Bruges Day Trip: Canal Boat, Windmills & Damme

Lots of walking in a unique city with architecture that is unusuall and impressive. A canal boat ride is a must. Lots to see!

A good review of Bruges. However, many of your guests were sold a tour with "Canal Boat". This was not included. Please advise as to compensation. I deduce the guide has seen this happen before, as in you put him in poor position.

It’s a pretty long day and quite a bit of walking, including to and from the bus. Our bus had the Spanish speakers plus the English speakers so all of the commentary was done twice in the two different languages. Our guide was very helpful and friendly and we have plenty of time to explore Bruges. She gave us some good suggestions for restaurants to try and the one that we went to was great.

The Bruges Tour suddenly got merged with the Ghent & Bruges Tour which was not on the cards. The Tour did not correspond to what was sold. Very disappointing and underwhelming.

I don't know why there is a picture of the windmill and countryside, this was more of a busy town for tourist. Very busy streets, crowded and the locals were not nice to tourist :( Our tour guide was very nice, but she was not Belgium, and her English was not great, I wish we had more detailed history during the tour, that was limited. Very crowded and for this reason I would not recommend the visit but it's a cute, very tourist heavy town with lots of tourist shops.

Our guide Antonio was outstanding and very knowledgeable about Bruges (and Brussels). Our only complaint is that our Bruges tour (about 12-15 ppl) was combined with a separate tour of Spanish speakers going to both Bruges and Ghent. As a result, when our tour was completed, we then had to make a separate stop at Ghent to pick up the Spaniards which added over an hour of extra bus time to our tour. Overall our total time was over 10 hours, not the 8-9 hour published duration. Bruges was amazing and we would repeat but I wish we had direct transportation.

The way this tour is arranged is something I have not experienced in other countries. They combined both Spanish and English tour. All information had to be repeated. The itinerary was different. The Spanish tour was going to Gent and the English tour which we were on went to Bruges. The bus had to detour to drop off the other group before heading to Bruges. Same on the way back to Brussels, had to pickup that group. I don’t know how much extra time for this detour but we gathered at 8:30 in the morning and did not reach Bruges until almost 11:30. The fact that gathering a full bus, walking to the bus, and the detour took an extra hour. It was quite a bit of walking from the bus parking to the old town. The guide took us there but there was no guide in the old town to take us back to the bus. You better have google maps to follow so you won’t get lost. Not easy to find you way back. A 2 hr walking tour with no visit to any site with just talking and looking is tiring. Someone requested in the midst to go back to visit the Our lady church but no time to see the Michael Angelo sculpture was disappointing. Some history could have been explained on the bus during the long ride. Rather we were standing just in front of the convent for over 10 minute to hear the history with nothing to see. That was tiring too. Overall, not recommending to join this tour if you are just going to Bruges. Take the train yourself and you can have more time to enjoy the town. There seems to be only one tour company in Belgium for bus tour. We also joined the Gent/Antwatp day tour and the same type of arrangement with 2 different languages tour combined on the bus. We had a double deck bus, fist time experience with that.

Tours lacked any central idea or storyline. I left knowing nothing more about either city. Also the time was very tight. The tour was 1/2 of the time in either city. the tour guides were nice but could use a theme, specific history, or talking points. info was lacking. Very little free time to explore. In future, I’ll take a train and do own exploring. This tour works if you want quantity of tourist pictures but not quality of time or info.

We wasted £83. We could not find the coach. We tried contacting operator. The telephone number would not ring out. We messaged them but they did not respond. They have all our contact details. They did not attempt to contact us to find out whether we were coming. They have not responded to our messages to establish what happened. Book this at your risk

The tour guide was not very impressive and his English was not that good. The tour was geared towards Spanish speaking tourists. It took two and half hours to get back as the bus stopped in Ghent which was not planned. I think we would have saved 4 hours in transit if we had taken the train from Brussels to Brugge.