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.

Getting to Temple of Heaven from our hotel was a breeze, and had no trouble meeting up with our guide and other group members. Lots of walking but at a good pace that allowed for photos as well as information sharing. Travelling on the subway to Tiananmen Square was fun. The Forbidden City was fabulous and our guide was great in helping us see the best of this massive site. Lunch there was disappointing and some of the food tasted off. Continued the tour which lasted around 6-7 hours. Major problem at the end when trying to get a taxi back to our hotel and guide advised they didn't really do picks up where the tour finished and suggested getting the subway by ourselves. This felt too overwhelming so we wandered around, got harassed by rickshaw drivers and ultimately took one (at a highly inflated cost) after feeling lost and exhausted. This difficulty with transport needs to be addressed or at least advised prior to the tour as it ultimately soured what was a really good tour.

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.

This tour covered most of the main places to visit in Beijing in one day. Tour guide Jackson was very informative and helpful. There are two stops at a medical centre and perl shop which were made mentioned previously and in reviews. Even though I was expecting them it was not for me and I had no interest in either. I understand its possibly a way to make money, but I would rather pay extra on my ticket to not have these stops and use this time at the sites we were visiting. Other than that the tour was very good and I enjoy it along with the other members of our tour group.

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.