Tours in Dublin

Figuring out which tours in Dublin are the best ones for your particular needs can be a hassle. When you land in Dublin you will find yourself swamped with brochures all offering hundreds of tours, and thousands of sites to see. Often you will have the choice of up to ten different tour companies all offering the same type of tour heading to the same sites around the city and surrounding region. Which one is the best one to do? Is there really any notable difference between companies?

The best advice I can give is to do your research before you go. A lot of tourists arrive in Dublin armed with an arsenal of tour books. I have found unfortunately that often these people are not any better informed about the city than people who have done minimal research on the internet before they have arrived. Tour books become out of date very quickly and often don't even touch upon things which may seem too obvious for them to touch upon, but would be very helpful to anybody arriving in Dublin who had not previously visited. For example, of four tour books that I read on Dublin, none of them mentioned the fact that there are hop on hop off/Dublin sightseeing buses available in Dublin. There are two hop-on-hop-off buses in Dublin, one company runs the green buses and one company runs the red buses. If the tourist didn't even know before they arrived that these services existed then how do they choose whether to go with the red company or the green company on arrival? And there are marked differences between the two bus tours during the peak summer season so it's not just a case of tossing a coin.

 The best plan of attack when it comes to choosing your tours in Dublin is to do your research online before you go. There are a whole plethora of websites out there that can help you choose a tour in Dublin. Tripadvisor is the best known of these. All you have to do is type 'Dublin' into the keyword search at the top and then choose 'Things to Do in Dublin' and then 'tours in Dublin'. Don't get stuck on the 'things to do' tab as this will just outline all the major sites there are to see in this city. Once you are in the 'tours of Dublin' part of Tripadvisor, you will see the top rated tours. Tour companies are often reviewed by hundreds of previous visitors to the city giving their honest, sometimes brutal, sometimes glowing reviews of tours, guides and sites that they have experienced while on holiday here in Ireland.

Another good idea is to check out the 'forum' section of tripadvisor for Dublin. This is a place that travellers can ask questions about a city and have them answered by previous travellers and locals. It is always interesting to see what questions are being asked by other would-be travellers as these often inspire ideas about what to see and do whilst you are in Dublin.

 Other than tripadvisor, you can visit sites which sell tours such as Viator, Expedia and Get Your Guide. These also have review sections so you can see what people who bought the tours thought of them. You can purchase tours here, just do be aware that when you purchase a tour through a third party such as Viator, Expedia and Get Your Guide, that 20% of the price you pay will be going to the third party rather than the tour operator themselves. It is also a good idea to keep in mind that all correspondence to do with your trip, such as cancellations, date changes and refunds will have to go through the third party rather than the tour operator. In my opinion this can cause a lot of hassle if something happens which means you have to change a date or cancel your tour.

If you are one of these people who has arrived in Dublin with absolutely no itinerary planned and no idea of what there is on offer to do and see it is not the end of the world. Just head to the nearest tourist office in Dublin when you get here and you can browse through the hundreds of brochures which you will find stacked up neatly along the walls of these institutions. You can also ask at the tourist offices if they have any recommendations for tours in Dublin, and anybody working behind a tourist desk will be able to help you out.

Dublin Tours

When you get to our fair city you are likely to want to first start out looking at the various Dublin tours that are available. Although Dublin is fairly compact as far as cities go, guided tours are generally the best and easiest way to see the city.

This is because Dublin, being more than a thousand years old, was not a planned city. It grew up organically over the last thousand years which means it has higgeldy piggeldy, curved, narrow and often cobbled streets. This does add to the city's charm most certainly but it also means it can be a bit of a nightmare finding your way around. American cities often utilise the grid system. They have very user friendly street names like 1st street, 3rd promenade and 5th avenue. If you need to be at 4th street and you have just walked past 1st and 2nd street, you know that there is a very good chance that you are almost at your destination when you are in a grid city. In Dublin, you might be walking along a street called College Green, then 3 minutes later that same street changes name to Dame Street, then less than three minutes later the street name has changed again! Now you are on Lord Edward Street, three name changes all in the space of less than ten minutes. It can certainly get confusing in Dublin.

This is the reason that the vast majority of visitors to Dublin choose guided tours as the easiest, most reliable way to see the entire city. Dublin tours are varied, you can choose walking tours of Dublin, which are tours of the city entirely on foot or you can choose bus tours such as the hop on hop off services. They each have their own merits as far as tours go. Walking tours are wonderful as they will take you into the little nooks and crannies of Dublin that Dublin tours by bus can never reach. They will also be able to show you the pedestrian areas of the city, like Grafton Street, Henry Street and Temple Bar which are of course off limits to buses and other vehicles.

Dublin tours by bus however have their own merits. For example, starting from the main street of Dublin, O'Connell Street, it would take about an hour to walk to Kilmainham Gaol, and around 45 minutes to walk to the Guinness Storehouse, the two most visited tour attractions in Dublin. If you wanted to go to see Oscar Wilde's House on Merrion Square, it would be another forty minutes in the opposite direction from Kilmainham Gaol and Guinness. Tours by foot would take all day, over several days, to show you everything there is to see in the city. Tours by bus on the other hand can show you absolutely everything in the city, with a live commentary on all the interesting sites you are seeing in just an hour and a half. On top of this, you get 2 days with your ticket to hop on and hop off the bus, so you could do the whole circuit of the city once, and then use the tour bus as your transport in the city for getting around. Very handy!

As you can see, there are many reasons to choose guided tours over self guided tours, now all you have to do is figure out whether you want to do your Dublin tours on foot or by bus!