Giverny Day with Monet Foundation Audio Guided Tour from Paris

BOOK AT YOUR OWN RISK. I have never written a bad review in my life, but this place warrants it. This was an extremely scary experience that put a huge damper on my trip to Paris. I booked a full day at Monet's Gardens, but they put me on a bus with people who had only booked a half-day. I was told halfway through the bus ride that I would need to find the second "afternoon" bus to get back to Paris. The tour guide gave me zero information on what the bus looked like, who the second guide would be, and didn't provide me with a name or phone number. She simply said "Just get here before 5:45pm and look around, you'll find it. The bus leaves at 5:45pm." I waited in that parking lot from 5pm to 6pm - a full hour - and asked every single bus driver in the lot. Nobody was with Paris City Vision. I was completely alone 2 hours outside of Paris, and I kept calling their customer service line but nobody picked up. I texted their WhatsApp, but nobody answered. I tried to get in touch with the tour guide, but she didn't pick up either. Eventually I had to call an Uber, which cost me $140. I've spoken to other people who've had similar experiences with Paris City Vision. Their customer service is virtually nonexistent, and you have to repeatedly call and email them over and over to even get a response. They finally looked into the situation and found that their tour guide had indeed given me the wrong time, but STILL refused to pay me back for my Uber. They essentially messed up on their end, I had to pay for it, and then they didn't absolutely nothing about it. Again, have never written a bad review in my life. But there's a certain way to treat people, and this is not it. I've never felt so snubbed and disrespected by a company before. Again, book at your own risk - this isn't the first time someone has been stranded because of a mess-up on their end.

The Impressionist Day at Giverny (Monet) was great. Tour guide gave full information. Audio guide was okay but we already knew more details than the audio guide had (due to extensive pre-reading), so some of audio tour we ended up skipping. We liked having the full day, we concluded half day would not be enough. If you want to enjoy the garden, house, lunch, grave, and museum of impressionism, you need the full day tour. We departed Paris on time at 8:15am, and the bus left Giverny at 6pm arriving back to drop-off point in Paris at 7:25pm. Note the return time is not specified by Paris City Vision ahead of time, so I am putting it in the review to give you an idea of return time. Note the half day participants would have had to head back to their bus at about 11:40am and I made a note, at that time we were looking inside the house, and we were only about halfway done with the house. It would have been way too little time! In the end, we arrived back for 6pm pickup about 40 minutes early, so it was just a tiny bit too much time, but given how they bring in the afternoon group and then you return with that group, there's no way they can have a 5pm return bus - but in case they could, I offer my suggestion that a 5pm bus return would have been just about perfect timing for us.

Self guided tour which was perfect visit for us. You definitely need more than 1.5 hrs to tour Gardens and Monet’s house. Tour guide gave good instructions ONCE we arrived. What was unhelpful was the lack of instruction on HOW TO USE the audio guide before arrival. We had no idea that we could listen to the prerecorded guide on the ride there. There was also no commentary on our trip to or from Giverny, unless you were on the pink, green or brown tour. This was unfriendly and unacceptable. There were 4 different tours on our bus. We had to wait 15 minutes for our guide to dispatch the three tours first. This arrangement was unprofessional. And please instruct your guides to give more information like whether there is a bathroom on board the bus and general safety information about the bus exits. .