We had been on one Viator tour before this trip: a walking tour of D.C. that focused on Abraham Lincoln. Although the guide knew his material forward and back and the tour was generally interesting, the guide was unable to self-edit. The tour lasted twice as long as it was billed and by the end, only two of the original eight people remained.

Undeterred, we signed up for a few Viator tours for our China trip. As discussed in our Beijing blog, we were very disappointed by a Viator Street Food Tour and Dumpling Making Class tour we had taken in Beijing. Although the guide was pretty good, the tour description bordered on outright misrepresentation.

Our next Viator experience was in Shanghai, with what was labeled as a Private Custom Tour: Shanghai in One Day. It sounded great…an opportunity to create our own itinerary, with a personal guide who would takes us through the sections of the city and the sights in which we had the greatest interest. Unfortunately, our experience was only modestly better than our previous Viator tours. Our guide certainly knew the sites and did a good job explaining them. She was also able to discuss a bit about the history of the city (a fair amount of which we later discovered was incorrect) and the culture. Our problems were threefold:

• We had specified twice during confirmations to Viator that we learn cities by walking them and by taking subways–that we did not want the private car add-on that they repeatedly tried to up-sell. Our guide was never told of our itinerary nor our preference for walking. Although she reluctantly agreed to walk to our first two sites, she made clear subtly that she had never signed on to such duty and spent much of the time of the initial walk on the phone (we thought she was pleading with the company to replace her with another guide, an effort that apparently failed). She, however, put her foot down when it came to more distant sites and the taking of the subway. We relented and took cabs for the rest of the day. Yes, cabs are cheap in China, but that wasn’t the point. If we can’t walk, we wanted to understand how the subway worked.
• Although we had identified our agenda for our ‘custom’ tour, our guide had her own agenda as to the sites we should visit and the restaurant at which we would eat lunch (for which we believed that she received the best commission and free food). We did reach an accommodation and ended up seeing and learning about much of what we had wanted, plus a couple of interesting sites that she suggested that were not on our itinerary.
• When our guide realized that we were interested in jade and that we had the potential of buying a relatively expensive piece, she was enlivened, taking us to store after store (which we admittedly encouraged) and in some cases, becoming an extension of the store’s salespeople in trying to convince us to buy a piece that we didn’t want. When we completed the day at 5:00, she offered to take us out for a half-day tour to visit a couple of additional sights at half-price, an offer which we declined. When we returned to our hotel at 10:00 PM, we were greeted by a call from our guide with an offer to take us to the additional sights for free the next day, which we also politely declined. Then, at 7:30 AM the next morning, we received yet another call where she told us that she knew of a few other jade shops that may have the type of pieces in which we had an interest, at a price that was attractive–again for free. We declined again. We know that many guides make commissions on what they can convince their guests to buy. While it was very kind of our guide to try to help us buy jade, we feel that the potential commission prevented her from hearing no and from being objective to what we wanted.

Bottom line, we loved Shanghai as you can read in our blogs. But after 3 disappointing tries of using Viator, it is very difficult for us to want to waste more money on additional Viator tours.