Gray Line Tours

My mom and I took a weekend trip to New Orleans and just got back today! We took the Isle of Orleans tour with Jude and really enjoyed it! He was very knowledgable and entertaining! We enjoyed getting to see some of the city sights outside the French Quarter. Would recommend this tour and Jude!

This company is very professional and both the Steamboat and the Garden City & Graveyard tour were fantastic. Excellent guides and really knew their stuff.

We went on the drinking tour. Our tour guide, Sandi was wonderful! Very accommodating and she went out of her way to make sure we went to bars that didn’t have steps, as one of our party was in a motorized wheel chair. She was the picture of Southern hospitality and very informative of the history of this fine town.

Garrett was our driver And was extremely knowledgeable. he gave us great information on the way to the Plantations. We went to Whitney and Oak Alley. Whitney is from the standpoint of the enslaved. They took oral histories done by the Writers project. these people were actually enslaved as children so it is a totally different perspective. A must see. You will never be the same. Oak Alley is famous for the oaks planted by an unknown settler in the 1700’s.

Marsha was great as the tour guide on the Garden District walking tour! Entertaining and knowledgable! Beautiful homes with tons of history and celebrity homes. Great that we were able to go in one as well!
We also did the cocktail tour with Sandi who was a wealth of information. She knew what bartenders that were best and had great stories to tell!

I just took my 5^th Grayline Tour this past weekend. I’ve taken various tours and have loved them all! Every guide has been amazing!

We did the Hurricane Katrina Tour today. It was very interesting and informative. I recommend it to any visitor to Nola. The guide took us to many parts of the city that we would not have seen otherwise, including the impoverished ninth ward. There are many more things to learn about the catastrophe that struck the city than we saw on the national news, and this tour really lays them out in plain detail.

Mary was a great tour guide. Very informative and knew a lot about the mansions she was showering us. The lady inside the Jackson Brewery information desk want the friendliest when we asked questions about the street car.

This review is for the Katrina tour + swamp & bayou tours.
Katrina tour was very eye opening, they give you an insane perspective on what went down and how bad things got. I loved our tour guide George! He grew up in the area and even showed us what street/​house he grew up on and what his personal experience was with Katrina. That guy remembered everything about what happened and didn’t skip a beat.
The swamp & bayou tour was great! Convenient that they pickup & drop off. Great experience, VERY COLD on the boat since you’re going at a speed (this is in Feb) so I recommend bringing an extra jacket.

Me, my husband and our 8 ½ month old baby went on the garden district, cemetery, mansion tour with Marcia and it was the best tour we have ever been on. No joke! Marcia was so informative, friendly and funny. She really made our day! We have been on many tours and we usually get to the point where we ask each other if it is almost over? We wanted Marcia’s tour to last a little longer. Thank you Marcia! You were the best!

My wife booked the the Christmas Bonfire tour which happens to be Christmas Eve tradition. The tour was called the Gray Line Express Cruise. We assumed this to be a cruise on the Mississippi river but we were disappointed to find it was a bus ride.
Our tour guide was a local and knew his stuff. He was a retired school teacher and gave us history about Creoles and Cajuns. It was an hour ride to the Bonfire destination. It was a rainy day and despite that spirited folks came out to witness the Bonfires. It was definitely a sight to watch. The restroom in our bus didn’t have any light, we had to use the light from our cellphones
We slept our way back on the bus ride, Quite a handful of folks
Bottomline: Be sure of what you order for. The GrayLine Express for Christmas Eve Bonfire is a disappointment.

The best part of this tour was our tour guide, Paul. He provided a safe, fun bus ride to the Christmas Eve bonfires, and also provided us a safe bus ride back to the door step of our house.
The Christmas Eve both fire tour was a lot of fun, I’m really glad we ended up on this tour. First we visited a plantation and toured inside the house for about half an hour. This was followed by a few drinks ($ 2 beers, very nice to see no markup) and a beautiful dinner.
The dinner was excellent. Deep fried turkey, ham, sweet potatoes, etc. I was impressed by the dinner, including the Christmas ambiance.
The bonfire tour part is the reason we did this tour. The bus line rents police to clear the highway giving us a straight drive and front row parking to the bonfires. Without this, we would have been stuck in traffic and then had to walk 12 – 15 blocks after parking. The bus tour allows you front row parking (and by front row I mean THE CLOSEST possible parking to the bonfires) where you can watch from the bus if you want.
We chose to walk up the levy and watch first hand. Incredible. 20ft tall teepee type structures lit by diesel and 32,000 (yes, thirty two thousand) firecrackers.
Overland highly recommended tour!

