Best day tours in Prague and Berlin

If you are looking for walking tours or other info about Prague I highly recommend Jason from Living Prague. Many recommendations from this forum! He is both knowledgeable and kind.
Enjoy your stay! https://livingprague.com/tours/living-prague-tours/

Edited to add- We have hired guides throughout Europe and Jason was at the top of our list!
We’ve never regretted hiring guides. As Rick says: “Hiring Your Own Local Guide: Your Trip’s Most Enriching Luxury.” I agree!

For Berlin, Insider Tour gets high praise on this forum for group tours. https://insidertour.com/

For a private tour, I would recommend Robert Sommer. He was the 15-year-old son of a fairly high-ranking East German (DDR) bureaucrat at the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. He went on to earn a doctorate in history; his dissertation explored prostitution in WWII concentration camps. He contributed to the creation of the exhibition at the Ravensbrück memorial. His wife was in the German Parliament until recently. He is a super interesting guy who is full of information and can share his personal experience of the fall of the Berlin Wall and life in the former DDR (if such things interest you). I've done a number of tours with him -- from a standard Berlin tour to tours where we explored abandoned Soviet military facilities, including going down into underground bunkers where nuclear warheads were stored during the Cold War. http://thetrueberliner.com/

Download Rick Steves app and take his self-guided walking tours of Berlin and Prague. Why pay someone when you can do it yourself.

Respectfully disagree with MaryPat. We did Rick’s walking tour of Prague and it was ok for a high level overview. But the walking tour we did with Jason from Living Prague was outstanding. We learned so much from him, it was well worth the time and money.

Insider Tours for Berlin for a group tour, or Jeremy the Berlin Expert for a private tour.

An old audio guide can not compare with a live guide. Someone who can answer questions, someone who actually knows the city. The RS audio guide for Frankfurt makes me sad, as it leaves out so many of the best sites. Guessing Berlin would be the same.

In Berlin we were thrilled with Fat Tires morning bike tour - https://www.fattiretours.com/berlin/?utm_source=GMBBerlin&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=GMBBerlin&utm_id=GMBBerlin
The guide was English, working on a Phd in architecture, and spoke fluent German, (which I also speak). Amazing to bike through layers of history, with amusing anecdotal stories, with him! There were some teens along & I saw on the website they accommodate kids on their tours. In the afternoon, you could take a "skip the line" small tour at Museum Island, if that's something you would enjoy. That guide was even more experienced! Not only did we skip long lines, he led us directly to the highlights & gave us a glimpse into so much ancient history, well worth the surcharge. Hope that helps

Big Thank you to all who have responded to my post. Great information/recommendations. Just what I was looking for.

Shalom,
I have had so many tours and met so many tour guides but what I experienced with this group of historians was literally breathtaking. terezin-private-tours.com
One of the reasons why it was such a different experience is they are professional researchers and writers about the subject they talk to you about with excellent storytelling abilities!
Yvonne was very nice and knowledgeable taking me through Jewish Quarter in Prague and explaining all the details and facts I never understood about Jews living in Prague for so many centuries but what I experienced with Pavel Batel in the former Terezin ghetto - camp was something me and my teenage sons will never forget. Weeks have passed and we are still talking about it. My oldest son just finished reading Pavel's first book "The Tour guide story" and said that the reason why he is such a special guide is that he travels back in time. That is exactly how you feel when he is showing you places. He interviewed so many different survivors and studied so many memoirs that he can build 3D images of a certain situation from the past right in front of your eyes. He was showing us a book he was waiting for for over ten years. An original written in 1946 by Terezin survivor Profesor Utitz was never translated into the English language. I had a few death cards from my great-grandparents who died in Terezin. Pavel was explaining to us how he can read from it. He had a map of the Ghetto and took us to the exact places where they lived and died. I was in Terezin several times and nobody was able to do it. Guides were telling me only Terezin historians can do so. Well, we were so lucky we found the best one! Can not recommend this group highly enough.

And if you're not into the deep dive minutiae of Berlin, well it's pretty darned easy to do a self-propelled tour - lots of resources on-line to download - here's just one -

https://about.visitberlin.de/sites/default/files/MAM//asset/2019-10/WiB_2019_EN_wb.pdf

and here's another -

https://www.berlin-welcomecard.de/sites/default/files/2022-03-30_bwc2022_komplett_inkl_umschlag_rz_web_hl_es.pdf