This 3-day New Orleans itinerary includes coffee at French Truck Coffee, a self-guided tour of the Garden District, and lunch at Commander’s Palace. Rideshare services like Uber and Lyft, organized tours, and public buses are available, and there is no need to rent a car in New Orleans unless you plan to make a trip. New Orleans is an ideal place to explore on a guided or self-guided walking tour.
Day 1 in New Orleans focuses on exploring the French Quarter, including Jackson Square, Voodoo, Bourbon Street, and Frenchmen Street. Day 2 in New Orleans focuses on the Garden District and cemeteries, including haunted cemeteries.
Days 1 and 2 in New Orleans include exploring the French Quarter, visiting Voodoo and Wealth, Bury Them High, taking a step back in time, swamps and bayous, and a unique experience. New Orleans and Company makes planning your adventures easy by providing coupons, maps, itineraries, and more. Self-guided tours can be done for free on sites like FQ and GD (Garden District), and can be printed out for easy access.
To obtain an initial permit, tour guides must pass a test on the history and culture of New Orleans. Walking tours offer a deeper understanding of the city’s history and debunk common myths. Nola Tour Guy offers private tours with local tour guides, and the New Orleans Tour Guide Directory is a one-stop site for private tours of the beautiful, unique, and sometimes haunted city.
📹 So You Want to be a Tour Guide in New Orleans
I was a tour guide in New Orleans for four years. Here’s what the job is really like. Support Atun-Shei Films on PatreonĀ …
Are Hop on Hop off tours worth it?
A hop-on hop-off bus tour in London offers several benefits, including convenience, flexibility, regular schedules, informative audio guides, and a wide range of attractions and landmarks. Top attractions to visit include the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, the British Museum, the London Eye, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, and the iconic Tower Bridge.
To maximize your experience on a hop-on hop-off bus tour in London, plan your route in advance and prioritize the attractions you want to visit. Consider purchasing a multi-day ticket for more flexibility, with options for 24, 48, or 72 hour tickets. Take advantage of the multi-lingual audio commentary during the bus to learn about the history and significance of each stop.
Be sure to bring comfortable shoes and a raincoat as you may be walking between attractions. Additionally, don’t forget to bring a camera to capture the iconic sights of London along the way. With these tips, you’ll have a memorable and enjoyable experience on your hop-on hop-off bus tour in London, even if you only have one day in the city.
In summary, a hop-on hop-off bus tour in London offers numerous benefits, including convenience, flexibility, and an opportunity to explore the city at your own pace. To maximize your experience, consider planning your route in advance, purchasing a multi-day ticket, taking advantage of the multi-lingual audio commentary, bringing comfortable shoes and a raincoat, and capturing iconic sights along the way.
Is New Orleans walkable for tourists?
A study by travel insurance experts AllClear has ranked New Orleans as the most walkable city in the US and the fourth most walkable city globally. The study analyzed topographical information from over 240 cities worldwide, focusing on average elevation and range. New Orleans’ French Quarter and Central Business District, designed by French military engineer Le Blond de la Tour in 1721, span two miles and are home to over 500 eateries and nearly 100 attractions. Notable landmarks include the St. Louis Cathedral, Jackson Square, and Bourbon Street, which is the site of Mardi Gras.
What do I need to know before traveling to New Orleans?
To fully appreciate the temperate, humid climate of New Orleans, it is recommended to pack lightweight, airy attire, comfortable walking shoes for exploring the French Quarter, and a hat and sunglasses to protect against the sun’s rays. It is recommended that visitors to the area wear comfortable walking shoes.
Is it necessary to have a tour Guide?
A guide is a valuable resource for travelers seeking a personalized tour experience. They can create a customized itinerary, arrange accommodations and transportation, and potentially save money. They can provide tips on dining, entertainment, and avoidance, making tours suitable for families or history buffs. A knowledgeable guide can highlight important facts during sightseeing visits, especially during limited time in a destination.
