I had not realized a hop-on hop-off tour could be this bad. The staff at my hotel recommended this company and pre-sold me a ticket. It was my mistake not to check with them that it included a live guide; only when I boarded did I realize that the guide is prerecorded while at least one of its competitors has a live guide. But it's not just that; I unknowingly did a prerecorded one in Tasmania but even that had more information than this. The pretaped guide had little information and didn't even announce a single stop, leaving people to figure out on their own when to hit the stop button, and kept playing music to try to fool us into not realizing how little actual guiding the recording was doing. Partway through my loop a couple got on and sat behind me and started remarking on things we were passing that looked interesting; I realized the guide was not mentioning any of them so started telling these fellow visitors which museums we were passing that I'd visited on a previous trip that I thought were worth visiting. And because the guide was prerecorded and triggered by GPS, sometimes it would be talking about something we were supposedly passing and none of us could tell what they were supposed to be referencing. The driver kept running the bus against trees, leaving those of us on the top deck to duck out of the way.
As an historical researcher, I knew a fair amount about two of the things the guide discussed and both were wrong or misleading. The first was wildly inaccurate: When we were passing an area of Georgian buildings, the guide claimed that the Window Tax was about the amount of sunlight that came in through windows, that this was why servant windows were so small, and that this was the origin of the term "daylight robbery." Literally every bit of that is wrong: The Window Tax was on the number of windows a home had, and only applied to homes with eight or more windows; servants' windows were small because their employers were cheap and indifferent; and the origin of "daylight robbery" is robberies that took place during the day. The second thing was about Henry VIII "keeping the gold for himself" when he closed the monasteries. This one is of course more complicated, but the guide gave the erroneous impression that Henry VIII was solely enriching himself, when in reality his policy was enriching his country's coffers, in large part due to selling off confiscated real estate. (Thanks a lot to this company for making me feel like I have to defend Henry VIII. Sigh.)
These things that I knew were wrong or misleading made me doubt the rest of the historical information the guide provided.
When I was partway through the loop I saw that the other two companies had crowded buses though it was still morning, and it's no wonder why. Run, don't walk, away from this tour to its competition. I can't guarantee you'll have an excellent time, but I can guarantee that you won't do worse.