Forget the hop-on, hop-off bus. The tour you should do on your first day in any city is a food tour.
Bad travel advice
There is one piece of travel advice I see over and over again. And it is dreadful advice.
The tip goes something like this:
“Take a hop-on, hop-off bus on your first day to see the highlights and get an orientation.”
Why you should avoid hop-on, hop-off buses
No, no, no, no, no. This is the wrong sort of tour to take on your first day.
For a start, you really don’t need that orientation if you’ve got a map with the main attractions marked on it.
Secondly, you get a much better orientation by walking – and it often takes roughly the same time anyway.
And that’s before you get into the amount of time hop-on, hop-off buses spend sitting in traffic. Or how once you get off, you hardly ever get back on again – because it’s easier to walk to the next attraction than wait for the bus.
The tour you should do on your first day
This is not to say you shouldn’t do a tour on your first day in a city, however. You should. It’s just a case of picking the right sort of tour.
And the right sort of tour is a food tour.
Three reasons for booking a food tour
There are three reasons for this. One is that, unless the tour is terrible, you’ll get lots of tasty food to eat.
The second is that food tours are usually walking tours, and they’re relatively slow paced. This gives plenty of time for the guide to give you that orientation and history you were looking for on the bus tour.
The main reason to do a food tour on your first day
The main reason for booking a food tour on your first day in a destination, however, is that it gives you good options for where to eat later in the trip.
If you come out of a food tour with one café, restaurant or food truck that you’d like to go back to, then it’s a win. That’s at least one meal you don’t need to research later on.
This is a winning strategy in bigger cities such as London, Chicago and Berlin, where food tours tend to focus on a certain neighbourhood. But it’s particularly the case in smaller cities like Antwerp, Edinburgh and Salzburg where you’re more likely to be visiting restaurants near your hotel.
Where to look for food tours
Most food tours are sold through the likes of Viator and Getyourguide. However, you can’t go too far wrong by just searching for the name of the city and “food tour”.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. If you book through them, I earn a small commission.
