Guided Day Tour of Pompeii and Herculaneum with Light Lunch

The tours of Pompeii and Herculaneum were very interesting and our tour guides were wonderful! However, the tour bus made stops at multiple hotels all over the Sorrento peninsula to drop off other tour members and this resulted in extremely long return trip. The tour description should have indicated that this tour was not just leaving from our pick up and drop off point.

The lunch was not very good. Bad pizza and sorry looking pasta. Desert was a very frozen lemon gellato. Also did not like the earpiece. It was awkward to wear and then hurt after some time. The women guide was very knowledgeable about the ruins but I found it difficult to to understand her English with her strong Italian cadence and accent. I also think she had too many people to track--I belive there were 34. This caused issues. At Herculeum, we were broken into two groups by site mandate. That difference in size made that part of the tour much better. I think the guide company is disorganized.

It was a very full, informative day! Definitely a little pricey but it’s a once in a lifetime thing so I think it’s worth it. Note that this tour runs more like 9 hours+ - we started about 20-30 minutes late so we were back by 515 since the traffic wasn’t bad but I would be prepared to get back by 6. Lunch was awesome - you start with antipasti then got to choose between a whole pizza or pasta and the gelato to end. Everything vegetarian! My only complaint is that the meet up point is confusing, but I had read previous review reviews that helped me figure out where it was. If you are in front of Deutsche Bank, you need to go down the stairs to the bus terminal on the left. You meet the guide in front of the bathrooms. The bus terminal is across the street from hotel Europa so if you are facing the hotel from the main street, it’s behind you and to the left. They did run late, as they picked up other people from hotels prior to going to the bus terminal/main meet up place, so definitely message the Tour operator prior to starting so you can get the name of your tour guide for the day. The drop off point is different from the pick up because there are rules about the tour bus and where it can stop during traffic hours. But the drop off point is not far from where you pick up. It’s just down the street at the train station. We went on a really hot day so I would recommend bringing an umbrella and a a hat. I would also highly recommend wearing clothes toed sneakers as it’s quite sandy there. You cannot bring big bags to Herculean so plan accordingly - you can leave stuff on the bus though. And they sell waters on the bus for 1€ each. There is a lot of walking - at the end of the day we probably had 12,000 steps, so if you have any injuries, I would be aware that it’s not the most handicap- friendly place and the cobblestones are quite uneven, and the steps are large. Someone in our group had a cane and had complained that they didn’t know there was a lot of walking, but I’m not really sure what they were confused about. Our guide Carmela was great, although in Pompeii, you only have one guide and in Herculean you have to, which was better. Our Herculean guide was really great. I forgot her name. Everyone raved about Herculean, but I think I liked Pompei better. The scale is much larger and it’s more impressive. The walk in Pompeii is two hours and Herculean was an hour and a half. There is no shade in Pompeii, but there is shade at Herculean. All in all a really good trip! Would recommend if you have a full day!