Hamburg Port: Tours & Tickets

We booked to go on the Tour and turned up about 2o minutes before the schuduled time. Other people arrived and we figured there was German speaking group and and English speaking group. The german gude arrived but no English Guide. At about 10 minutes after the start time I sent and email and then approach the German guide and to ask him what was happening. He phoned the booking company and got to speak to a girl. First she said we arrived too late and then changed her response that we booked too late. I said we booked two days ago, so she said it was canclled because there was not enough guests. But there were 7 people waiting. She that said we could do the tour the next day, but 5 of the 7 said they could not do so I asked her for a guarantee that it woul go ahead. So we turned up the next day and did the tour with just 3 guests. While the tour was good and informative the booking company is just plain shonky.

Firstly, There was no map, which shows, how would the trip look like. I expected that the boat goes through the city also, through canals like in Venezia. Secondly, there was a problem with the orientation in the harbour, because, the boat wasn't marked, that this is the boat for this type of trip. When we have asked the staff for information, they, told us there are two different boats and their boat is full for now and we can choose the bigger one. That information was misleading, however, in the advertisement wasn't that type of information. So we ran to another one, which was somewhere else, and we again were looking for it. Next, I would like to mention, that the sentence: "please, be there a little bit earlier, so you can catch the seating next to the window, so you can have a nice view during a trip because the cruise used to be full/sold out" in the advertisement would be useful.

The staff was friendly and helpful, and the tour was as described in the ads. There were toilets on the boat, which was quite convenient. The English-speaking tour guide was a German man with a German accent, not a native speaker of English. His English was reasonably good. The loudspeaker was a loudspeaker, meaning it had a bit of static or distortion, although it wasn't bad as loudspeakers go. The combination made the narration a bit difficult for some people in our group to understand. I didn't have trouble with it, but I have a lot of experience with German accents. Still, having a tour in English was very nice.

It was really excellent that we could split the two activities over two days, as there was now time left to do the boat trip when we got back from the hop-on hop-off bus trip. We tend to use the bus as one trip, in order to gain an overview of the whole city. We rarely tend to use the bus more than once. Hamburg was great and the bus was great too.

The boat was clean and comfortable. The guide was knowledgeable and fun. The food and drink were good. Unfortunately the sound system is pretty bad and unless the guide was right next to me, I couldn’t understand much of anything he was saying. When we could hear him, though, it was wonderful!