Book a Private Tour directly for a lifetime of memories

Discover the Real Hong Kong with Jamie

I can think of plenty of reasons why you should book directly with a Private Tour Company in Hong Kong rather than VIATOR or other large Online Travel Agencies

Do you Book a Private Tour with an Online Travel Agency Like Viator or Get Your Guide or do you book directly?

Viator worldwide lists 350,000+ tours, how do you choose the best tour company?!

Please bear in mind that OTA’s including Viator offer Private Tours and Group Tours, you need to know this as Group Tours, well you could be part of a group that has 20 - 30 or more people in it, this applies to walking tours, cultural tours and food tours - frankly and as a pioneer of private tours in Hong Kong, group tours can be just plain awful and clearly the less people the better. The quality food tour companies generally limit the amount of guests on the tour to 6 - 10 people, you need to check and verify this prior to booking.

My conclusion comes first:

Do you want a 5 star Hong Kong experience with memories that will last a lifetime or do you want to do a generic tour offered by a generic and mediocre Tour Company with a generic tour guide with an unknown level of English Fluency?

I can be pretty hard hitting but for me providing the very best private tour experience was hard wired into my DNA and I have no time for Tour Companies who do not share this sentiment, I have been on quite a lot of Hong Kong Tours in the interests of research and I have pretty much come away feeling very disappointed, not just with the level of English but with the apathy of the guide (in the movie business they call it “phoning in a performance”) I am sure there are exceptions and I know a few who work for my friends, there are tour guides and then there are TOUR GUIDES

You absolutely stand a much better chance of finding your perfect private tour company by doing a simple Google search and visiting the Tour Companies own websites, you will get a complete picture of the company, who the owner is, who the guides are, tours offered and everything can be cross referenced with Tripadvisor reviews, oh and it is likely you will get a much better deal.

In Hong Kong there are only about 15 top quality private tour companies, that‛s right 15 and I know them all.

The key component of any Private Tour Company is | are the actual tour guides.

So to me what is critical when it comes to “qualifications” to be a Private Tour Guide in Hong Kong - these are my thoughts.

• male or female, it should not really make a difference but many clients are more comfortable with females!

• a minimum 10 years residency in Hong Kong, every additional year is simply a life experience bonus (I am at 52 years residency)

• English as a native language if possible, there are many degrees of English fluency in Hong Kong and to put it bluntly on an OTA site when they state Fluent in English it can be quite meaningless, my Cantonese much to my annoyance is beyond pathetic but I would never mislead anybody by even stating I had even basic Cantonese skills never mind a modicum of fluency because I do not. The statement below is quite interesting. I should point out that if you are comfortable being with a Tour Guide with basic conversational English then who am I to argue!

• if they speak native Cantonese as well and are Hong Kong Chinese, then awesome!, this is particularly important if you are booking a food tour in Hong Kong, I would absolutely recommend the Hong Kong Chinese Guides working for my friends.

• they must also know key Hong Kong facts and keep themselves up to date, key statistics change every year and keeping up with current events is a must, in other words, they must be information junkies, too me information is my lifeblood, it is unfortunate that a lot of young people these days do not have this mentality, they are happy to quote out of date and incorrect statistics working on the theory that nobody cares and no one will check, what a terrible attitude.

• and aged from 30+ onwards, I simply believe that life experience is a vital asset to being a tour guide, the more you have the better, I became a Private Tour Guide when I was 50 years old and in my experience the best guides in Hong Kong are aged over 35.

Unfortunately these days when you book on an OTA you have no control over the guide you get, I am sure a lot of them are competent if rather generic but you have been warned and frankly you do not want competent and generic, you want the best!

It is not just English language skills, it is their aptitude as a tour guide that can make or break a tour, I was born to be a tour guide - 2,324 tours in 9 years.

As an example if you type into Viator Search the leading OTA - Hong Kong Private Tours you get over 350 listings! Oh and the tour page pretty much looks exactly the same for all of them, for a tour company there is simply no way to stand out from the crowd with the template they have to follow and like I said, the only thing Viator cares about is earnings and continuous growth, they probably figure if that if 50 companies offer a similar tour then no matter what they are guaranteed to get the booking.

I ask my friends - are you trying to grow your own business on Viator or Viators business? to write this article I spent a couple of days immersed in Viators Hong Kong site, it is certainly impressive but because each experience has the same template, one companies offerings have no chance of standing out from the crowd and the person booking the tour | experience has no real idea about the quality of the tour at the end of the day you get a booking because there are so many people viewing the site the law of averages comes into play.

