Makena H.
False Claims for the "Pristine" Sistine
Our tour guide for our early entrance “Pristine Sistine” tour was wonderful, but one of the first factoids she shared with us was that the Vatican had recently suspended the rule that allowed tour groups into the city before the general public. This was when the skip-the-line tour I paid for became an “Oops–All Lines” tour. Despite our early start time at 7:45am, we didn’t even get into the city until after 9:00am, and that time spent in line was silent. I won’t out our guide, but she spilled the beans on Walks of Italy. On the website, the tour is lauded to be “the product of 13 years of constant development and refinement,” when in fact, our guide said, all the tour guides were scrambling to manage the new (dis)organization of admission and passage through the Vatican. The “early access” I paid at least twice as much for, was no more. She suspected it might have something to do with the Jubilee year approaching, and it made me question, if all the guides were aware of the chaos of this change, why hadn’t Walks reached out to notify us? The information our guide provided was fantastic–when you could hear her. Though certainly not her fault, she was small, and not being tall myself, I frequently found myself and my family being separated from her by the tide of bodies that pushed us through the hallways. If we fell too far behind, our radios would cut out, and we’d lose chunks of her tour–not to mention we wouldn’t be able to see the art she was talking about. Guards frequently shouted for people to keep moving, which meant even when our guide had something she wanted to tell us about, she had to do it while moving (often backwards), and the narrative ended when the crush of the crowd dictated. There was no “time and space to give [us] a proper explanation” as promised. Walks says: “you'll enter the Sistine Chapel just as the doors open to groups and ahead of the daytime crowds.” Nope. Instead of “20 minutes of quiet contemplation,” we got possibly five before we were rushed on again, after making ourselves as narrow as possible, tetrised between hundreds of people. The tiny spot a guard pointed to is where you stood regardless of the view. I contacted Walks three times asking only for a partial refund to bring the cost in line with a non “special access” tour. My initial requests were not even cataloged in their system, and when I called a third time I found out nothing had been flagged for a follow-up, even though I had been promised that twice. Are you seeing a pattern here? What I might have previously called out of date information on their website is now definitively a false bill of goods. Save yourself some grief (and a lot of money) and book your tour elsewhere. Walks of Italy are grifters.