El Retiro Park Guided Tour and tapas tasting

B

Brenda V.

November 22, 2025

This tour provider through Get Your Guide was awful. I gave them an opportunity to make our experience right by refunding all or a portion of our tour and they refused. The tour to Toledo and Segovia in Spain was poorly paced, had no headphones to hear the guide with a group of over 30 people, and the you're guides could care less about your comfort, and ability to hear and understand them. We filled a large bus so however many that is. The bus what hot and the guide made no effort to check in on the comfort of passengers. It was so bad, that when we asked for a bathroom break having just ridden over 2 hours to the destination to our first stop we were told to wait until the end. PS there were kids on this tour. They waited on no one, pressed forward at a rapid pace up and down stairs and did not stop once to keep the group together. Do not take this your if you have any type of issue walking. It is rigorous. Up and down stairs, up and down hills, not handicap friendly and mostly cobblestone streets. All lovely but just FYI. And if you weren't crammed into everyone's personal space you couldn't hear a thing, there were no whispers with head phones that were sorely needed to hear the guides explanations of the history. Other operators had them... By the time we got to the second stop in Segovia another warm hour ride on the bus we stopped for lunch at a restaurant chosen by the guide but you could do what you wanted and meet at the meeting point later. The guide, Maria, was not welcoming. She was quite standoffish, as was Eva the English speaking guide in Toledo. When we advised Eva we may need to leave bc of timing and our disappointment at not hearing anything anyway, she replied "do what you want" . So we left. Despite telling her we left we were receiving messages from the bus that they were waiting for us. Why? We told her we were leaving and she didn't care or take note who we even were. I protested with the tour operator bc this was so subpar considering all the other tours we had been on and they refused to refund any portion of the tour. Toledo and Segovia are beautiful places but you can see them on your own from Madrid on a bullet train and get there in less than 30 minutes. I am sure there are audio guides online that would have been better than this. That bus ride was brutal. The tour itself was 12 hours which also was not properly explained in the description they instead said you would be back in Madrid by 5 or 6. We would not have been back until way past 8 pm and had to leave Madrid the next day. So this was a total disappointment. We took the bus to the train from Segovia and bullet trained it @37 Euro it back to Madrid. Thank goodness we had copies of our passports with us as it was required to book the train. I have booked with Get Your Guide who has been a reliable source in the past on my trips abroad having no issues with any operator in Germany, Paris or Rome that we chose. We even booked Oktoberfest tickets in Munich and that was a blast. But the lesson here is about the tour operator, IBE Tours needs to do better and stop treating tourists like money bags and not care about the experience they are providing. Be consistent, you had good reviews which clearly were dependent on what guides you chose to take your customers on these guided tours. This one was a -1 star.

E

Erin V.

November 20, 2025

Lupe was an amazing guide! We spent almost 2 hours with her and she had all of the fun stories about the Sagrada Familia we could ask for. She also gave us good tips of things to look for after the tour was over. We really enjoyed our time with her and would definitely do this tour again!

A

Ade O.

October 06, 2025

This tour completely ruined a day of my holiday. It was one of the most stressful and frustrating experiences I’ve ever had while travelling. First of all, the whole itinerary is badly planned. Trying to do both Toledo and Segovia in one day is already far too rushed – you barely get time to enjoy anything. But what really made this experience awful was the utter lack of organisation and communication. In Segovia, there were two different meeting points – one after lunch and another one later to leave the city. That alone is confusing enough. The first meeting point after lunch made perfect sense (right by the aqueduct, close to the bus stop), but for some reason, they changed it for the final departure. Unsurprisingly, I went to the wrong spot and missed the bus. Now, here’s where it gets truly unacceptable: • The tour guide didn’t provide any contact number, and the company had no emergency line. So when I realised I missed the bus, I was completely stranded – in a city I didn’t know, with a dying phone battery, and no way to reach anyone. • When I tried calling the company, nobody answered because they were “closed.” How is it even acceptable for a tour company to leave customers stranded in another city with no contact support? • The guide also didn’t even try to contact me, even though they obviously knew someone was missing. While I don’t expect them to wait for me forever, they could have at least tried to call or message me to check if I was close by – a basic level of care any decent tour company should have. I eventually managed to find my way back to Madrid on my own – incredibly stressful, expensive, and exhausting. But it gets worse. My jacket was left on the bus, and trying to get it back was another nightmare. Both the company and GetYourGuide gave me robotic, copy-paste responses. No one would tell me if they even had my jacket. I got told to “go to the meeting point at 7pm.” Then “6:50pm.” Then another email said “go at 6pm.” All these conflicting times came via email, so it was probably the same person just guessing instead of checking properly. When I finally showed up (early!), my jacket wasn’t even on that bus. The guide there told me to wait another 1.5 hours and “maybe” it might be on the next one. Seriously? How hard is it to message your colleagues to check if a red jacket was found? Why make a customer waste hours of their time waiting based on “maybe”? Eventually, only after verifying who the previous guide did someone finally bother to contact him – something that could have been done from the start. This company has zero coordination, zero empathy, and zero responsibility. Their customer service feels like talking to a chatbot that doesn’t care whether you’re stranded, upset, or wasting your time. Between the rushed schedule, poor organisation, lack of communication, and the way they handled a very basic lost item, I can confidently say: 👉 DO NOT book this tour. They caused me unnecessary stress, wasted hours of my trip, and total frustration. There are far better companies that treat their customers like humans, not ticket numbers.