If this is the quality of your average Hong Kong Tour then I am going to end up in a very sad and dark place - our experience was in no shape or form anything like what the hundreds of Tripadvisor reviews mention, it was the total opposite of a 5 star experience

The shockingly bad tour offered by Hong Kong Free Walks | Hong Kong Free Walking Tours and Memory Tours, a free tour or a paid tour. There is a link above which gives a very detailed explanation of our terrible experience from August 21st 2024

Thanks to this chap for having the gumption to say it as he saw it.
The one thing that is very troubling about Hong Kong Free Walking Tours and Memory Tours is that they are one and the same company, if I was viewing the Hong Kong Free Walking Tours website and Tripadvisor reviews I would never ever book another tour with with either company (and I have done 4 tours with them now)
There response to reviews is a canned response basically the same with a slight variation if you wrote a good review.
In a nutshell there is a NO MISUNDERSTANDING, they have used the same phrase for years and it is very patronising, they simply do not care about the guest experience because they get so many fake 5 star reviews and you can be quite sure that there will be no investigation
and it gets worse if you write a good review and they respond - I quote
**We are not only locals but also a licenced agent your safety and satisfaction is our priority. Thx for your support, we will keep on**
What absolute gibberish, are they saying that only a local Chinese person can lead a tour? and they could not give a rats ass about your safety and satisfaction.
In a nutshell I would not trust this company as far as I could spit after our recent experience.
I find it unbelievable the Grace who supposedly has 10 years experience as a tour guide is just so awful.
At the end of the day what I say will NOT change things, very few people read my blog posts as believe it or not Hong Kong Tours is a niche market and that is a real shame very few people these days use Google to search for tour companies, they go to Viator and Tripadvisor.
I need to make this very clear, I am a nice person and can pretty much get on with everyone, when I grow some teeth it is because a poor quality tour company had provided a very poor tour and in my eyes, gives Hong Kong a bad name and has given 20 + tour guests a very poor introduction to Hong Kong.
I should stress that myself and my associate (whose review is below) booked the free tour version of their paid tour, basically we wanted to sound out this guide as a potential freelance hire, she had so many amazing reviews it was embarrassing.
The worst part of all of this is there is really no complaint mechanism in place to submit a any sort of complaint
All you can do is write a review on Tripadvisor.
The Hong Kong Tourism Board is seeming totally oblivious to these questionable tactics, most of the 5,500 licenced guides in Hong Kong are Government trained (a totally useless programme) it is amazing there is so much legislation in place to protect Mainland Chinese Tourists that they simply do not give a damn about the service that foreign tourists receive and that is shameful.
Worse, some members of the Board of Directors of the HK Tourism Board operate some of these dodgy companies and have done so for decades
On this tour there would have been anywhere from 20 - 100 people on the tour, it is like the guide Grace who we had on our tour has 2 personalities and lives in an alternate universe because we have never met a worse guide than Grace and I am a very objective person, if Grace was the best I would say so, as mentioned the reason we did her tour was to check her out, a lot of our friends are always looking for great guides to add to the team - please note that on a group tour of even 20 people it is almost impossible to have one on one conversations with the guide, whose sole aim is not to lose anyone, stick to the largely memorised and awful script and make sure everything thing runs like clockwork and yell at guests who cause delays.
I did 2,324 Private Tours of Hong Kong in 9 years and I cannot remember ever a guest calling my tours incredible, I had a 5 star profile on Tripadvisor and I worked very hard to make sure I gave 110% on every tour and "a tour that was just incredible" to describe a cheap group tour with a terrible guide - it just does not fit.

These reviews where basically posted at the same time as the one star review, in my view she did not have a wonderful personality she was patronising, overbearing, screeched her script and essentially treated 20 people like they where 5 year old's - oh and the Hong Kong information she gave out was riddled with errors. I have come across guides like this before. quite simply how can reconcile these very similar reviews (with no mention of the sites they visited) with the one star review

We took this free tour version on August 20th, we where the only 2 people out of 20 guests that were on a free tour - I am simply too angry to write a review so my associate (a young lady and great friend who is one of the very best private tour guides in Hong Kong) did the job, she takes tours all over the world when she travels, she knows good from bad.

I was a pioneer of Private Tours of Hong Kong, putting up my website in 2010 and doing my first tour in April of 2011, I completed 2,324 private tours of Hong Kong

… and recently I learnt just how awful some prominent Tour Companies are in Hong Kong who simply have no idea what quality service even means, the Hong Kong Government loves to talk about how great our Tour Companies are, a few are, most are not even remotely great and are distinctly average and | or poor and the Government has no way of knowing or checking, unless they stick a “secret shopper” on tours, I doubt anyone at the Hong Kong Tourism Board even knows what a Tripadvisor review is.

