The Tour Guy

Hi John, thank you for sharing your feedback, and we are so glad to hear that you had highly successful experiences on your other tours with us in Italy. However, we are very sorry to hear that your Vatican experience fell short of our standards and that our communication did not meet your expectations. We would like to clarify the schedule changes you experienced. We initially reached out to you on June 22nd to check your availability for an afternoon slot because we had not yet met the minimum group requirement to run the morning tour. Once additional travelers booked and met that minimum, we returned you to your original 8:00 AM booking. We apologize for any confusion this caused; this scheduling check was entirely unrelated to the Papal Audience. Regarding St. Peter's Basilica, we do openly state on our booking page, our FAQs, and your tour voucher that the Basilica is closed on Wednesday mornings due to the Papal Audience, and that morning tours on this day do not include entry. However, our internal policy dictates that if the Basilica is inaccessible, our guides are expected to make up that time by guiding you through other areas of the Vatican Museums. We are extremely disappointed to hear that your tour was concluded in under two hours without this extra guiding taking place. Our support team has processed your request to make this right. We have responded directly to your email, processed a partial refund back to your original payment method, and issued an additional $100 credit to your account with us as a sincere apology for the inconvenience and delay. We truly value your repeat business and hope to welcome you back for a flawless experience in the future.

Hi Peter, thank you for sharing your feedback with us, and we are glad to hear that you had a fantastic experience on our Rome food tour. However, we are deeply sorry for the frustrating experience and the conflicting schedule information you encountered regarding your Naples food tour, which ultimately led to you missing the experience. We completely understand your disappointment, especially given how organized and seamless your experience in Rome was. In Naples, we work closely with local operators to bring our travelers authentic regional culinary experiences, and they are expected to uphold our high standards of punctuality and organization. We are incredibly disappointed to hear that you were at the meeting point at the correct adjusted time of 4:30 PM and the local operator did not show up as scheduled. We have addressed this directly with our Naples partner to investigate this operational failure and ensure it does not happen to future travelers. Please be assured that we do not keep your money for experiences you were unable to join. A full refund has been issued back to your original payment method. We sincerely apologize for this disruption to your day in Naples, and we hope to have the opportunity to restore your trust and welcome you back for a flawless tour in the future.

Hi Saranga, thank you for sharing your feedback with us. We are deeply concerned to hear about your experience, as this is completely unacceptable and does not reflect the high standards of guiding we pride ourselves on. For our London tours, we work exclusively with Blue Badge tourist guides, which is the highest professional guiding qualification in the UK. These guides undergo rigorous training to ensure they are highly knowledgeable, engaging, and professional. Hearing that your guide only stayed with you for ten minutes before leaving you to explore on your own is extremely disappointing. We have escalated this directly to our London Guide Operations Team to launch an immediate investigation into this guide's conduct on your tour date. We want to make this right as quickly as possible. A member of our support team will be reaching out to you directly at the email address provided to address this issue and process a resolution for you. We sincerely apologize for this experience, and we hope to have the opportunity to show you the true quality of our tours in the future.

Hi Chelsea, thank you so much for the fantastic feedback! We are thrilled to hear that Kiara made the island history come alive and became a major highlight of your trip. We love making history exciting even for non-history buffs, and we hope you travel with us again on your next adventure. Please tell your friends and family about The Tour Guy so they can join in on the fun too!

Hi Michael, thank you! We are so glad everything was easy and well-prepared for your trip. Please tell your family about The Tour Guy and come back soon!

Hi Alma, thanks! Tell your friends about The Tour Guy and come back soon!

Hi Maria, thank you for sharing your honest feedback, and we are glad to hear that your Versailles tour with Kenny went very well. However, we are deeply sorry for the frustrating situation you experienced at the Louvre, especially after traveling so far to see it. We completely understand why a refund does not make up for missing out on your top priority in Paris. This issue arose due to an unexpected technical synchronization error with our local partner, Uncle Sam Tours, meaning your booking did not register on their direct rosters. We have already addressed this software issue with our Paris Manager and our technical team to ensure it does not happen again. Regarding the Versailles text from Ece, this was not a double-booking but rather a network delay in delivering the message while you were traveling abroad. We apologize for the disappointment during your stay, and we hope you will reach out to us at [email protected] so we can connect further and get this resolved for you.