I am always amused at how many of my friends do not like to discuss how many bookings they get through an OTA!

I know a few things about Private Tours in Hong Kong, I was a pioneer of Private Tours, I started my research in 2010 which took about 6 months and launched my Private Tour Company J3 Private Tours on 1.1.2011 and did my first tour in early April 2011

I completed 2,324 Private Tours with my last one being in January 2020 just prior to Covid devastating the Travel and Tour Business, Hong Kong was closed to visitors for 3 years.

I am a founder member of the Hong Kong Private Guides Society which we set up in 2014 or thereabouts, it consists of a small group of Private Tour owner operators who are absolutely dedicated to providing guests with the best possible experience when they visit Hong Kong.

Due to health issues I no longer offer Private Tours but I am looking at launching the J3 Hong Kong Experience later in 2024.

So far in 2024 I have dedicated my time to promoting Private Tours of Hong Kong provided by members of our society and as mentioned, they offer top quality private tours and many of them offer amazing food tours as well.

Looking at the development of Private Tours since 2011 (when I could locate just one person offering a single private tour) I am absolutely horrified at the proliferation of what are called OTA‛s or Online Travel Agencies.

These companies include:

☛ Viator

☛ Tripadvisor

☛ Get Your Guide

☛ Klook

☛ Tours by Locals

☛ Booking.com

☛ Expedia

☛ Airbnb Experiences (who have since withdrawn for the business)

To name but a few, there are probably around 50 now all vying for your business..

To put it into context, on Viator alone claim to offer 300,000 tours and their website(s) get over 460 million visitors a month it can be hard to compete against that.

I have spent many, many hours on the sites mentioned above and for the life of me I cannot quite understand why anyone would book a private tour on an OTA. (Online Travel Agency)

For many, visiting Hong Kong is not the sort of visit done on a whim, I am quite sure people do a lot of pre planning, flights are expensive and long, hotels are expensive (but awesome) and if you are coming for 2 - 5 days you will probably have time to fit in a tour or two and if you are here on a stopover, well, there is a lot you can do in 8 hours.

In a nutshell on an OTA, all tour companies are created equal but some companies are more equal than others and I do not say that as a positive thing.

It is almost impossible to determine who the company is offering the tour, the tour offering is over the top complex with lots of useless stuff, there is no mention of guides, tour offerings just come across as too bland with far too much detail, it is bewildering and I can never understand how people can manage to book a tour on an OTA using a smartphone.!

Basically all individual tours have to follow the OTA tour template so all tours look the same and even though most OTA‛s like to offer a lowest price guarantee (I am not sure how they could do that?) trying to find out the price of a tour requires clicking on a lot of “boxes” and then to compare prices you have to exit and repeat the same time consuming procedure with another offering.

When you compare this to the simplicity of Private Tour Companies in Hong Kong websites you can save yourself a lot of frustration.

Here are some other things to consider

• OTA‛s like to put on the page a detailed itinerary with a time allocated for each stop on the tour, this is utterly pointless and I know this because I did 2,324 private tours of Hong Kong, if someone says 10 minutes at stop one it will always be 30 minutes, when you are doing a tour learning to control time simply comes with experience and a lot of the time, timing is really up to the Guest.

I should point out that with one exception (a trip to Lantau Island) I had NO formal itineraries, if a guest had a special request I would find a way to fit it in but otherwise you where in my capable hands for 6 - 8 hours, all I can say is that it worked for me.

• There is no way to read a bio or see who is the Company Owner or who the actual guides are, my advice is always the same, where possible book the tour with the owner of the company, it is not difficult to work out who this is from the Tour Company website

• Most tour companies in Hong Kong will NOT pick up guests from a Hotel, the Airport or a Cruise Ship Terminal, this is an important consideration, all my friends do and it is something I did 2,324 times, you have to do right by the guest.

• most importantly you need to read the Tripadvisor reviews, this is vital and here is where it gets complicated, take for example the Big Bus Company who offer bus tours in Hong Kong, on Viator they have 948 reviews however on Tripadvisor (which owns Viator) they have 2,317 reviews (as of 1st July 2024) on Viator a lot of negative reviews do not exist, no matter who you book with always check the reviews on Tripadvisor, some people mock the value of reviews, I do not, if someone has over 300 reviews then the reviews will be quite accurate.

• oh and a tip when it comes to reviews on Tripadvisor for Private Tour Companies, there is a company listed near the top who have sprung up out of nowhere, they own a tour company and a free walking tour company, so here is the thing, they get awful reviews for their free walking tours (and I mean awful) and yet in April, May and June 2024 on for their tour company they got hundreds of reviews virtually everyone a 5 star review from people making their first review, review manipulation is very common with low quality tour companies.

