Forbidden City&T-Square Small GroupTours met ticket (Eng/Esp Gids)

Our guide Snow Chao was very helpful: friendly, knowledgeable about country’s history and traditions with very good communication skills. We started at 8am and finished at 12-30pm. However, the time flew very quickly and we really enjoyed our time with Snow. Thank you for this experience

Our family group of seven people had wonderful time in this tour. Venessa the Tour Guide was amazing! She knew all the information was even able to share some of her personal experiences. With Vanessa's help, it was easy to navigate through all the security check points. I would recommend doing the tour. Thank you, Vanessa!

Vanessa really took the time to explain things. I noticed that on entrance we passed hundreds of people standing in line. With the guide we walked right upon the entrance, that already was worth the money.

The combination of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Beijing, but with hard-to-buy tickets and heavy security, so the guide was worth it alone to help navigate all the various queues and processes. From research, it seems it is possible to get tickets individually, but the tour companies have these block-booked, and while more expensive, the process was so much easier and less stressful. The Forbidden City itself is spectacular and a must-see heritage site, and the guide was both friendly and full of interesting information about the history of the place. Biggest downside was the weather - we went in August in >30C conditions, but you have to be prepared to do a lot of walking over wide concrete/stone spaces regardless, so take lots of water and wear something comfortable if you're going this time of year. But that can't be held against the tour guide, so I've not subtracted any stars for that. We didn't get to see all of the (it is huge) but we could have stayed and explored more if we'd wanted. As another tip, really don't underestimate the Beijing traffic if getting there by taxi - we were late but fortunately our guide was in touch with us by text and we were able to rendezvous with them after they'd started.

This tour is an absolute must! You get so much value for what you pay. Our guides were outstanding—friendly, knowledgeable, and kept everything running smoothly. Plus, the lunch provided was delicious and way better than standard tour food. Highly recommend!

We really enjoyed this tour ! Vanessa, our guide, was amazing she explained each place very clearly and made sure to take regular breaks. We recommend this tour whether on your own, with family or with friends

Very nice guide. She speak very good english, tell us about historic faces and was ready to help us and attend our needs.

Great! Easy to follow Ping. Very knowledgeable and helpful. Forbidden City has very limited shade so sunscreen and a hat will be good idea.

Tour guide was not that informative and we kept getting slowed down by the group. We ended up leaving the group and doing our own thing due to the bad experience. The best part of this offering was getting the tickets to access the city and square and also bypassing most of the line.

Everything leading up to the tour seemed fine. The challenges started from the meeting point. The location that was shared, the description, name (Muji hotel), map, and Didi all gave different locations that were slightly off. On top of which cars are not allowed to stop right in front of the hotel so you get dropped a few blocks away. This is a good meeting point on paper, but practically and logistically an awful place to navigate to. Next was the lack of communication and clarity. We expected to do the Forbidden city first, then Tiananmen square mostly because we were expecting to skip the Square due to time constraints. Once the tour started we were told we were doing the square first. The one good thing about booking this tour is it allows you to skip the ticket and security lines which were literally hours long. We got through all the checkpoints in under half an hour. We could have spent a lot less time at the square than we did. There's not much to see. It's a big square and you take pictures of the buildings on all sides. This didn't require all the time we took there, which was more than half an hour. Moving on to getting into the city, this is when issues really started to show. There were a lot of twists and turns and lines to queue in. A bit minor but I'm used to having more communication from the guide. Instead she mostly just kept walking ahead with the occasional (keep left). Without herding our group, we had a lot of stragglers. And I'm sure there were interesting things to mention about all the structures we passed through and under. Once we made it inside the walls, this is really where the tour fell apart. She was on her phone constantly as we were walking instead of engaging with the group, or pointing things out. To be honest, it looked like she was reading about the buildings and everything in a tour book on her phone in real time, and occasionally would look up to give us a summary of what she read. Very low engagement with the group and the sights themselves. She'd merely point to a building and say this was for the ceremony. Inside is this throne. And kept moving, instead of walking us up to the actual sight and point out the insides to us and let us take pictures. So here you had a choice, break off and go see it yourself and risk losing the group, or stick with the group and basically not see anything. There were points where she just pulled up pictures on her phone when the doors were wide open. Other guides would have walked us up to the door, ushered us to a good vantage point, pointed out structural or decorative details before moving on. We just kept walking. Eventually we just started losing more and more people and we finally split off ourselves. Getting an express pass for entry was worth it. But, at the end of the day we booked an in person live tour, not a walking Wikipedia summary, which would have been more informative anyway. Just getting in and reading the very helpful and informative signs would have been more interesting. I'll likely never book with this company again.