I am bringing my family to Italy for the 1st time and am looking at booking guided tours ahead of time. Has anyone had success booking though the site Viator (which is what trip advisor uses). There are many that I'm ready to book, but want to be sure that I am booking through a reputable company.
Thank you so much!
You should just book directly through the company you wish to use and not bother with a reseller such as Viator. TripAdvisor owns Viator, if I'm not mistaken.
Booking directly will get you the best prices. What types of tours and what sites were you interested in?
Donna
Thanks, but I'm not sure how to do that. I've never been to Italy and we want to see the Vatican/Sistine Chapel, as well as the colosseum. How would I go about booking direct??
Yes, Viator, a tour re-seller is owned by Trip Advisor. Sometimes there is a mark up on the tour cost thru Viator altho I've seen some claim there is not. You can be sure you've actually got a tour booked if you go with the actual company.
You'd find the tours by looking on here, reading Rick's guidebooks, looking at other guidebooks and by looking on TA under the review sections - usually things to do or something like that.
Walks of Italy (walksofitaly.com) is a highly-regarded tour company, and should have something to suit your needs; as the others suggest, you'd do best to book directly through them rather than through Viator or another tour consolidator.
Kath, here is the official website for buying entry tickets or tours DIRECTLY from the Vatican:
http://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en.html
This is the page of the different options:
http://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/visita-i-musei/scegli-la-visita/visitatori-singoli.html
Take some time to look it over and give a shout back if you have questions?
For the Colosseum, this is the official website:
https://www.coopculture.it/en/the-colosseum.cfm
A general-entry ("open") ticket also includes entry to the Forum and Palatine. It doesn't cover guided tours; those are extra.
As the other stated above, Viator is only a re-seller - a third party - and doesn't provide tours or guides directly themselves. There's a LOT of discussions in the recent forum history about tickets, tours and whatnot if you do a search for them.
Thank you so much for the information. Does anyone have a direct site for Pompeii or Capri? Would anyone recommend doing the self guided audio tour on Rick's app instead for Pompeii?
Capri:
http://www.capri.net
You do not need to book any tours to or around the island; it's really not that big.
With a little advance reading, I don't think you need a tour for Capri.
https://www.capri.com/en/what-to-see
A little googling of these sites will give you plenty of info.
For Pompeii just purchase tickets when you arrive, have never waited more than 10-15 minutes. The RS audio guide should be enough. But there are licensed guides at the gate if you chose to do so.
I've booked tours via Viator in Croatia and Mexico (3-4 tours) and had a good experience with all of them. The reason Viator exists is 1) some small tour companies don't want to invest in a booking infrastructure so they "piggyback" off Viator's, 2) some local companies don't have a website presence or have a dismal one, so they use Viator to match customers with tours 3) Viator makes it easy to compare all sorts of tours in one area easily, and 4) payment and confirmation is instantaneous and there are no online forms to fill out or waiting required. I don't think there is any way to say conclusively that pricing is more expensive than booking direct because it's not easy to do a side-by-side comparison to begin with. For all you know, Viator may squeeze their local tour suppliers to give them more favorable pricing. In the most heavily touristed parts of Italy, mature tour groups like Walks of Italy don't have to rely on a third party to see seats, so it's a no-brainer to book with them directly...but that's not true in other parts of the world. Sometimes Viator works just fine because it's so easy to use.
Actually, you can compare their prices with official prices to see the cost difference. And as for immediate confirmation, that's not possible on some tours such as the underground colosseum tour because those tickets aren't released to tour companies more than two weeks before they're released to the general public. These companies will certainly sell you a tour but I've seen numerous times where people have been cancelled on because the tour company could not secure the tickets. This is even after "instant" confirmation.
Donna
We booked our tours through Viator because we got 10% off. Since we were booking a handful of them it saved us quite a bit (basically got one tour for free). We didn't have any success signing up for email alerts (sign up, get 10%) so we just called and booked the tours that way. We asked for the 10% off and it was no problem. Had it not been for the discount I would have just booked through the companies themselves, however, we've gone through Viator for previous trips with no problems whatsoever.
Viator usually (always?) shows who the tour operator is before you commit. I got a better price on Viator than directly for a tour last year from Rome to Tivoli. I did check with a good friend first who told me she uses them often and has never had a problem.