4 of us took this tour over Halloween weekend. This was exactly the type of tour that I was hoping this was NOT!!! We sat in a bus & drove around for 2+ hours. The guide was a native & somewhat interesting, but seeing the sites in this fashion felt exceptionally predatory.
We actually got more info from the taxi driver that took us out to a swamp tour than what we gleaned from this tour!!!

Review for the Super City Tour.
This was the biggest waste of money and the worst tour I’ve ever been on. I see that the rest of the reviews are great which makes me wonder if we had a terrible tour guide or it was an «off day» for the tour company.
We took the Super City Tour this past weekend at 2pm on Saturday. I love history and facts but when I leave the tour only learning about Morris Bart on the billboards and where he lives, it’s a pretty pathetic experience. The entire tour was «scatterbrained» and I can guarantee the other 35 people on the bus were not impressed either.
My parents visited 6 months ago and raved about their tour so we decided to purchase $ 80 for two tickets. Turns out they went to a different tour company with a more thorough view of the entire city and their tour guide actually gave them historical facts. My mom told me more about New Orleans on the phone than our tour guide did on the bus.
I hate leaving poor reviews on Unilocal,but this was an unacceptable experience. It was our 1 year wedding anniversary and it was sad to have that much of the day taken up with something so expensive and worthless. I can see how a tour may not be amazing, but this tour was a glorified taxi that took us throughout the city.

I went on the swamp /​airboat ride tour. I believe I paid $ 75. We started in New Orleans and took a bus about 40 minutes away. During the bus ride there was a lesson on Cajun history and culture. I went on an airboat with about 7 other people. We rode through the swamp area very fast and the ride was exhilarating. We saw wild alligators and fed them marshmallows. We also got to hold a baby alligator. The guide was informative and told us about the wildlife and plants of the swamp. I would recommend this tour to other people. It’s a bit pricey but I thoroughly enjoyed my time. Take a look at my pictures. My rating is based on the experience and cost.

I’ve taken both the Hurricane Katrina tour, and the swamp and bayou boat ride. I recommend both. I hesitated about taking the Katrina tour.. .it seemed voyeuristic. And some residents will not allow the buses in their neighborhoods. Certainly can’t blame them.
But the tour helps to make real what we saw on television and via social media, and there are lessons to be learned from it. There are still a few houses with their «X» markers on the front, put there by rescue/​recovery workers. There are the still-​abandoned houses with holes in their roofs that allowed people to escape the rising waters, and the new houses built on 20′ high columns. Some neighborhoods are still struggling; we heard about one that just got a grocery store a year ago — 9 years after the flood.
Carol was our passionate and knowledgeable guide. One dollar from each passenger fare goes to the non-​profit
, which is helping in the ongoing recovery.
The swamp and bayou tour may sound hokey, but it’s not. You have your choice of a pontoon boat, or large or small airboat. You’re all on the same bus, and you all leave and return at the same time. The only differences are how fast you go, how many of you there are, and how much water you cover on the alloted time. I went on the gentle pontoon boat ride.
There is less wildlife in winter, yet we still saw buzzards, egrets, blue herons, and, surprisingly, five alligators. You have to do some seemingly silly things to get them to come out, but it works. You can feed the alligators marshmallows and hot dogs.. .off the end of a long stick. You also get to hold a baby alligator, if you like. You don’t have to.
The ride each way on the bus is about 40 minutes. There is no narration, but you see some interesting things on the way. The store at the dock has snacks and a rare albino alligator who eats better than many humans I know.

