Premium City Tour with visit to Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires

This is an excellent tour to give you insights into the history, geography, architecture, and culture of Buenos Aires. Our guide, Cynthia, was friendly, knowledgeable and competent. It was enjoyable to spend a few hours with her. Following our city tour, Cynthia made sure we could access our tickets to Teatro Colon where another excellent guide explained the construction, decor, history, and current state of the theater. We even got to see a portion of a rehearsal for the new show.

It is increasingly difficult to get tickets to visit Teatro Colon, unless you book well in advance, and there aren't theatre events on - so I was happy when this small group tour offered a ticket to see the opulent opera house. There is a hotel pickup but no drop off if you include the Teatro Colon and you'll need to find your own way back to hotel. Our tour was running late - higher than usual traffic problems, but we were kept informed until they arrived. Our guide was a friendly local who gave us English commentary. We made several stops to see the iconic square and memorials, government building and church, port development, colourful neighborhoods - a select locations bus tour of the city - a good taste of what was on offer, and helped plan future group or private tours. The tour covered enough interesting spots - its a very large city. My goal was the Opera House so everything else was a bonus. This tour is packed with commentary on history, culture and is heavily fact driven. Our only longer stop was at Caminito - a colourful area where we were dropped off for a very brief stop and told to get back on time. Nothing about what the area offered, other than to be considerate when watching or photographing busker tango dancers without payment and to be careful about pickpockets. It was rushed because of parking limitations and sticking to the time schedule. No information was offered about where was best to go, buy water, food or souvenirs or who the famous Mafalda was. Too history and fact driven and not enough focus on time for us to experience the locations - and get out of the bus to explore on our own. Worth going just to get to the opera house. After the tour, I was dropped off and ushered inside to get me onto a guided tour - luckily one was just starting so I got in without waiting. I asked about how to get back to my hotel and was told to just get an uber or taxi. No-one stopped to think that I wasn't local or perhaps didn't know where to hail a cab - everyone assumed it was easy. That included the staff at the opera house. After the well run tour of the Opera House, I thought about staying to enjoy an afternoon snack in the lovely Opera House cafe but decided to look for a cab. After walking to a busier main road where I could see cabs driving by - after much effort hailing for cabs, a non English speaking driver kindly stopped and got me back. Our guide was good but she had a strict deadline and things got too rushed after the long commentary stop at the square. The tour started over 30mins late, so the tour company should have extended our tour and given us more time to enjoy Caminito. A worthwhile tour and worth doing - just time poor and too rushed this time. This review is about my experience only. Enjoy.