A guide can also introduce you to lesser-known places of interest, allowing you to experience the trip as an insider. They can provide insights into the best places frequented by locals and provide a unique perspective on the trip.
A guide also helps make sense of what you are seeing, putting it in its historical, religious, and cultural context. They can answer questions about the customs, habits, and morals of the people, and explain what makes a country different from your own. Overall, a knowledgeable guide is essential for a memorable and enjoyable tour experience.
What is the best way to get around in New Orleans?
New Orleans offers a variety of transportation options for visitors, including walking, cycling, taxis, and streetcars. The city’s compact neighborhoods make it ideal for strolling and sightseeing. Streetcars, run by the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority, are a popular attraction since Tennessee Williams’ play “A Streetcar Named Desire”. The Airport Shuttle, located about 15 miles west of downtown New Orleans, provides transportation to the downtown and uptown districts, as well as the French Quarter. Taxis are also available, but they can be expensive. Uber and Lyft are also widely available.
Streetcars, run by the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority, have been a popular attraction since Tennessee Williams’ play, “A Streetcar Named Desire”. Buses, although less charming than streetcars, offer more extensive routes. Operating hours for both streetcars and buses vary by line, and operating hours vary by line. Nearly all of the city’s top attractions, such as the Garden District, City Park, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, can be reached via streetcar or bus.
How much are trolley rides in New Orleans?
The St. Charles Streetcar Line offers a variety of transportation options, including streetcars, ferries, and buses. The fare for each ride is $1. 25, and Jazzy Passes can be purchased in advance online or from the RTA Le Pass app. Ferry rides are $2. 00 each way or can be used with the Jazzy Pass. The Children’s Resource Center Library, open since 1908, is the second operating Carnegie library, catering to children and teens, adults, and adult programming. To reach the library, take the St. Charles Streetcar to the Napoleon Avenue stop and head down Napoleon Avenue about 6. 5 blocks.
How to travel without a tour guide?
Traveling without a tour guide can be a cost-effective alternative, especially for budget travelers. By planning your own itinerary and researching the places you want to visit, you can save money and avoid unnecessary expenses. By reading descriptions and researching the places you plan to visit, you can gain a better understanding of the destination and make informed decisions about your trip. This approach allows you to explore new places and experiences without the need for a tour guide.
Does New Orleans have a Hop on Hop off tour?
The New Orleans Unlimited Sightseeing Package provides visitors with the opportunity to explore the city’s rich history through a 45-minute walking tour and a 72-hour hop-on, hop-off city tour.
Are private tour guides worth it?
Travels with Audrey offers guided tours to provide a comprehensive understanding of a destination, including its history, culture, quirks, and traditions. Local expert guides, also known as “local insiders”, are essential for small group tours and custom tours. They have earned licenses that grant them special privileges and valuable access, such as access to museums, palaces, and special venues.
Private tour guides are also beneficial for travelers who prefer to explore a location independently. They offer a unique perspective and connection to the local culture, allowing them to provide fresh and unique insights about a location. Private guides meet clients in hotel lobby, know the city and monuments inside out, and can respond to requests for unscheduled stops. They can point out landmarks and suggest places to visit at your leisure.
As a private tour, you can dictate the focus and pace, ask questions, and even stop for impromptu drinks or tapas. Local guides can easily obtain tickets on the spot for almost all attractions without waiting in line. This allows you to fully appreciate the cultural heritage and diversity of a destination.
Can you tour New Orleans without a car?
New Orleans’ streetcar system offers a charming way to explore the city, with easy access to various transportation options such as bikes, buses, ferry, pedicabs, taxis, and limos. The French Quarter, Downtown, and Arts/Warehouse District offer walking to all destinations. If you don’t have a car, there’s no problem. An expert guide can help you navigate New Orleans via public transportation, bike, or your own two feet. Millions of visitors travel by car every year, following the rules and navigating the city without issues.
Is it better to travel with a tour guide or alone?