This review is for the Original Cocktail Tour.
A group of friends and I travel to New Orleans every year for Halloween. We come from all over the US and generally spend about a week visiting the city and catching up. We always book at least one touristy thing to do but this year we didn’t really plan ahead, so I found this tour online sort of last minute and booked it.
We arrived at the appointed place and time and stood around for a bit waiting to be sorted in to groups. As we were waiting, an obviously intoxicated or mentally ill homeless man approached me. We stood chatting for a bit, he told me a very tame joke about a gummy bear, I gave him a cigarette, and that was the end of it.
The city I live in has declared a state of emergency due to the problem of homelessness and unsheltered people. It’s really bad in my city. The homeless problem in New Orleans is also really bad. However, as a part time tour guide, I have found that treating people with kindness and compassion goes a long way — hence, my lack of reluctance to speak to this man and share a laugh.
This bit of info is actually important to the story. I was beckoned over to the group to start the tour. When I got there, a woman who identified herself as Sandy immediately began chastising me about speaking to the man. She actually scolded me in front of my friends and a group of strangers who were also waiting, going as far as telling me to «hang on to my sweet little money.» I mentioned I hadn’t given him any money, but she kept on with it.
Her behavior was condescending, rude, and totally unprofessional. If she had an issue with me talking with the man, she easily could have pulled me aside and explained her take on it — she knows nothing about me nor my situation, so for her to attack me like that in front of the whole group was shocking. I almost walked away and asked for my money back, and would have if she had been our guide.
This conversation was a very auspicious start for our tour. As a former bartender (15 years) and part time guide for a bar/​history tour in my home city (4 years), I was worried about the tour based on the tone set by Sandy’s behavior.
Luckily, we ended up with Brian as our guide. He was awesome.
He had a lot of knowledge about craft cocktails, the history of the city and the bars we visited, and different types of liquor. He was really patient with questions and made sure to make time for each person in all of the stops that we visited. He was funny, but not in that way that tour guides often are — when they’re trying too hard or are just bland about the facts.
Even after the initial negativity that I felt after my experience with Sandy, I was stil quite pleased with the tour. My friends and I really enjoyed ourselves with Brian. I would recommend this tour.

We had a great experience with two tours with Grayline. The first we took was the Cocktail Tour with Joe. He is an older gentleman and you can tell he knew his stuff! What I liked most was that not only did we learn about the drinks we were having but we got an awesome history lesson too. I would highly recommend this being your first tour!
Our other tour was the walking Garden District tour with Marcia. She was very knowledgeable and we really learned a lot. She had lots of energy for sure!
If I had to choose one it would be the cocktail tour, but honestly I would do more if I could!

Late September 2015, Isle of Orleans bus tour
Driver & Speaker both named George (I think… but they definitely had the same name)
10 a.m. departure
This is a good tour that just needs some tweaking. It takes you through various NO districts, including the tragic Ninth Ward. It’s part historical and part post-​Katrina. The historical part included a stop at a cemetery (yikes!) and at the Sculpture Garden (loved loved loved — you can also go to the snack bar, but go see the free art instead). Great info given on the various neighborhoods.
The post-​Katrina part is very strong as the bus moves through the upper and lower Ninth Wards. These are post-​apocalyptic areas that tourists would ordinarily have no safe access to. It was so sad to see people living in these conditions; the guide made a very thoughtful, detailed, and nuanced review of the situation.
The part of the tour that doesn’t really work is the stop at the lighthouse. With all due respect to the heroic lighthouse keepers, volunteers, and waterway preservationists… this was a boring stop. The guide is smart and passionate about water issues, but it’s just too much for a tourist to take in. The blame is not with him, it’s with Gray Line! The lighthouse is padding; they should add this time to the Café/​Sculpture Garden stop — that way we could see much more garden/​art *and* have a snack.
In fact, the lighthouse stop made some of the tourists pass out when they returned to the bus. Seriously, they just sat down and fell over asleep, having lost their will to take in more information. RIP rows 3, 5a and 7b {pouring some Courvoisier in the bus aisle for the ones we lost}.
Overall, though, this was a good tour. I learned a lot and definitely saw things I would never have seen alone. As for you? Go or don’t go — because of the lighthouse, I can’t call this one for you.

So fun and refreshing! Our tour guide «Lil Lou» was so funny and loved cracking jokes. He had small gators that we got to hold! Although it’s not on an airboat, we got to see more gators because it’s quieter. Definitely worth it, you go to the central location and then they drive you to the swamps and was definitely cheaper than everywhere else that offered hotel pick up.
Worth every penny