Boston Tours (rent, hotel, move)

[marcth]

I'll be staying at The Holiday Inn Boston at Beacon Hill and was planning on taking a trolley tour. I wanted to ask if anyone has taken this tour. Does the trolley pickup out front of the hotel? Do you get dropped off back at the hotel? How is the tour? Thanks!!

[Bob Lanata]

Marcth, the trolly tour is excellent and even better is the duck tour. I do not know all the stops. I highly recomend the duck tours. I am a Boston boy and took the tours just to accomodate friends visiting from away and I really loved it and learned a bit more about my city. Hope the city is good to you

[chaxey]

The duck tours are very fun, but as a history major, I can say that a lot of the 'stories' they tell are just that... not backed in fact. That said, it's very fun.

Additionally, the ducktour is not a very thorough tour, however. It's a a very different tour experience, but due to the demand and number of tours they run with the duck boats, the actual route and lenght/depth of the tour is not nearly as good as a standard trolley tour. The other thing about the duck tour is it's not useable as transportation; you get on and are on a set course and never get off the boat. The regular trolley can be used as transport; IE, if you pass by an interesting site or attraction, you hop off the trolley, and visit the attraction. When your done, you just wait for another trolley and hop back on and move on to your next destination. You can't do that on the duck boats.

If you want to do a boat tour, I'd suggest doing a charles river gondola ride, or rent a power boat (a new comapny just started offering this). There's also many harbor island ferries you could use, or take an evening cocktail cruise to charlestown at sunset and wait for the Constitution to fire off it's sunset cannon.

There's lots of options!