London Literary Tour with a Local Expert: Private & Personalized

I booked a "London Literary Tour with a Local Expert: Private & Personalized" tour, because I had never been to London before, and because I teach Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf at the college level, and I am passionate about their work. Our tour guide was kind and personable, but unfortunately many of her facts were false, and she did not seem to know the city of London well. For example, she walked us to an apartment and said Virginia Woolf had killed herself inside it— when in fact Virginia Woolf died in a river in the country. Our guide then walked us 20 minutes to a bookstore that, it turns out, no longer exists (I would have expected someone leading a tour and walking us 20 minutes in that direction would have double-checked in advance that the store she wanted to show us was still there). When I mentioned that Charles Dickens had lived on Tavistock Square, our tour guide insisted that he had not. (He had—we found a blue plaque saying so later.) I could go on... Then, at the end of our tour, she advised us to take the Underground back to our hotel, and when we told her we would prefer to walk, she informed us that if we chose to walk, it would take us an hour and a half; in fact our hotel was ten minutes away on foot, as we found out ourselves. Having spent $290.00 for this "London Literary Tour with a Local Expert," I expected an expert in literature, or better preparation. It turns out, our guide's expertise was in business administration and economics, not literature. And her local knowledge was not strong. I regret paying so much for inaccurate and misleading information, and would not recommend this to my friends.

Adrian was knowledgeable, interested in what I wanted to learn about, and showed me several hidden gems on our afternoon in London. I would tour again with Adrian in a heartbeat.