Tour buses & Travel/Oyster Card??

They are more than one double-decker hop-on hop-off bus tours, competing with each other and with different names. You will probably find leaflets advertising them in your hotel. At the popular hop-on hop-off stops (Trafalgar Square, St. Pauls) they have touts trying to sell tickets. Do a google search for "London hop on hop off tours" and you will find lots.

No, they do not accept Oyster Cards. These tours are not part of London's public transport system, but private commercial operations, and are more expensive than just taking a bus or tube from A to B.

Nope. Private companies, nothing to do with Transport for London, so they are over and above your Travelcard or Oyster purchase.

There are 3 main open top hop on hop off companies making the rounds.

I have never used any of them, and I haven't recommended them because they are very spendy, very slow, when you hop off you may wait quite a long time to hop back on, and mostly because for no more money than your Travelcard costs anyway or your daily Oyster price cap you can arm yourself with a tourist bus map (part of the Central London Bus Map given away at Tube stations and available on line) and by riding at the front of a double decker number 11 and number 15, and maybe a number 9 regular or preserved (same price) bus see the same or more. And because those buses come by every 5 to 10 minutes you go way faster and are much less tired.

You miss the commentary but we can cover that....

The 3 big HOHOs in London are:

The Big Bus tour , starting at £25 pp.

Original London Sightseeing Tour , nearly £30 pp.

And the Duck. Amphibious, has had a few difficulties recently. Start at £24 pp.

and there are several more smaller and/or less comprehensive ones.

There is a decent comparison between the HoHos at http://www.londontoolkit.com/blog/daytrips/tours/comparing-londons-hop-on-hop-off-sightseeing-buses/

Still think that D-I-Y is better.

Well that made my decision easy...a regular bus it is then :)

Mike, The tourist orientated map of central Londons buses which Nigel mentioned is here (look on the last but one page). The full central London bus map is here. And, with an Oyster Card you can hop on and hop off all these buses all day, so long as you scan your Oyster Card every time you get on for a maximum of £4.40 a day.

I'll probably be using a 7-day travelcard during my 9 day stay. I think one of the first things we'll do is hop on a few buses to get to see the town and get our sense of direction and familiarity down.

I'm going to jump in with a different opinion. We took the Hop on Hop off bus tour our first day in London to help orient us and to help us stay awake to start making the time adjustment. We didn't actually hop on or off, but rode around the circuit. This gave us an overview of things that was really quite helpful when we did use the buses and tube for the rest of our trip. For us, it worked very well and we were glad we did this.

Mikey,

I looked into the Hop-On-Hop-Off (HOHO) bus when i was there my 2nd time in London.

I can see the appeal, but if you bother to learn how to use the tube, you won't need no HOHO. I just love the Tube and use it all the time when i go back to London. I keep and add $$ to my Oyster card whenever I'm there so its no biggie to bring it back and forth.

Also, what i noticed is that when traffic up top is stalled in gridlock, the tubes are running. Even if there is a breakdown somewhere, they are usually up to date on where and what lines are downs or what sections are down.

Happy trails.