The decision between self-guided tours and independent exploration is contingent upon personal preferences, travel objectives, and the geographical context. Some individuals may opt for guided tours due to their perceived convenience and structure.
📹 Visit New Orleans – The Don’ts of Visiting New Orleans
New Orleans, The Big Easy is one of the best tourist destinations in the USA. From the historic architecture in the French Quarter,Ā …
As a native who was trapped downtown during Katrina, I don’t recommend doing a article about it unless it’s an oral history consisting of interviews. I don’t speak for everyone who experienced it, but I don’t think it’s an easy historical event to accurately capture in a short youtube article. There’s a lot of conspiracy woven in with truth. Certain details of the narrative are either obscurred or falsehoods repeated over and over until it’s accepted as fact.
It’s kind of incredible how entitled rich out-of-towners can be, anywhere in the world. In France, rich retirees like to move into small villages, and then write to the local government complaining about how they’re disturbed by the sounds of church bells and farm animals. (What’s the government going to do, ban Christianity and farming?) Also, why do I feel such a strong urge to smoke?
Nay on the (slight, probably unintentional) insinuation that all the tourists on ghost tours believe in the paranormal. It’s still fun to be led around and hear an entertaining guide do their bit on all the spots even if you’re not a crazyperson. š Also very interesting to know that the interest in that stuff wasn’t really around before Interview with a Vampire.
I wasn’t in New Orleans, but I was an EMT here in metro Atlanta during Katrina and worked as a part of a multiagency response to patients and evacuees being flown in to the local Air Force reserve base. I worked 72hr straight (mandatory overtime) and it was a situation of controlled chaos. We had no idea when planes full of people were showing up or what they were showing up with…there were fears of malaria and TB widespread in the patient population. We were cramming our ambulances as full as possible and driving them wherever we could to offload them to a facility. After 3 days I essentially hitch-hiked from the staging area so I could get to the rehearsal and prep for my cousin’s wedding the next day (in which I was the best man).
The best way to be a New Orleans tourguide is to be born and raised in New Awlins, brah…. Of course, no offense to you nor any other non-New Orleanian tourguides. Born and raised in the Magnolia Projects (ain’t there no mo’) and bring my out-of-town guests on tours to include the ‘holes in the wall’ spots. Those are the perks of being born and raised here. Oh, and I do it pro bono simply because I love my city. Good article, bro.
This is a very open and honest narrative about your former profession. You should write a book! I’m glad you were able to have such a unique experience but practice self preservation at the same time. You should definitely do a little more research and do a Katrina article. I can answer as many questions as I can if you have any.
My Aunt and Uncle had a small tour business in Nola.My Aunt only did day tours! And plantations. They took foreign people French, spanich, speaking, ECT, my Uncle did the night tours. I took the tours they were fun! Loved the garden district! And the zoo! I didn’t have any bad experiences while I was there.
I went on an NO ghost tour a couple months before you filmed this. My tour guide was great, she definitely had the theater background that you mention, but it would have been so cool if you were my tour guide, I’d love to hear extra history. My favorite stop was Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop because I had just gotten very drunk there the night before. Glad I randomly found your articles and got your version of the ghost stories.
In college, my dorm building was on the National Historic Register, so there were always tours going through the public parts of the building. So many freaking tourists would take pictures of us eating in the dining hall (the old hotel parlor) or in the courtyard. Like, I get it, it’s a historic place and it’s gorgeous, but it made us feel like props on a set laid out for entertainment. Also, tourists would block pathways and not move, making us squeeze past them to get to the elevators. They’d also stop us in the courtyard IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SCHOOL DAY to ask us questions about where things are or ask us questions about the college or the building. I get that they’re tourists and are bound to have questions, but it’s not a secret that it’s a functioning college campus with students who need to get to classes.