Hi James, thank you so much for this incredible and detailed review! We are absolutely thrilled to hear that Monika made the ancient ruins of Rome come alive for your whole family, keeping everyone from age 10 to 16 completely engaged despite the intense summer heat. Bringing gladiators and emperors to life is exactly what we strive for, and Palatine Hill is indeed the perfect backdrop for those family photos! We will certainly pass along your wonderful praises to Monika. Please tell your friends and family about The Tour Guy, and we would love to welcome you back for another unforgettable adventure on your next trip!

Hi Dave, thank you for taking the time to share your feedback! We are so glad that Jose kept the long walk engaging, educational, and fun for you. We appreciate your recommendation, and we hope you travel with us again on your next vacation. Please tell your friends and family about The Tour Guy!

Hi Michelle, thank you so much for the lovely recommendation! We pride ourselves on being punctual, professional, and bringing you the absolute best local guides. We are so happy to have been a part of your travels, and we hope you travel with us again on your next trip abroad. Please tell your friends and family about The Tour Guy!

Hi Cacee, thank you so much for the wonderful review! We are so happy to hear that you met great people and had an amazing experience with Arvin. We love building those community connections on our adventures, and we hope you travel with us again soon. Please tell your friends and family about The Tour Guy!

Hi Leslie, thank you for the wonderful feedback! We are absolutely delighted to hear that Silvia took such great care of your multigenerational group and made the museum accessible for everyone. Tailoring the history for both kids and seniors is a true art, and we hope you travel with us again soon. Please tell your friends and family about The Tour Guy!

Hello, We are truly sorry to read about such a frustrating series of events, as this is completely opposite to the experience we aim to provide our guests. We would like to gently clarify a few points regarding how our tours operate. We take great care to provide precise meeting locations, including detailed drop-pins, landmark photos, and explicit directions on all digital vouchers to avoid any confusion around landmarks like ticket booths or trees. Additionally, our dedicated customer support team monitors our emergency lines continuously during operating hours to assist guests on the ground. Because we operate under the name "The Tour Guy" and strive to maintain direct, transparent communication, it is deeply concerning to hear that you were unable to reach anyone or receive assistance. We take feedback like this very seriously, but because this review was posted under an anonymous name ("Customer") without a booking or order number, we have been unable to locate any matching records for your Colosseum or Venice reservations in our system. We reached out directly through Trustpilot requesting your booking details so we could investigate what happened and assist you, but we have not yet received a response. We strongly suspect there may be a mix-up with another company or booking platform. If you did indeed book directly with The Tour Guy, please reach out to us at [email protected] with your order details and reference your review so we can look into this immediately and ensure you are taken care of.

Hi Thy, thank you for taking the time to leave us a review! We are glad that you found our tour experience highly informative. Please tell your friends and family about The Tour Guy!

Hi Anna, thank you for sharing your feedback. While we are glad you found the tour itself to be okay, we want to address your concerns regarding the scheduling and logistics of this highly exclusive experience. We understand that shifting your plans was frustrating, but we must stand by our operational procedures and the strict terms of booking the Colosseum Underground. The Colosseum Underground is the most restricted and highly sought-after area of the monument, with ticketing entirely controlled by the Italian government. Because entry times are strictly assigned by the monument on a rolling basis, we make it very clear—and require agreement at checkout—that all start times are provisional, that guests must keep their day flexible, and that start times can change. Our local partner, Tickets & Tours LTD, acted directly to secure your access when the monument released your slot, and they proactively reached out via WhatsApp to ensure you had the updated time as early as possible. While our support team was verifying this change with the partner to ensure its accuracy before updating our internal system, the shift in time was necessary to prevent your tour from being canceled entirely. Additionally, we want to assure you that our online reviews are completely organic and written by real travelers, not "local guides." Partnering with heavily vetted local operators is a standard industry practice that allows us to secure highly competitive, restricted-access tickets for our guests. Regarding the "keys" to the Underground, these are strictly managed by the Colosseum’s official state security guards, not our guides, and any delays in unlocking the gates are unfortunately beyond our control. We take our group size limits very seriously and are addressing your feedback with our Rome team to ensure our partners are strictly maintaining our small-group capacities at all times. Please reach out to us at [email protected] so we can review your booking further.

