The Best Tour guides should NOT give you an itinerary up front

Discover the Real Hong Kong with the BEST Private Guides

Above are links to 5 blog posts that I have also written relevant to this post, my aim is simple and that is to convince you to carefully consider booking a Private Tour of Hong Kong with my friends, they offer fabulous experiences at prices you can afford and you will come away with memories to last a lifetime.

Please do try and read all of these posts as they cover a very important point which is, do you want to have the best experience possible when you visit Hong Kong?

….oh and give the little guys a chance, most Private Tour Companies in Hong Kong simply cannot compete with Viator and other Online Travel Agencies, they do have websites and offer a far superior product than what you might get on a generic Viator Tour!

12 Excellent reasons to book a Private Tour of Hong Kong

Ask yourself a very simple question, a family of 5 comes to Hong Kong, which tour do you think will give them a better experience of Hong Kong and those memories to last a lifetime

1. A private tour, just the top quality private tour guide and the family with a flexible itinerary going at your own pace

2. A group coach tour with a bored, underpaid “local guide” working from a prepared script and you have another 20 tourists on the bus with you and you have no control of the tour itinerary including how long you spend at a particular place and no chance to interact one on one with the guide.

3. You have booked the Tour on Viator, you have no information on the guide or the company and because Viator insists on an itinerary you get a cookie cutter itinerary, very bland and very generic and it is very hard to make any changes to the itinerary (in general) most tour guides in Hong Kong lack the confidence and street smarts to make up an itinerary in their heads when they meet their guests!

12 reasons to book a Private Tour of Hong Kong

1. Itineraries customised to your personal specifications with unrivalled flexibility

2. Go at your own pace based on your personal dynamics and circumstances

3. You can choose the date and starting time and it can cost a lot less than you think!

4. Beat the crowds! you will absolutely maximise the time for actual sightseeing

5. You get a local resident | expert with an insiders knowledge of Hong Kong - the ultimate benefit

6. Flexibility on changing the itinerary during the tour if required

7. An opportunity to make amazing memories with family and friends

8. An in-depth learning and participation experience

9. You will get a great value for money experience and you will get the best guides

10. The undivided attention of your Private Tour Guide

11. Going from attractions A to B to C to D to E seamlessly and hassle free with an expert

12. You will absolutely have a lot more fun! (p.s. and someone to take your picture!)

This is a fairly mediocre itinerary on Viator for what they call a Private Tour, very generic and not in any shape or form can it be compared to a Private Tour that I did and my friends do.

I always like to state that these are my personal opinions, Viator, Get Your Guide, Tours by Locals and any number of other OTA’S have taken over the Private Tour and Tour Business and have taken all of the personality out the business, all company offerings are treated in the same manner.

Viator in June 2024 had 30+ million visitors to it’s website, the vast majority of those people where 25 - 34 years old and this is what tour companies find attractive, the sheer volume of people going to the Viator site so even mediocre companies with mediocre offerings can get a large volume of bookings without even trying.

Statistically the vast majority of my guests where aged over 50 and appreciated quality over mediocrity and where quite happy to browse websites of small companies offering great, personalised Private Tours and think carefully and spend time making a decision.

This is a slightly different version of a typical Viator Tour - the company that is behind this tour is called City Unscripted and they have made it quite clear the itinerary can be personalised, so when you meet the guide in theory you can ditch the Viator Itinerary, I would point out that I would NEVER take guests to the Man Mo Temple, PMQ and Tai Kwun, there are far better places to visit, these 3 attractions are part of Hong Kong Tourism Board gimmick to call an area in the Business District “Old Town Central” which is in and around Hollywood Road where these three attractions are located, guides like to take people here because they are very close to each other and in a central location and they do not have to walk that much!

So, the crux of the issue starts here, please bear with me and please understand that my comments relate to Hong Kong only which is quite unique in many respects.

Virtually all of my 6,000+ guests over 2,324 tours were in Hong Kong for 24 - 48 hours only.

