Gray Line of Charleston — Local services in Charleston

As a hostess I was embarrassed. I booked the "Historic City Tour and Live Narrated Harbor Cruise" (approximately $160) for my husband and myself and an out of town couple for their first visit to Charleston. It was not that there was a bad experience with a rude employee or anything that was difficult to navigate, just that it was not at all what I expected based on how the tour was advertised. I learned more from the website description of the sites of interest that would be included than I did on the tour! I intentionally booked a driving/sailing tour because my older guests have limited mobility/stamina. The description of the tours looked like a perfect way to show off our beautiful city in air conditioned comfort. It wasn't. The driver for the city tour drove entirely too fast to find, let alone appreciate anything he pointed out. The roof of the bus made it impossible to see the full height of the homes and buildings we were supposed to be seeing so when the guide was talking about architecture and roofs and tall trees we were so close to them there was no way to even see what he was talking about. It didn't help that he was bored to death with the presentation himself and he repeated himself frequently. The spiel was so canned that the driver was pointing out spring blooms in October. (So...what am I looking at, a green bush that looks like the last green bush he pointed out?) There wasn't any real knowledge imparted, just some canned dates and a little trivia but not much information. It was more of an advertisement for a walking tour if you wanted to really see anything or for an additional fee if you wanted any real information of the historic houses. Walking tours weren't an option for my guests and after the bust with the driving tour I wasn't willing to risk more money for additional disappointment with this company. The harbor tour narration was almost identical to the driving tour. I even heard a man at a table behind us on the boat (who was apparently on a different bus than we were for the driving tour) say that the narration was exactly what he'd just heard on the driving tour. We didn't get close enough to any of the points of interest the narrator was identifying so basically all we did was make a loop around the middle of the harbor with the items of interest at a huge distance, some on the horizon. Annoyingly, when we got close to the Yorktown, the impressive carrier was on the starboard but the narrator was talking about items on the port side! Then, when he did talk about the Yorktown he basically said "there's a destroyer behind the ship but you can't really see it now" because we were already past it. When I have guests in the future I will have to find another way to show them our lovely city with its rich, colorful history, Gray Line failed terribly. Wasted...

I sent an email 4 days ago now and haven’t heard anything back. On Saturday we went on the Kennedy space tour and it was a nightmare. The bus was over half an hour late and then when it arrived we were pulling out of the car park and the bus went onto the wrong side of the road and hit a pole. The driver said he was distracted. We then had to wait ages before we left. When we were on our way they announced that we would be staying back late and getting back late. We had a booking at 7:30pm and we told him we needed to be back and that is why we got the express ticket and he could not of cared less and said it was not possible to get back at the time we were supposed to. If he had told us before we were on our way we would have got off. We then asked about the astronaut that would be greeting us and he said no that we have missed that because we were late. I explained that the tour states that it’s included and that’s not fair and he said no it’s an add on which is false because the tour says that it happens on Saturday which is why we booked that day. We got there just before 11am and he told us he was going to walk us through and show us where to go. We were at the back of the bus on the top level and by the time our section got off the bus he had already left with half of the group and we had no idea where we were going. Overall the whole...

Very disappointed with this “tou” which was both misleading in description and failed in its execution.

To begin, our group of 3 were not picked up at or before 11:15 instead we were picked up 15 minutes late and we did not leave until after 11:30. We were only picked up because we kept asking the visitor center staff about our pick-up and they called to find out. There were no Grayline staff available on site to ask about the delay or to confirm that we would indeed be picked up.

Our driver Watson was very nice and apologized for the mix-up.

We arrived at noon to the plantation and were told we’d be picked up at 2:45pm. This seemed like a very short amount of time given the tour was advertised as 4 1/2 hours.

We were picked up a half hour late at 3:15pm due to another group being late to their pick-up time. We could have used this time exploring the property. We returned to the visitor center at 3:45pm.

Our time was wasted at both pickup times and the lack of staff and information was troubling.

Our driver was lovely and I don’t believe this was his fault just poor company management.

Skip this “tour” as this is basically a drop off and pick-up service and just get an Uber or Lyft there and back. They have a designated area especially for ride-share drop-off...