Back when I worked security, I used to work with a tour company that did nighttime tours of old Welsh castles, and I was surprised by how much worse people act on tours compared to when they’re at a pub or bar. I was really surprised how rowdy they got, the company’s policy was if you so much as interrupt the tour guide you have to leave the castle, drunk people usually lasted 10 minutes into a 2-hour tour, I eventually lost that particular job as they switched to remote tours which are just a set of wireless headphones that the tour guide can talk to people through while sitting in an office, so I was no longer needed to protect the tour guide I instead worked for the organisation that owned the castle rather than the tour guide to make sure tourists didn’t vandalise or damage the castle while they were on remote tours. The company eventually lost its licence to do tours of that castle due to the way tourists were acting, everything from damaging signs, starting fights going to the bathroom where ever they wanted, and even having sexual intercourse while on the tour… But I will say Americans were usually the nicest tourists, although to be fair most Americans were usually families, compared to say other tourists (I’m not going to single out any particular nation, other than they tended to be from countries neighbouring Wales..) who were usually 20 year old single males who had just joined the tour after leaving a sports game.
I really enjoyed this article. I’ve never been to New Orleans, but I feel like hearing about the tour industry there helps me better understand experiences I’ve had on tours in other places. I’ve always really enjoyed in-person historical tours, and while I am ok with a lack of historical accuracy, it would be great if, perhaps by using the internet, there could be a sustainable market for tourists who would, in fact, be interested in a more historically accurate tour, focussing on social history. With COVID, that all seems very far off! For now, I’m very happy to be enjoying your articles!
I used to be a motion picture lighting technician, and one time I was working at Universal Studios. I saw a tour tram go by, and the guide was pointing to a building with the Alfred Hitchcock logo on it, saying that was where Hitch had his offices. And right then and there, I saw what bullshit the tour was. Because I had worked at Universal while Hitchcock was still alive, and I knew his offices were right next to the Universal Commissary, next to the food… I’ve only been to New Orleans once, around 1995. I was flown there by my friend, Teddy Haggarty, who was Alec Baldwin’s standin on a movie being shot there. And Teddy wanted to have an art exhibition at a locals bar on Conti off of Bourbon, the name escapes me now. So he brought me to hang his paintings there. Teddy also had some strippers as friends, who we made up like mermaids, and we carried them to the bar to sit on it. Teddy used the bar as a stage for a surrealist play. I loved the city and explored quite a bit. I have friends from Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles, who live in NOLA. Teddy also had a girlfriend, a blonde, who was a tour guide, I forget her name. But she had been the girlfriend of a New Orleans artist named, Noel Rockmore, who did the illustrations for a Bukowski book, I think called Death Hand and the Maiden, and also was responsible for the portraits of musicians in Preservation Hall. Teddy and his brother Leonard owned a business in New Orleans called Architectural Angel, which business was destroyed by Katrina.
I was a tour guide for a time in a Colonial southern historical home and a homeless man wandered into the home with the tour upstairs. He then ordered the tour out of his house because he was the king of England and as the king, he held domain over the home since it was in the colonies. After ejecting the king he then stood in the church graveyard across the street yelling at the house and the squatters (us) in it. For three hours. In torrential downpour. Tour guiding in urban areas is interesting. (Also we weren’t allowed to call slaves “slaves.” They were the “servants.” The home was (and is) owned by a ‘descendant’ group that wants nothing more than to push Lost Cause trash rather than face the fact that their ancestors were terrible, terrible, people.)
Savannah is known throughout here in the state of GA for its ghost tourism, not for anything specific like Salem, but because of it’s long history as the oldest city in the state and its beautiful antebellum atmosphere in many parts. Also you caught me with that joke. Started thinking about how we’ve had restrictions/prohibitions of tobacco ads on TV and radio since the 1970s and realizing that since YouTube is naturally more deregulated than either platform, it is totally possible for someone to actually sponsor tobacco on here. Unless there is some obscure part of the Community Guidelines or Terms of Service that prohibit it, which I give those articles a month or two, give or take some years, before the algorithm finds out.
