Hop-on Hop-off Tours New York

Ivan (Driver) and Shelley (Tour Guide) were awesome! Ivan did his best to slow down where he could so we could get as many pictures as we could. Shelley was so fun and incredibly thorough with information about the City and Borroughs. This was a highlight of our trip and I highly suggest taking this tour! It would be a great tour to do at the beginning of your trip, too!!

This was a very good value ticket. We did see everyting we intend with red and blue bus tour. The boats are leaving from 42nd street midtown, so the boat tour takes a bit longer compared to the downtown trips. The 1hour tour to the Statue of liberty leaves in October at 10:30am and 2.30pm. you should check out the time table of the circle line cruises before your plan your trip. We took the red bus route (stop 3) from empire state building at 9:10am which brings us at 10:20am to stop 13 for the boat. There was long queue at the counter to convert the booking code to a real ticket. The boat crew was so nice to leave 10 minutes later at 10:40 so the people in the line which intend to catch the 10:30 boat get onboard. The boats can fit 600 people so there is a lot of space to have good family photos. It is not so crowded as the small boats from dowtown. To visit Empire state building you should also use the booking code from headout to convert your booking in a time slot ticket for empire state a few days before your trip. A good time would be at 5pm when the bus services stops or in the morning when the bus service starts (9 am), so you have the rest of day for the bus service and the boat. When you just try convert the ticket for empire state in the morning of your visit there are only a few time slots around noon available. We were unlucky with the blue bus line. The bus service is operated every 30 minutes. we had to wait 25 minutes and then the streets were so crowded by delivering lorries at the left and right lanes that only one lane was available for the all the traffic. We could observe that the pedestrians could walk faster then the bus was moving. It almost took one hour for the 30 streets from bus stop 2 to the metropolian museum (86nd street) in the cental park. Due to the heavy traffic the service people from bug bus cannot tell you when the next blue bus arrives, so it might be faster when you walk up to the museum and than take the bus back as the 5th avenue is not so crowded due to the central park.

It was so nice to be able to see the city from the bus and then figure out where we wanted to go. The weather was great mostly and we really enjoyed riding the top. With the visit to the Empire State Building and boat ride to the Statue of Liberty being the icing on the cake.