New Orleans: City Tour with Hotel Pickup & Local Guide

4.64

(2386 reviews)

What’s the experience like?

I’ll be honest — we almost missed our pickup because my friend thought “pickup window” meant something else (don’t ask). But our guide, Andre, just grinned when we finally tumbled into the minibus outside our hotel in the French Quarter. Right away he started telling us about the city’s layers — I could hear a brass band somewhere down the block, faint but stubborn. The bus was cool inside, which felt like mercy after that sticky morning air.

The drive along Esplanade Avenue was slower than I expected — partly because Andre kept slowing down to point out these wild Creole mansions with their peeling paint and tangled gardens. He told us about a poet who used to live in one of them. We stopped at City Park and I wandered into Morning Call Café for coffee and beignets. Powdered sugar everywhere — honestly, I’m still finding it on my shoes. The smell of fried dough mixed with old oaks and cut grass is something I didn’t know I needed.

After that, we rolled through the Garden District. The houses there look like they’re holding secrets behind their iron fences. Andre joked about how people wave from porches here even if they don’t know you — he wasn’t wrong; a woman in a pink robe actually waved as we passed by. Then came Faubourg Tremé and the Warehouse District — he talked about jazz roots and pointed out murals I’d have missed on my own. At some point I realized I’d stopped checking my phone entirely.

The last stop was St. Louis Cathedral by the Mississippi River. It’s older than any church back home, and there was this hush inside that made me want to whisper even though nobody told me to. We ended up back where we started but everything felt different somehow — maybe it was just all that history packed into a couple hours or maybe it was the sugar crash from those beignets. Either way, New Orleans got under my skin a little bit.