So basically being a New Orleans tour guide is at least as bad of not worse than working in fast food? I’ve been fascinated by the culture of New Orleans since seeing Interview with the Vampire when I was 12. I’ve never been but it’s definitely on my list of places to see before I die. I love your articles in fact I’m currently binge perusal them all. I can’t get enough of “Checkmate Lincolnites”.
Had a similar life experience about 6 years ago as door to door salesman for a company I will not mention because I do not want to be sued. I feel like these experiences of meeting the best and worst people back to back are part of any job where you regularly interact with the public. I didn’t make very much money cuz it was on commission only (I was desperate right after college and am financially secure now) and quit after 9 months of that. Yeah I will never work a job like that ever again. Little rant related to the story of the loud speaker man. People in upper class communities are the worst by far. Not all, but generally that’s where you see your Karens and Kens living and making life shit for the people around them. I would prefer selling at trailer parks any day of the week over selling even close to an upper middle class neighborhood. I will never live in a neighborhood with an HOA because of the experiences of dealing with those people. I did learn a lot about sales though and having thick skin which has been very helpful these days.
Tour guide here, and No. I do not tell stories that I know are false. Or if I do, it is to immediately debunk it. Yes, the truth is watered down, simplified and dumbed down, but I try my best to be accurate. I get REALLY Tired of people saying all the tour guides are lying. And yes, I get groped on tours. But NEVER by gutterpunks. It’s always tourists. Hell, two nights ago I had a guy on another tour walk by me while I was telling a story and grab my ass.
Been both a guide on Bulgaria blacksea coast and also have in some way shape or form involved with local archeology, I was discussed with the type of tourist that our industry and government target. We are Europe oldest country( no Italy is not Rome and I won’t even start with the birth place of Civilization and our southern neighbors and they’re BS.) The oldest Gold jewelry is at the museum in Varna, most towns on the coast are 3000 and more years old and I can go on like that for way to much, but we are know for having the cheapest boose in the EU and the shit house named Sunny beach which happens to be just next door to the oldest town in Europe but the people who go there don’t even see the sea because they have a room that looks the other way a the pool bar is on that side of the hotel, true story 2 weeks next to the beach and learns that there is a sea on the way to his plane to the UK. And American history student gets told by his professor that there is nothing interesting in Bulgaria. Just ruins from 4 empire’s just in walking distance from my home in the center of Sofia (the capitol) probably the last place I will tell someone to go to when in my country is, it’s nice but for holidays If you have more than a month ok spend a day or two here there is lot of cool stuff just there’s cooler stuff else were and ok we have
I was just curious, would you be interested in adding another website to your list. It would be a history/english lit. website directed towards maybe middle school students that are closer to being freshman? The reason I’m asking is that the kid’s have been out of school for so long & it may be even be longer because the 2nd wave of the pandemic will hit the hardest in the Fall & Winter months & the 3rd wave will hit in the Spring. The kid’s have lost so much time in school because of it & they really could use the help you could give them with history & english lit. You would be the best person I’ve ever seen to teach them & keep their attention & interest in those subjects in those grades being closer to their freshmen year. You could make money from YouTube with the website & it would compensate you for your time. Please think about it & contact me about this.
Okay man, the PBS produced DVD on Benjamin Latrobe ended not very satisfactorily in New Orleans. And while sometimes that’s just how history plays out, is there anything more you might have done? I mean, some people really care about architecture, and Latrobe just did not get his propers. Is there anything else you can do to remedy this?
Hi Atun. I have enjoyed perusal most of your articles. I would like to make one comment. PLEASE cover your mouth when you sneeze. I have noticed on a couple of your articles that you just spray it out. Its a little disturbing. With that said, I disagree with you about the comment regarding Hurricane Katrina’s history. You can do it justice. I enjoyed your spiel on the 1811 German Coast uprising. You weren’t there either but did a good job on telling the story. You come across a little cocky, but I like that. Good luck with your articles.