Los Angeles and Hollywood in particular are very popular tourist cities, so naturally there are going to be plenty of tour companies available. Unfortunately, the experience between all of these companies won’t always be of the same value. In fact, choosing the right bus tour can make or break a trip, especially if you’ll only be in town for a short time.
We’ve taken great care and consideration to plot the absolutely most perfect and enjoyable Los Angeles bus tour experience imaginable, but you don’t have to take just our word for it. Please allow us to explain exactly how all this came to be.
Starting & Ending Location
Los Angeles is a large, sprawling city with sights and sounds to explore all over the place. Many of the competitor tour companies have elected to begin and end their tours right on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. This is convenient for the tour company because it’s easier to operate, but this isn’t the ideal situation for someone looking to spend a day in Los Angeles as a tourist for a few reasons.
- The Hollywood Walk of Fame is a great place to take photos and experience the stars, grab some souveniers, etc. Unfortunately, after about an hour on the walk of fame people are ready to move onto the next thing, so it’s best not to be left on the Walk of Fame after your tour has ended because you’ll run out of stuff to do pretty quickly.
- The beaches and beach towns of Los Angeles are a phenomenal part of the city and an absolute must-do for visitors, but it isn’t all that great spending an allotted amount of time at the beach. When you’re at the beach you need to be on your own time. For this reason, we’ve decided to start and end our tours right next to the Santa Monica Pier so that people can see everything they want to see on the tour, and then retreat back to the beach after the tour has ended to enjoy Los Angeles to the fullest.
Not only do we highly recommend starting your tour with us in Santa Monica rather than on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, we also highly advise that you look into getting a hotel in the Santa Monica area: Check out our blog post on choosing the best hotel in Los Angeles for more info.
Tour Guides
The Tour Guide is truly the most important part of the experience. Yes, the city of Los Angeles is beautiful, unique, and sought after worldwide, but experiencing it all through the eyes of an inexperience or improperly trained tour guide can really mess things up. Even worse, some folks are actually lied to and shown things that aren’t actually what they claim to be.
When you’re riding with Surf City Tours, you can rest assured that you will be riding only with the most experienced, professional, and knowledgeable tour guides in the city of Los Angeles. We maintain a multi-cultured and amazing pool of guides that undergo regular quality checks and commit towards continuing to update and improve their knowledge on all things Hollywood.
Vehicle For Your Bus Tour
If you’re talkin’ about bus tours, the bus itself is obviously a pretty critical component, especially in the city of Los Angeles when the weather is beautiful year-round but the sun doesn’t stop, either.
Our vehicles are open-air, customized tour buses that allow for 360-degrees of photo opportunities while inside. We’ve installed custom canopies overhead to protect you from the sun, but left the vehicles open-air to take advantage of the perfect weather. The buses also look pretty rad, so you’ll be cruising the streets of LA in style with a full view of it all.
WARNING: Some tour companies offer open-air vehicles but don’t bother to install any sort of canopy overhead. If you’d rather pass on the sunburn, but still say yes to open-air, Surf City has got you covered. Literally.
Highlights Included & Tour Route
There are quite a few different ways to tour Los Angeles. Some companies will try to sell you a tour of a bunch of things that you might not be interested in seeing to make the tour as long as possible, or even spend some time sending you on what they call a “short loop” while they wait to sell additional seats on your bus and for the real tour to begin. **If you plan on visiting the Walk of Fame on your own and are approached by a salesperson be careful of this trap**
At Surf City Tours, our tours depart on time every day and the route has been carefully curated to provide a perfect balance of celebrity homes, TV & film locations, studios, landmarks, and other unique sights of the city. We don’t show you too much of one thing at a time, and our route covers the most ground in the least time with about 24 miles of world-famous Los Angeles road, dozens and dozens of celebrity homes and the countless Hollywood treasures you’ll see before the 5.5 hours and 4 stops has ended on our Perfect Los Angeles Tour.
Celebrity Homes You’ll See
We already mentioned this earlier in the guide, but we’ll say it again. Don’t get fooled by shady tour companies that show you homes that might’ve been owned by a celebrity 20 years ago. Surf City Tours keeps our celebrity homes up to date and interesting with a perfect mix of new and old celebrity mansions on all of our tours with unique appeals and interesting stories behind each and every door.
Safety & COVID Preparedness
Surf City Tours has truly gone above and beyond to prepare our vehicles and staff to resume operations as COVID numbers in Los Angeles continue to move downwards and city ordinances and sectors continue to open.
First, our vehicles are completely open-air so you’ll never be in an enclosed space at any point during the trip. We’ve also brought in the big guns with a special team that comes in to sanitize our vehicles with enormous sanitizing fog cannons (no joke!) every night after the tours have ended. Tour guides sanitize touch points frequently throughout the tours, and plenty of hand sanitizer is made available on board every tour.
If that doesn’t sound safe enough for you, we’ve even customized our vehicles further to install plexiglass partitions between the tour guide and the rest of the bus, as well as between each and every row. And the vehicles are still completely open air.
The Conclusion: Surf City Tours is the Best!
Yes, so as you can see it is clear that Surf City Tours is truly the best Los Angeles Bus Tour, and there are plenty of reasons to point at as to why. If you’re interested in taking a tour of Hollywood check out our Perfect Los Angeles Tour. Or, if you’d rather keep it beachside and check out Malibu and all the sweet celebrity mansions, hangouts, and history you should be visiting the Malibu Tour page.
