Combined city tour that allows you to skip the line to the Saint Marks Basilica, discovering its byzantine history and the glittering mosaics and the Doge's Palace, once the residence of the Doge.
End the tour with a classic gondola ride through the venetian canals!
• Combine super saver includes 3 of the best-selling tours in Venice
• Great photos opportunities!
• Local and appassionate guide
Posted By : William_G
Ok, here are the pro's:
-The guide in St. Marks was very knowledgeable, professional, and friendly.
-The gondola ride is a perk to inexpensively get that out of the way, if you will.
Here are the cons of which there are a great many:
-They very clearly are overbooking this. We did a ton of tours similar to this through Viator on our honeymoon through Italy and this was shockingly overbooked. It resulted in a number of problems including:
1 Gondola ride was too crowded. I literally didn't have a place to sit and had to sit on the step in the front. I looked around at other boats with similar load outs and they at least had a cushion. Not me!
2 St. Marks square was an absolute disaster, but it wasn't entirely anyone's fault. You see the Italian government likes to just change things, and what was changed this time was the skip the line aspect. Everyone was forced to go to the common line. However, our guide who by the way was fantastic as mentioned in the pro's section learned that this was changed a few days prior to our arrival. Therefore, the organizers could have warned people via email. Instead, I feel the experience was falsely represented.
This overbooking, along with poor time planning since the organizers did not check into the skip the line issue, resulted in numerous problems. First, the headphones used by the tour guide in the museum do not work well if the tour guide is entering into another room and you're not quite there. Normally, this is fine because the group is smaller and you can quickly get to the other room. However, due to the large group size, you had to fight to be at the front or else spend quite a bit of time in the previous room, unable to hear anything.
Second, due to spending way too much time waiting in line we should have arrived earlier and had literally hours in-between the gondola tour and the museum to do so, but the organizers failed to plan, we had to rush through the end and essentially skip the prisons and other cool parts because most people not us though had to get onto the next part of the tour which was a boat ride.
I would not recommend this tour.
Posted By : Kelly M
I won't say I was blown away by this tour because I wasn't. You start off at the Gondola park where you meet the tour guide to get directions about the tour. You board a gondola and depending on how many are in your party you share with other people. The Gondola ride is about 30 minutes long. The gondola driver does not narrate or sing but will answer questions if you ask. Once your 30-minute ride is over you have about 45 minutes to walk unescorted over to meet your tour guide at St. Marks Square. Each person was given a headset to hear our guide better. Our guide then took us to the Basilica for a skip the line tour. Our guide was over-enthusiastic and we kept on getting shooed away by the guards because we were holding up the line as we were a big group. It was great to skip the line because the queue to get into the place wrapped around the square in the hot sun. After exiting the Basilica our tour guide pointed out different things in the square before entering the Doge's Palace. We ran so long that we had to leave the group about a third of the way through the palace because we had another tour to meet up with. This tour was advertised as being 2.5 hours long and we were supposed to be done by 1:15...we left at one o'clock because we realized that this tour guide was ready to go another two hours!
Rating :
Posted On : 2018-06-02 02:28:59 
