Eiffel Tower with Rover Cruise & open-top bus trip - Sun 9th Sept 12.15
Tour started well, an informative and pleasant guide called Florence greeted us at the assembly point at mid-day and took the group through Eiffel Tower security and after a short introduction on the history of the tower, brought us to the queue for the lift, and left us there - as it turned out, that was the end of the guided tour. The tour was sold in-line as an open top bus ride, followed by a 1hr cruise, finishing with access pass to the Eiffel Tower. We had been warned that they might shuffle the order of things about, which was fine. We were paying about twice the standard walk-up fare amount for the tour package had you bought each part of the tour individually, which I thought was ok and reasonable value for the added value of the guided element, and guaranteed fast access to the tower.. Once we ascended the lift in the Eiffel tower, it became clear that from then on, we were on our own. We’d been told by Florence that we should join a cruise boat independently anytime until 10pm that night, and that the open top bus (which was their own bus) would depart at 4.15pm - there was no flexibility on that time. We later had to call the office to establish where the bus would leave from, (unlike the cruise, you couldn’t rock up and jump on one of the many other open top bus tours departing from the waters edge- the bus operators weren’t at all impressed with our magic civitas stickers, which they each dismissed with a Gallic shrug) - our tour bus was 30mins late in departing, causing much aggravation on a very hot day among the various nationalities in the group. The bus tour was ok, an uninspiring invitation to listen to an audio on our phones wasn’t quite what I’d imagined but hey-ho. An uninspiring and pretty lazy attempt at a group tour that left us feeling a little short-changed, all in all, unfortunately. I’m quite sure we weren’t alone in our opinion.