I hate with a passion Viator and OTA’S in general (Online Travel Agencies) who simply have NO concept of what makes for a fantastic private tour or tour experience of Hong Kong, their “tour page” basically gives you no information on the Company you will be working with or the guide who will do your private tour but they do insist that an itinerary appears on the page

Even worse, they put approximate timing for each place of interest, based on my vast experience of doing private tours, timing, never, ever goes to plan.

• “For guests, part of the draw of booking with a tour operator is having a pre-planned itinerary. This means travellers can simply show up and enjoy the tour.” - this was a quote I read on a Travel Blog, the great Private Tour Guides can plan the perfect private tour within 5 minutes of meeting you!

• “Picture yourself in a potential guest’s shoes. They’re looking at different tour options, trying to decide what activity and where to book. A detailed tour itinerary simplifies the booking experience for prospective visitors and can be a powerful marketing tactic in motivating these visitors to book your tour.” - and based on my own experience, a detailed tour itinerary totally complicates the whole booking experience and it can result in 20 - 30 emails going back and forth, for me anyway itineraries can be sorted on the day within 5 minutes of meeting with the guests and see my comments further down the page towards the end of the post.

The problem is for me a very simple issue, on Viator everyone’s offerings basically look the same and there is simply too much “stuff” on the page and trying to work out the price is quite difficult, I simply cannot grasp why guests would not simple go to google and type in “private tours hong kong”!

A great Private Tour Company will NOT give you an itinerary in advance, basically the itinerary is very, very flexible with the emphasis on giving you the best experience, a short Q & A session of 5 minutes at the start of the tour will get the basic itinerary sorted out.

You will have been on their website, you know who is the company owner, there will be bio’s of the guides and of course there are the Tripadvisor reviews you can read.

I need to point out that a lot of my friends who own Private Tour Companies do have their own Viator style offerings on their website, they tend to have a team of guides who can get assigned a tour on the day of the tour so it helps them if they know the itinerary. I do not agree with this process as to me anyway it is no longer a Private Tour but a bog standard pre planned tour with a set itinerary, anyway, on their website you can generally figure out who the owner is, ask for them to be your Private Tour Guide!

I never listed by the way on VIATOR but I was for a time on Tours by Locals and I clashed with them constantly because I did not like to be associated with doing generic tours, they tolerated me to a certain level but I cut ties with them in 2019 when they became more and more like VIATOR - in my universe not all tour guides are created equal, some guides are more equal than others, TBL liked to push the concept that all guides where the same quality! Tours by Locals just launched a new website and it is like VIATOR version 3.0 …. oh well

The key component of the private tour is FLEXIBILITY and a substantial % of my private tours where 6 - 8 hours and you can cover a lot of ground in that time with a combination of walking and taking public transport (all part of understanding what makes Hong Kong tick)

Unfortunately a lot of mediocre tour companies hire mediocre tour guides who get set in their ways and who hate to visit places that they rarely visit and will give you a litany of excuses on why they cannot take you there.

Let’s start with the basics of my planning a tour.

• priority place to visit no. 1 - Victoria Peak on Hong Kong Island but taking in the view from my spot.

• priority place to visit no. 2 - The Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin Temple in Kowloon, Hong Kong Culture 101

• priority thing to do no. 3 - A ride on the Star Ferry across Victoria Harbour

Basically one of the reasons why guests book a private tour is that they can make special requests, the gift I had was making a tour memorable and fitting in a lot of “things” without ever rushing and clock watching, I basically did not have a standard tour with the exception of the Lantau Island NP 360 day out which took up around 8 hours

My guests always appreciated the fact that they had a certain amount of input and control over the itinerary, over the course of 2,324 private tours I did many unusual things ranging from visiting old apartment blocks where guests lived 30 years ago, visiting their old school, visiting places that their relatives went to 50 years ago, visiting Military Graveyards, the list is extensive.

At the end of the day what mattered is that most of my guests simply wanted the BEST Hong Kong experience and to learn about the unique history and culture and they got a native English speaker who has lived in Hong Kong for 52 years and raised a family here (we have 3 adult sons) oh and I am extremely blunt, I do not shy away from tricky subjects, with me you got the good, the bad and the ugly and I have to this day a unique take on Hong Kong.

