jemgazo

OK folks. We have our flights and hotel secured for Rome. We'll be staying just around the corner of Piazza Navona the 2nd week of March for 6 days/5 nights. We would welcome any recommendations for tours or touring companies. We were thinking about the Skip-The-Line tours for the Forum/Colosseum and the Vatican. Any other tour recommendations would be helpful (Food tours, Segway, Museum, Bus tours etc). Still not sure if we have time to take a train to Florence for a day trip with only 5 nights in Rome. Is it worth the day trip to Florence or is Rome enough to keep us busy? Appreciate any of your recommendations.

Perche

It depends on your budget. Almost all tours skip the lines. Context Travel is the best, if you are intellectually curious about a place. Every guide has some type of pos-graduate degree in the subject of the tour. If visiting the Forum, Colosseum, or Palatine Hill, your guide be an archeologist or historian. If going to the Vatican Museum, your guide will be a professor of art, or something like that. If you are traveling with kids they have tours that will geared for kids in the group as well. Walks of Italy is also good, but not as good as Context. Be careful, because some tours are bad, with someone's only qualifications being a local, and having some training in being a tour guide, but they can be apathetic and just rush you. For food, Katie Parla, except she is now focused on writing cookbooks, so doesn't do it that much anymore. Another good food guide is Katie Minchilli, or her daughter Sophie. Gina Tringalli and her two partners are good. Maureen Fant takes you shopping at the market, then to her apartment where she makes it with you as a cooking lesson.

Don't use TripAdvisor for what should be obvious reasons (tourists who are visiting Italy for the first time on a brief vacation cannot possibly have insight into Rome or what it offers). Don't use Viator, it doesn't have any tours. It's just a bulletin board like Craig's list that individuals advertise their things for monthly fee. You don't need to have qualifications at all advertise on Viator.

Sedgeway tours are just a tourist gimmicky thing. It's more about being on a Sedgeway then seeing Rome. Depending on the ages of people you are going with, and your health, Rome is best seen on foot, not from a bus. It would be a bad idea to got to Florence. Not because it's Florence, but you don't really count the day you arrive in Rome as a day. You arrive jet lagged, tired, etc. You really only have 5 days, which is a brief trip, and you don't want to waste one of them sitting on a train for a good chunk of the day. You can't see Rome in a month, so why cut it dow to only 4 days?

Perche

Oh no, I'd seriously beware of going that route. There are a lot of companies like that, the most popular being Viator. Like Viator, they don't have any guides. Like Viator, they are a bulletin board, and nothing more. If I have a website indicate that I want to advertise, such as me saying I am a travel guide for Sydney, Australia, a place I've never been, all I need to do is send an email to them, a link to my website, a 250 word essay on, "what is the most favorite travel experience you ever had in your life?" And that's it! Stride Travel will send tourists to me to guide them through Sydney, even though I'm sitting in San Francisco right now.

In Italy, there is actually a pretty high bar to become an official travel agent. With Stride Travel, if I'm active enough on social media in touting their website, I get deemed an, "Expert." An actual Italian guide needs to take official classes and take a test to become a certified guide.

This is hokum. Let's face it. Everybody who goes to Italy is going to have a good time. Anyone who spends thousands of dollars on a vacation is going to say, "it was great!!!" They want to validate their expenditure of time and money, even if they ate frozen pizza in front of the Pantheon (yes, all pizza in all of the restaurants in front of the Pantheon, and on the popular walk between the Pantheon and the Fountain of Trevi is frozen pizza made in Germany, and now increasingly, it's being shipped over from England). They will nevertheless say it was the, "best pizza in all of Italy," Even though it is not any different from take out at Papa Johns in the USA, it's just the atmosphere that seduces. If that turns you on, imagine what a real pizza would do.

Stride Travel even says the benefits of becoming a guide with them are,
"Increase exposure to your website through Stride's marketing channels
Gain search engine optimization benefits through relevant, contextual backlinks to your website"

In other words, you make a website, they will list it for a monthly fee, and all you have to do is provide a 250 word essay on your "favorite travel experience." I'm sure I can become a guide for Stride Travel in Tanzania tonight. These are exactly the types of scams you need to avoid.

rickg523

We (on a three generation family trip) very much enjoyed Walks of Italy Crypts, Bones, and Catacombs tour, esp. the Priscilla Catacombs.

I personally found the tour of the Forum and Colosseum limiting. I had been before on my own and enjoyed using Rick Steves' audio tour (free on the app) and then just exploring the expansive site on my own. I was underwhelmed by the Underground Colosseum portion of the tour, but really liked access to the third level.
The tour - also from Walks of Italy - is long and hot in summer. Btw, another nice feature of the Catacombs tour is it's cool down there.
Spend some time just wandering around central Rome. And the famous evening Passeggiata from Navona to the Spanish Steps is crowded, but deservedly.
Good travels.

Michael El

Absolutely use Viator to book your tours. My guide for the Colosseum underground tour was a trained archaeologist and provided a history of the Colosseum and Forum that was awesome. My Vatican tour guide had an art history degree making the tour much more interesting.

EMB

Perche is correct. Context is the best. I have used them in several cities. They had 20% off their tours last week.
I used them for the Vatican tour 2 years ago. Only 6 people in our group. Met across the street from the museum and were escorted right past all the lines. The tour was supposed to be 3 hours but wound up being 4.5. Worth the money.

Perche

Yes, Viator is the same as Craig's list. Anyone can post their service on it. In about two minutes I can book myself on Viator as offering cooking classes in Sardinia. It's just an online Craig's list, with no quality control. I can list myself as a guide to take you on a Safari in Africa right now, and I've never set foot on the continent. The form is less than one page long. Anyone can list anything. Too book your service, you just have to agree to let them take about 20% of any service booked on their website.

Viator is located in San Francisco, where I live when not in Italy. It's an office next to Costco in a less than desirable part of the city. In the last few years they bought a satellite office in Las Vegas, and in the London suburbs and in Sydney. If you have trouble with your Viator tour when in Italy, there is no one to go to, because they don't exist in Italy. Viator itself has nothing to do with anything, other than acting as a website host in San Francisco, although it's a nice building.

It Rome it actually takes a lot to become certified as a travel guide. I was surprised when someone explained to me how much training her sister was going through to become certified. There are geography tests, history tests, classes, and so on. Context uses those standards, but takes it up a few notches. I have no conflict of interest here. I don't know anyone who works for Context or any other company, and I've never used a travel guide myself, because I never needed the service. I'm just giving my personal opinion from having lived in Rome, going to school there for almost a year, and talking to many Roman friends during numerous visits over the years, and with people from around the world whom I've met while in Rome, and Context is considered going first class.

Viator is considered an, "open listing platform," and the form to fill out to get listed on it is less than one page long, and has no quality control. In less time than it took me to write this I could have signed up to list myself as a guide to the Olympics in Korea. It would be posted and no one would ask any questions, as long as I agreed to the 20%. It's something like TripAdvisor, but actually, TripAdvisor owns Viator. When you sign up they ask if you want to be listed on TripAdvisor as well, so that your business gets more hits.