• you would be surprised at how many freelance tour guides are out there working for multiple tour companies with multiple OTA‛s, my personal opinion is a lot of these guides are of a poor standard with limited English fluency. Pick one of my recommended companies.

These are just some of the tips - I recommend you at least think about what I have said!

... and naturally I save the worst aspect of booking through an OTA until last.

Most OTA‛s have a system in place which does NOT rank tour offerings by quality which to me is the only way to do it.

Even Tripadvisor does it, for a fee they will list your company at no. 1 in the rankings for a week or so even if you have totally negative reviews.

On an OTA site the Tour Company pays a hefty commission to the OTA for a listing, really hefty and too make things worse if you agree to pay MORE commission the algorithm will automatically place you in the top 2, 5, 10, 20 of search results no matter how great or rubbish you are, there is simply no quality control here.

I know a lot of companies who list on OTA‛s whose reputations leave a lot to be desired and they can still get a top 5 listing? How awful is that, for the OTA they simply do not care, all they care about is revenue for the next financial quarter.

There is one OTA I have listed that is a little bit different and that is Tours by Locals, I was listed on their site from 2011 - 2019, they are a very small player but at least they promote the guides, it is the guide who is the difference between a great tour and a terrible tour, unfortunately over the years Tours by Locals started taking the route of all guides are created equal (which is complete hogwash by the way) and they increased the commission guides had to pay them and recently they upgraded their website so it looks a lot more like all the the other OTA sites, sad to see, but at least they still promote their guides.

I will be honest with you, a lot of my Private Tour Guides list on OTA‛s I totally understand why as a lot of them have a small team of employed guides and attracting business through your own website is tough (my business background is sales and marketing so attracting guests to book was never an issue) some also have freelance guides so it is important that they have a steady stream of bookings.

Other than Tours by Locals I NEVER listed on an OTA and Tours by Locals has only recently being judged to be an OTA after a corporate takeover

I always took the view - look at my website, everything you need to know is there in plain sight. You know exactly who I am, what my prices are and what you get for your hard earned money, I never employed guides or freelance guides, if I was unavailable then I would recommend my friends and yes, at all times you were dealing with the owner of the company.

… and yes, if you like Viator and you plan to book then have a look at the Viator reviews, quite often they reveal the name of the company who did the tour, you need to double check the company on Tripadvisor as you will see all reviews from all their clients not just Viator, it can be quite an eye opener and it may give you pause.

If you are looking to book a Private Tour of Hong Kong then I implore you NOT to book with an OTA, there are plenty of buttons you can click on this blog post to connect with my friends who will give you a great Hong Kong experience with memories to last a lifetime.

Oh and I do not get a commission from my friends, I have income streams not related to tours, for me it is really as simple as making sure that you the guest get the best possible experience when you visit Hong Kong.

ps and yes, you are more than welcome to contact me if you have any questions.

Jamie

Retired Hong Kong Private Tour Guide

J3 Private Tours and J3 Consultants

2,324 completed Private Tours of Hong Kong

J3 Group Hong Kong

J3 Consultants Hong Kong | J3 Private Tours Hong Kong

J3 Consultants Private Hong Kong Experiences are tailored for individuals who prefer to explore Hong Kong independently but would like a Hong Kong Expert to tell them about Hong Kong

This unique experience offers an authentic insight into the real Hong Kong, providing a deeper understanding of the city's culture, history, and local way of life.

Led by Jamie, a dedicated Hong Kong specialist and resident for 52 years, the experience covers many aspects of Hong Kong's identity, spanning its time under both British and Chinese rule.

Cultural Tourism at it’s very best

J3 Private Hong Kong Experiences

You want to learn about the REAL Hong Kong from a local host

How local do you want to get?

You have come to the right place.

Jamie, your friend in Hong Kong

52 years living in Hong Kong, our family arrived on January 2nd 1972

I have lived here for 25 years under British Rule, 27 years under Chinese Rule

I have 45 years of Business Consultancy experience in Hong Kong

My wife is a local & has lived her entire life in Hong Kong, her first language is Cantonese

We have 3 Adult sons all born and educated in Hong Kong, 2 still live in Hong Kong

I pioneered the Private Tour Industry in Hong Kong in 2010

2,324 completed award winning Private Tours of Hong Kong from 2011 - 2020

……and yes, I am a bit of an expert on the Hong Kong car culture!

© Jamie Lloyd | J3 Consultants Hong Kong | J3 Private Tours Hong Kong | | 2011 - 2024.

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