I appreciate very much that 5,500 licenced local tour guides are not all bad, there are some real standouts and they work for my friends.

I have quite a radical opinion on what it takes to become a great Tour Guide in Hong Kong

they must unlearn all the rubbish that the Government Courses teach you
you should be over 35 (I do not think young kids have the life experience to do this job)
if you want to deal with foreign tourists then fluency in English is an absolute must (all my Chinese friends that are guides pretty much speak flawless English) and being totally fluent in other European Languages is a real advantage
and you must have the ability to get on with foreigners and show them Hong Kong in the way you would do for family members and friends.

If you can tick all these boxes and are passionate about Hong Kong and spend a lot of time acquiring knowledge then you will do very well for yourself - I have 52 years under my belt living in Hong Kong and I can really get along with people and did a lot of tours and worked hard to maintain my 5 star rating on Tripadvisor.

So as a reminder - our reasons for doing this tour where two fold :

to check our the Tour Guide Grace whose amazing reviews made her a potential desirable hire as a freelance tour guide
based on my long experience in the tour business, it is simply NOT possible for a company offering the tours that they do to get so many 5 star Tripadvisor reviews, to say it was | is fishy was | is the understatement of the decade.

I have a lot of experience in this business having completed 2,324 private tours in 9 years, there are so many recent reviews for Grace that say she is simply so amazing and knowledgeable, this is why we wanted to check her out because frankly in our experience, NO ONE is that good but we wanted to be sure and I repeat again, I say it as I see it and I believe that most rational and normal people would agree with my comments - our Grace and review Grace appear to be 2 completely different people, Jekyll and Hyde if you will.

What I am writing here is objective and not emotional, our informal association of the best tour companies in Hong Kong has extremely high standards and we share knowledge, information and market intelligence daily, we are always on the lookout for talented tour guides but we do not tolerate clear manipulation of the Tripadvisor review system by companies who have a substantially inferior product and service ethos. we want visitors who come to Hong Kong to have the very best experience., it really is that simple.

Learn more | Visit the Memory Tours Hong Kong Website

Learn more | Visit the Hong Kong Free Walks Website

If you review their 2 websites, click on the buttons above, you have to ask yourself how they can get so many 5 star Tripadvisor reviews in such a short space of time with these very poorly designed websites that could have been cobbled together in some ones back bedroom and Memory Tours has a gmail address as an email contact, there is just something that is not right. It took me 9 years to get to 800+ reviews and 2,324 tours, this company has 600+ reviews in under 2 1/2 years! 210 in 2023, 345 so far in 2024

They have received 345+ reviews in 2024 (not including the 50 that where removed recently) even the top group tour companies in Hong Kong who do a lot more tours than they do and offer a proper 5 star experience only get 5 - 10 reviews per month at best.

Please note that approximately 20 x 2024 reviews have not been sorted by date and you have to scroll to page 55 plus to see the reviews.

I should point out that I have been monitoring Tripadvisor since 2011 on a daily basis, I know what to look for when it comes to fake reviews and the fact that Tripadvisor recently removed 50 reviews, well, that should tell you a lot about the company.

Some more context

Because the Mainland Chinese Tour market is so regulated (80% of Hong Kong Tourists are from Mainland China and this figure has been stable for almost 20 years now) some “bus tour operators” have now turned their attention to foreign tourists - they know that forced shopping will not work any more so the business model (made possible by listing on sites such as Viator and Tripadvisor) is to sell a very cheap tour and basically play the numbers game to eke out a meagre profit, their plan it totally reliant on every tour having a minimum of 20 - 30 participants and making sure that every part of the tour including “meals and snacks included” is the lowest possible quality that they can get away with and they pay the tour guides peanuts.

So basically what I experienced On August 21st was a now standard tour model for foreign tourists based on the Mainland Chinese Tourist Business Model and it just made me so sad to watch how the tour unfolded

Any tourist coming to Hong Kong has a certain expectation of quality, they are also not stupid, they know that the price is cheap and well below market prices for private tours and they know that corners will be cut but this is no excuse for what unfolded, if you accept a tour you have an obligation to provide the best tour possible, no excuses.

**Proof that Grace the guide we had is the same on as the one in the image below**

Absolute proof that our Guide Grace was the same guide that gets all these amazing Tripadvisor reviews, this reviewer wanted to give her a 10 star review and this review is also August 2024, I am sorry but I cannot reconcile these amazing reviews with the experience we had, a one star review would have been one star too many.
This is the same Grace that told us we could not join the tour unless we agreed to pay HK$100 (US$12.80) per person in cash at the end of the tour, she was very adamant about this, even though we made an official booking for a free tour which states the tip is according to the value of the tour and our budget, so much for her 5 star reputation.