Hello Susan, First, we want to wish you a very happy wedding anniversary and birthday! We know how incredibly important these milestones are, and we want nothing more than for you to have an unforgettable trip to Rome. We would like to reassure you that you are in highly capable hands. Your tour is scheduled with our close, fully accredited partner, Carpe Diem, which operates under the parent company Global Experiences, just as The Tour Guy is accredited under The Roman Guy. They are absolutely an authorized operator at the Colosseum, and you will have no trouble entering. When the highly restricted underground access became unavailable, we immediately secured the next best experience for you: the semi-private Colosseum Arena Floor tour. This is an incredibly exclusive and hard-to-get access point, and we made this transition precisely because we did not want you to face a last-minute cancellation on the day of your tour. We also immediately adjusted your booking price to reflect this change. We apologize for any delay in getting back to your emails but I see you got a response from our support team within a day. While we understand the pre-trip anxiety, we would love the opportunity to actually host you on this incredible tour before you count us out. If you would still prefer to look at other options, please contact us at [email protected] so we can get this resolved for you.

Hi Shana, thank you for sharing your feedback with us. As a company that prides itself on providing bucket-list, premium travel experiences, we are deeply sorry that your exclusive pre-opening Vatican tour fell short of the flawless experience you expected. We completely understand that for art history aficionados, ninety minutes of quiet, crowd-free access inside the Vatican Museums is a once-in-a-lifetime splurge, and every single minute of that time is incredibly precious. We want to be completely transparent with you: our guide made a mistake. One of our guides did not properly read her calendar. While your guide is normally one of our most beloved and highly rated experts, this human error is unacceptable for a high-value experience, and we have addressed this directly with our Rome Guide Operations Team to ensure it does not happen again. Regarding your request for an additional cash refund, we must stand by our final refund combined with the $200 USD travel credit. Between the 15% cash refund already processed and the high-value credit we issued to your account, we believe the total compensation package is a fair resolution. While we did start late due to our guide's oversight, a portion of the entry process still involved the normal security checks and ticketing procedures required for such an exclusive event, which are standard for all guests. We understand that you have already returned home and feel the credit holds no current value, but we want to highlight that this credit is valid for a full three years and can be used on any of our highly rated tours in major destinations across Europe—including Rome, Florence, Venice, Paris, London, and Barcelona—should you or your family plan a return trip. We sincerely apologize for the frustration this situation caused during and after your vacation. We deeply appreciate you holding us to the high standards we claim to represent, and we hope the combined refund and long-term credit go some way toward making up for the lost time.

Hi Michael, thank you for taking the time to share your detailed feedback with us. We are glad to hear that our recent personal outreach was received in good faith and that our cancellation and refund process was completed to your satisfaction. However, we are deeply sorry for the initial breakdown in communication, the frustration of feeling unheard during a stressful situation, and the abrupt nature of our schedule-change notifications. To provide some context on the schedule change, the Colosseum administration operates under highly restrictive and unpredictable ticket-allocation rules. We are often forced to move bookings to entirely different times of day in order to guarantee entry, as the alternative is a flat cancellation. We completely agree that the initial communication regarding this change should have been handled with far more empathy and explanation rather than a clinical administrative alert. We have taken your feedback directly to our Customer Service teams to completely restructure how we communicate schedule changes to our travelers moving forward. We also want to apologize for the delay in our email responses. During the peak summer season, our email volumes increase significantly. Our ticketing system unfortunately pushed your ticket back to the end of the queue with each follow-up message—a technical issue we are currently correcting so that urgent pre-tour concerns are prioritized. While we are glad our phone lines were active, we deeply regret that call-quality issues and disconnections only amplified your frustration. A full refund of $980.88 has been successfully processed back to your original payment method, and we have issued an additional $100 credit to your account as a tangible gesture of our apology. We are genuinely glad that everything ultimately worked out for your family's trip to Rome, and we wish you and your family the very best on all of your future travels.

Hi Bryan, thank you so much for your kind words! We are glad that our guide was friendly and kept the experience highly informative for you. Creating welcoming and educational environments is what we do best, and we hope you travel with us again soon. Please tell your friends and family about The Tour Guy!

Hi Elle, thank you so much for this amazing review! We are absolutely thrilled that Geppi brought the rich history and culture of Naples to life and managed to exceed all of your expectations. Creating unforgettable moments is what we strive for, and we hope you travel with us again on your next big adventure. Please tell your friends and family about The Tour Guy!