Going back to that Viator itinerary for a Private Tour I would like to make a few comments.

• A visit to Victoria Peak is essential, that is for sure, unfortunately going to the Peak Tower is a cop out by the company | guide offering the tour - the view is NOT even close to being the iconic and amazing panoramic city view that you get from my spot on Lugard Road (read my specific blog posts below about that) in general they will use the excuse of timing when quite often it is down to the laziness of the tour guide who does not want to make the extra effort to go to my spot and therefore deprives the guest of getting images of the greatest city view in the world, it is just wrong

• Aberdeen Fishing Village - a staple generic “tourist attraction” if ever there was one, a fishing village is just plain nonsense, it has not been that for decades, all the people who lived on boats moved into Government Apartment Blocks a long time ago, the Jumbo Floating Restaurant which to be fair was quite iconic, sank in the South China Sea a few years ago and has not been replaced., I remember vividly what it was like in the old days, but those days are long gone and to me personally it is not worth the effort, a recent Tomb Raider movie with Angelina Jolie had an extended scene in Aberdeen Harbour which they turned into a floating market, it was like that 50 years ago and it simply does not exist today.

• I like Repulse Bay but I rarely go there and it is not even close to being one of the most expensive residential areas in Hong Kong

• Stanley, I like Stanley and it is very interesting particularly the bus ride there but it is a long way from town.

• Victoria Harbour - well I cover that on my Star Ferry ride

So in a nutshell the itinerary is very generic, it does not seem to allow for any changes and it seems any personal requests by you will send the Private Tour Guide into a state of near panic given that their itinerary is set in stone.

One of the worst cases of “itinerary planning” was a young lady who copied a list of things to in Hong Kong off Wikipedia and came up with a list of 30 - 40 major attractions she wanted to visit in 3 days and then sent it to about 10 different tour companies, we surmised she had no interest in the places she just wanted a social media image at each place and it would have taken well over a week to go to the all the places she wanted to visit - Hong Kong is 430sq miles or 1,113sq km!

There is one final point about my supposedly controversial comment about not providing an itinerary up front prior to your Private Tour of Hong Kong.

I made that decision on my very first tour in April 2011 when I asked my guests if there was anything they would like to do and they simply stated, you know the place treat us as family members and show us your Hong Kong.

Wise words from my guests and I figured that at my price point I had to give the best experience possible.

The overwhelming majority of guests do NOT have special requests and they want the Private Tour Guide to show them the best of Hong Kong in the time allotted and if you have done 300 tours, 500 tours, 1,000 tours and 2,000+ Private Tours this should not be an issue.

I also learnt very quickly that some people wanted an itinerary so they could shop it around to other tour providers to get a cheaper price, my reasons for not giving a tour itinerary in advance are sound and logical, guests want to be comfortable with their choice of a Private Tour Guide which is why it is essential that you visit their website and read the reviews, I always refused to get into a bidding war, my price was my price and that was that.

Regrettably there are far too many mediocre tour companies and tour guides in Hong Kong, so choose wisely, right from day one I always had the highest prices but you also got a fabulous experience and my guests really appreciated that..

oh…. try and choose a Private Tour Guide that has lived in Hong Kong for at least 10 years and is over the age of 35, trust me on this, older people have a lot more life experience, there are a couple of exceptions but I would never go with a guide in their 20’s, just a personal opinion of course., you get a lot of kids in Hong Kong ending up doing Free Tours, well, you get what you pay for.

Itineraries in advance do NOT work, below is a small list of the occupations related to my Private Tour Guests, some had specific requests, most did not and where happy to have me lead the way, all I needed was 5 minutes discussion at the start of the private tour and then I planned the itinerary in my head.

I completed 2,324 Private Tours of Hong Kong in 9 years, my guests trusted me to give them an experience of a lifetime.

.......and I have done private tours with 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.

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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