Any Hop on Hop off tours in London have live commentary guides?

photbearsam, out of curiosity, what was the guided bus in Paris so we can avoid it? I would like to know about London also. Thanks

Yes there are, but in my experience the live information is not always accurate. I did one with my mother, and the guide told about the Regency architecture of Regent Street, designed by John Nash, adding that it was the same man who Russell Crowe played in A Beautiful Mind. Same name, two different men several centuries apart.

I have no idea about the accuracy of what else she told us, but don't expect Blue Badge levels of accuracy by the live guides on Hop-On Hop-Off buses.

You can find a comparison here.

Hope you enjoy the tour.

The Red line has a live person & the Blue line is recorded: https://www.bigbustours.com/en/london/london-bus-tours

Enjoy your trip.

How weird that a tour guide would say that uurrrggghhh not good.

I will check out that comparison. Thanks

The tour we took in Paris was the L'Open tour. The routes were great but the recorded commentary was aimed at kids and was not synced with the route. So it would say on your left is a statue or so and so but you would only see that statue 3 or 4 blocks later. The stops were numbered on the street but if you were seated where you could not see the stop numbers you had no idea where you were. We missed a stop cause the bus stop was way before where we wanted to get off and once the bus started again, it was too late to get off. Nowhere on the bus dud it tell you where you were. HATED it.

You will have may questions such as this one before you leave for London.
I suggest that this book--Rick Steves' Pocket London--will help you a lot.
Just $13.99, but worth a lot more for all the questions it answers.
And it's light enough and small enough that you can throw it in your purse and take it with you.
https://store.ricksteves.com/shop/p/pocket-london
Have a great trip!

Way ahead of you. Bought it already. Just reading it now.

Had the Pocket Paris too. Rick's books are the best.

Good move, Photobear! Thumbs up for Rick Steves pocket guides, all of them!

We did the Big Bus live commentary tour and it was awful. We understood the traffic jams - it's London. However, the guide would get pulled into side conversations with passengers and forget to address the sites on the route. He would also spend a lopsided amount of time on different things and this seemed to be clearly based on his own interests versus what might be of interest to the general population of riders. We were later corrected on a bunch of misinformation he offered as accurate history. Overall, not worth the money.

As a side note, we have done Big Bus in a number of cities and London was the worst experience.

See London Black Taxi Tours.
http://www.blacktaxitours.co.uk/
Not expensive considering what all of you would pay, total, for the HOHO tour.

Gosh, this is sad. I've always had good experiences with HOHO's in London.. Glad I don't need to think about them anymore.

I just hope that if we chose Big Bus Tours that we can at least know where we are. Thanks for all the advice.