Temple of Heaven: Tours & Tickets

Our tour guide Tina was great! Full of knowledge, great English and keeps you on track. It is a pretty fast paced tour, but I was able to get in enough picture time, and felt like I got to experience the sights adequately. Really great if you only have two days to experience as much of Beijing as you can fit in, like we did. Lunch had many different plates of food to choose from, which was nice for the vegetarians & meat eaters in our group. The pearl factory tour was interesting, buy or don't, there was no pressure, but the TCM experience was not pleasant. After a great foot massage they ask you to tip 15-20 RMB if you felt it was worth it. Several people didn't bring cash and it was awkward without a forewarning. Also one TCM doc asked where people came from, and was only interested in assessing people from more affluent countries. When they didn't buy after, he didn't check others in their group, he just left the room. He's he only one I saw do this, but it was distasteful & rude.

The guide (Emily) is great. She has an awesome attitude and her English is pretty good. The tour is as advertised with two big exceptions. First, the shopping stops at pearly factory. Waste of time and very overpriced. Should have spent the time at Summer Palace instead. We only had 45 minutes there and should be at least 90 minutes. The second is a stop at Chinese medicine institute. You can get a 20Y foot message, which is nice, but they got these Chinese medicine"professors" giving you free checkups and then telling you so many things wrong with you and prescribing 6 months worth of medication. In my case, they tried to make me pay for $4,500 worth of Chinese herb medication. Its so ridiculous that it's an accidentally entertaining show of local ways of scamming tourists.

We got an email from the organisator, that we will receive the code (ticket) day before the estimated visit day, however, we got nothing. We went their by our confirmations, but the cashier told me, that it is not acceptaeble and we have to buy new tickets. It was not expensive, but anyhow, we were not happy about it. When we returned to the hotel, we found an email that they have send us the code at 11:15 that day :/ We could not check our emails during the day without wifi, so it would be better to send the code day before - as it was promised. Overall, the Temple of Heaven and the park around are very nice, it is a good place for taking pictures and to walk around. I definitely recommend to visit it once someone is in Beijing :)

Yoyo was a great tour guide and we learned everything we wanted to know about these Beijing sites! We stayed on track the whole time (even despite how cold it was), and Yoyo was very conscientious of what we wanted to do and see. We found the Pearl Factory a bit useless and time-consuming, but this is probably why the tour is so cheap. The lunch food was a great Chinese experience. The Chinese medicine stop seemed like a bit of a scam because the medicine they recommended was extremely overpriced.

Tour guide picked me up from hotel, on time, Paul was friendly and knowledgeable about your places, helped purchasing entrance tickrts, clear on instructions & did a great job, many thanks to you & your driver Paul, you made my dream of visiting Beijing a happy and enjoyable experience.