Suzhou and Zhouzhuang Water Village Day Trip from Shanghai

We were picked up at our hotel at exactly he arranged time Meet by a delightful guide Annaliese, On the 29th July my wife and I decided to do Suzhou and Zhouzhuang Water Village Day Trip from Shanghai. We were picked up at exactly our pre-arranged time and meet by our delightful guide Aleena. We booked a group tour but due to changes became a personal tour, which turned out to be in our favour. Our very informative guide made it a day to remember. Our trip to Suzhou garden and Zhouzhuang village, a walk through the Village, then cruising on a gondola through the beautiful waterways made fun with our singing oars-lady. We then had free time to browse, but we choose to sit in the shade by the canal and watched the gondalas go by, as the temperatures was 36 deg. We then boarded our Coach for a very interesting visit to a silk processing factory then a delicious meal, then an enjoyable ride back to our Hotel, talking to Aleena about her country Aleena's English was excellent and she a delight, and was not imposing in anyway. (.Aleena in Chinese means "Eloquent " ). I would thoroughly recommend this Tour Roy and Jennifer

Even though it was raining we still enjoyed our trip to "little Venice" - Suzhou and Zhouzhuang Water Village. Also the silk factory was very interesting to see the silk worm to the finished product. Thank you Frank for an enjoyable day.

Frank was our tour guide, and he did a great job explaining the history of the sights, yet the tour did not seemed rushed. The water town in Souzhou was magical from beginning to end. The Chinese Garden was enchanting and quaint. We had a memorable day!

This tour was interesting and Zhouzhuang is really neat place, we even had a gondola operator sing for us. Some walking, but not too much and not too exhausting. Everything was well done. The food was good as well. Good tour and there were few nice things to take pictures of.

Unfortunately, I really can't highly recommend this tour. I would say Zhouzhuang is most definitely a place to visit, but you can leave Suzhou out of it. We were picked up at 7:30 a.m. and didn't reach Suzhou until almost 11:00. The traffic in Shanghai is crazy and we had to pick up at 3 other hotels before we even headed out of the city. We could have easily taken the Metro to a central meeting point and avoided at least 1.5 hours of sitting in traffic. Suzhou is a city of 10 million people, so another nectic metropolis. The Net Masters garden is nice, but you can visit Yu Garden in Shanghai which is vastly more impressive. The grand canal in Suzhou is also quite nice, but again not worth all the driving. We then got back into the car for another 45 minute drive to Zhouzhuang. Zhouzhuang is absolutely gorgeous and I would have liked to spend much more time there, but we only had an hour as it was time to get back in the car and head back to Shanghai. Also, we gave the tip to Tom the tour guide, but I think we should have split it ourselves between Tom and the driver, who was absolutely fantastic. We assume Tom split it with him - we hope so anyway. We had tossed up between this trip and the bullet train to Hangzhou - we definitely regretted our choice.

This tour unfortunately did not meet up to my expectations. All my friends told me that I had to do a water village tour, so I saw this one on Viator and decided to book it. Our tour guide was Tom, who spoke decent English but that's perhaps the only good thing I can say about him. Tom unfortunately had a tendency to shout at us - while I understand this might have been part of his effort to be articulate, it's not the most pleasant experience when you're with him in a small van. I also found his tour guide skills lacking - you know how on some bad tours your tour leader doesn't say much and there are long stretches of silence? That was how it was with Tom, who had moments where he shared some information but was not really proactive about giving us background and insights into what we were seeing - expect to mostly sit in awkward quiet actually. At times, the only thing he seemed to know what to say was please make sure to have all your belongings, which he emphatically say so many times that I felt like I was being scolded at. On top of that, the lunch place we went to was rather subpar - definitely a spot specifically catered to tourists, and was rather sad looking. Save yourself the money and book another tour.

Great tour, very special to visit this village. Just don't mind the tourist-traps!

It was a all day tour. Lunch was delicious. I love the Water Village. Both the cruise and shopping were excellent.