushed to get on ahead of us. When we did get on, this had even fewer seats because the seats on the right only had room for one. **This was the best driver of the day BY FAR.** Instead of listening to a pre-recorded terrible audio track, he gave a live and great tour as we went along until the end of his shift, where we were once again left to the recorded audio.