I hate cliches at the best of times but the one that is most apt here is “you get what you pay for” if you stop and think about it, do you really think you are going to get personal service and time with a tour guide that is dealing with 20 pesky foreigners and has as much love for her job as visiting a hemorrhoid clinic.

Something to think about

Below is just a partial list of my private tour guests and their rather diverse occupations, I completed 2,324 Private Tours of Hong Kong in just 9 years with almost 60% of these private tours being 6 - 8 hours long and the ability to talk to so many wonderful people from all walks of life is a gift I acquired, I had over 6,000 guests, not bad for one person!

I have done private tours with so many wonderful people who have the following diverse occupations:-

A REAL Princess, Very close relatives of a US President!, One Star Admiral of the US 7th Fleet, Nuclear Missile Operations Officer (Missileer) for the USAF, Plumbers, Postman, Supplier of ALL frozen burger pattie’s to McDonalds, Nuclear Sub Commanders, Farmers, Chip Shop Owner, Teachers, Pulitzer Prize Award Winning Journalists, Photocopier Repair Guys, Lawyers, Rocket Scientists, Movie Producers, Consul Generals, Police Officers, Homicide Detectives, Travel Agents, House Keepers, Linguists, Retired and Serving CIA Officers, Fighter Pilots, Army and Navy Guys, Socialites, Students, Judges, Journalists, Software Geeks, Nuclear Power Plant Inspectors, Surgeons, Doctors, Forensic Pathologists, Nurses, Coroners, Venture Capitalists, Hospice Directors, Town Planners, Accountants, Psychiatrists, Nuclear Physicists, Professional Athletes, Ferry Captains, Commercial Pilots, Airline Crew, Social Workers, Veterinarians, Musicians, Theme Park Executives, Professional Photographers, College Professors, Gaming Geeks, Inland Revenue Tax Officials, American Airforce B 52 Bomber Pilot, Senior Engineer / Ballistic Missiles, Bodyguards, Beer Salesmen, Park Rangers, Scuba Diving Instructors, Popcorn Machines Makers, Coastguard Officers, Firemen, Structural Geologists, Veterinarians, Architects, Surveyors, Hooters Waitress, Dentists, Ski Instructors, Civil Engineers, Air Traffic Controllers, Electricians, Top Law Professor's at major US Universities, Librarians, Steel Guys, Economists, Homemakers, Novelists, Book Publishers, Currency Traders, Carpenters, a Rabbi, Boiler Maker, Strawberry Farmers, Food Bloggers, Morticians, Financial Advisers, Corporate Video Makers, Private Investigators, Bounty Hunters, Chiropractors, Air Traffic Controllers, Builders, Stonemasons, Botanists, Dog Sitters, Spy, Geneticists, Interpol Agents, Prison Food Suppliers, Radio Announcers, Military Cryptologists, Forklift Drivers, Locksmiths, Icecream maker, Pastry Chef, Baker, Zoo Keepers, Explosives Experts, DEA Agents, Coffee Traders, Diamond Buyers, Wedding Photographers, Google Guru's, Geologists, Professor of Medieval History, Navy Chef's, Camp Site Operators, Animal Embalmers, Telecomms Engineers, Helicopter Pilots, Oil Industry Divers, Navy Seals, Editor for USA Today, Landscape Gardeners, Mary Kay Super Agents, Hotel Owners, TV Actors, Optometrists, Gourmet Chef's, Acclaimed Plastic Surgeons, Barristers, Travel Bloggers, Politicians, Funeral Home Directors, Former Gang Member, Anthropologist, Children's Book Author, Geophysicist, Chicken Artist, Priest, Movie Makeup Artist, Expert Witness, Bail Bondsman, Opera Singer, Master Brewer, Child Prodigy, Debt Collector, Victoria Secrets Store Manager, Head of a major Charity, Celebrity TV Talking Heads (!), Fortune 500 CEO's, Corporate Trainer, Futures Trader, Waitress (quite a few) General Manager of a Worm Bait Company, Owner of a RV Dealership, Convenience Store Owner, Owner of an Amusement Game Manufacturer, Elephant Conservationists, Chemist, High School Students, Crematorium Operator, Concert Pianist, Vet from Honduras, Hair Stylist for a Funeral Home, Calendar Maker, Pedicab Operator, Poets, F16 Fighter Pilot USAF, Steve Jobs Doctor, Major US Democratic Politician, Big cheese Executives from HBO and CBS, Famous journalist and a Journalism Professor, former Secret Service Agent, Famous Rare Coin and Stamp Collector, Major Charitable Foundation Owner ... and some really, really senior people from J. P. Morgan, Starbucks, United Airlines, Boeing, Google and Microsoft.

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