Cape Town Private, Tour Robben Island Gateaway & Table Mountain Car

Both Table Mountain and Robben Island are incredible experiences and would recommend any visitors to Cape Town to go to both. However, this tour is certainly not the best way of doing either. Incredibly expensive compared to doing it yourself, and in the case of Table Mountain, your time would be curtailed in order to do Robben Island afterwards. We never actually got to go to Table Mountain on the day of our tour as it was closed to high winds. Obviously not the fault of the provider, though I suspect they knew this before picking us up but were wary of being asked for a half day refund if they cancelled the morning. The driver therefore said we had "4 hours to kill" and asked us where we would like to go instead; he did not make suggestions. We asked to go to Seal Island and paid for a boat trip from there ourselves and had some lunch. In the afternoon, the Robben Island trip was brilliant and a highlight of our trip - but was entirely without input from the tour provider who simply dropped us at the ferry terminal and picked us up after. This would have been so easy to do ourselves via Uber/Taxi and I would recommend people do that instead. The driver was very polite and careful throughout, and very conscious of dropping us and picking us up at exact meeting points so we knew where to go. However, that's all he was - a driver for the day, and it would have been highly unlikely we lost our way at either point even without him. When we left Table Mountain at 8.30am, we were told our tickets were valid for 7 days and then could be refunded if still un-used. Sadly the cable cars remained closed due to weather for the rest of our time in Cape Town. We were then not able to get them refunded directly by the Table Mountain staff as we were not the purchaser, and Viator refused to process it for us. For context, Table Mountain cable cars cost around £20 each (Fast track £43), Robben Island Tour £27 and depending on where you are picked up and dropped off, I would suggest total Uber cost to get to and from both and in between would probably be around £40-£50. So save yourself the extra £80!

Tour guide was great, having a driver all day is a blessing. When we arrived to table mountain, it was closed due to weather. The company maybe could have checked the website for us as we didn’t know this. Our tickets are valid for 7 days and were sent to us so at least we can reuse. Our driver then took us around to some lovely photo spots before we went to Robben island. Again, we weren’t told anywhere in the t’s and c’s that we needed ID to get into Robben island. Thankfully we all had them otherwise it could have been a massive error. We had a great day regardless but maybe better communication could make this a 5 star tour.