Great Free City Tours in Europe

After taking more than 1,100 students abroad to Europe, I have had it with boring tours and stuffy tour guides. Especially the ones who stand in front of a map and talk for 45 minutes without showing us anything. However, in the past few years, I have discovered an organization that provides entertaining, funny, and, best of all, free tours of major European cities.

I am talking about New Europe Tours, of course. I first stumbled across this group in Berlin in 2007. We took an absolutely fantastic tour of Berlin that made me laugh, challenged me, gave me something new to think about, and forever changed my view on what a tour should be. The three and a half hour tour flew by, even on a cold and snowy day. The tour guide was a native English speaker, from Australia, who had a deep love of Berlin and Germany. He conveyed this love to the thirty-some-odd tourists in our group, most of whom were in their early twenties, and most of whom stayed until the end of the tour. As a professor, I know that this was no small feat. And most amazingly, most people in the group coughed up €5 or €10 for a tip afterward. I immediately got his business card and now I schedule New Europe tours wherever possible (if you book these tours in advance, they are not free, but worth every euro cent I pay for them). I have yet to be disappointed by a New Europe tour guide.

We have taken tours with this group in Paris, Munich, Dublin, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, and London. And we will start using the tours in Brussels when they begin in the summer of 2012. If you are traveling on your own, the tour is "free," though the guide will happily accept tips if you like the tour. Since the "free" tour guides live and die on tips, they are very motivated to make the tour appealing and entertaining. They are also very well trained by the New Europe Tour company. If you are traveling on your own in these cities (and others!), make sure you check out the free tour. Often, they have other paid tours (such as bike tours, pub crawls, or tours to special locations, such as the Versailles palace outside of Paris) you can purchase. They also hand out a city map with great information about where to sleep, cheaply. This organization is truly a friend of the budget traveler.