Five reasons to book a guided tour in New Orleans

New Orleans is best experienced through the lens of a guided tour for many reasons. Traveling is challenging and exciting enough, with many moving parts to account for. Tours add a dash of simplicity to your trip by giving you the best of NOLA, along with intimate details of what you’re seeing. The advantages of guided tours are many, so we gathered the essential pros here to save you time.

Five reasons to book a guided tour in New Orleans

New Orleans has her secrets: Jackson Square has been a trading spot for centuries; bodies are buried above ground in NOLA’s famous cemeteries; every corner of The French Quarter has a hidden past; the Garden District mansions have played host to famous writers, pirates, and politicians.

You get the point- few places in the US are as steeped in history and mystery as New Orleans! Learning the stories and hidden past makes the city come alive in a whole new way, and guess what? Storytelling is what tour guides do best!

Think of a guided tour as sampling the city’s most significant attractions, with the added advantage of learning about local customs, restaurants, and music joints not easily found online. Once you’ve gotten a feel for New Orleans’s different neighborhoods and hot spots, you can return to the places you like best.

After your guided tour, you’ll also feel more confident leading yourself or your friends through a self-guided tour next time.

Let’s be honest- cemeteries aren’t usually what comes to mind when you daydream about what to do on your vacation. But in New Orleans, the artfully designed, above-ground cemeteries are actually one of the city’s biggest attractions! Likewise, the grand southern mansions of The Garden District, or the gator-filled swamps, are easy to overlook in the daze of Bourbon Street and the thrills of The French Quarter. A guided tour takes the guesswork out of your vacation and allows you to see all of NOLA’s top sites without missing a thing.

For introverted travelers, a tour creates a fun environment to meet people with similar interests. The best part? A good tour guide unites everyone with jokes and easy going nature, skipping straight through the awkward phase of meeting new people. For solo female travelers, tours are the perfect safe space to connect with other people organically and in a group setting.

Walking tours have many advantages over bus tours. When you walk, you get closer to the attractions, venues, people, and culture. A bus is far less immersive, and you’ll only be able to see the city through a glass window, literally. Walking tours also have the advantage of being able to offer pay-what-you-can rates; the cost of a bus creates an automatic overhead which is passed down to the tourist.

You don’t need a ton of money to join Nola Tour Guy on a guided tour. We are proud to lead our pay-what-you-can guided tours of our beloved New Orleans. All our tours are free to join and If you don’t like the tour you don’t have to pay anything. It’s the best money back deal in the city! Questions? check out our FAQ page or just sign up for one FREE guided tours! Learn more below

Rewind through 300 years in New Orleans’ oldest neighborhood, The French Quarter. This walking tour covers all the French Quarter essentials like Pirates Alley, Jackson Square (including The Cabildo and The Presbytere), Royal Street, Bourbon Street, the homes of Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner, and much more! You’ll also learn some of The Quarter’s secret hot spots, including where to get the best local food from your guide! We like to think of this tour as our New Orleans 101, A must do for everyone visiting,

New Orleans’ Garden District is one of the biggest collections of 19th-century mansions in the US, an architectural museum of a neighborhood!
Our free Garden District walking tour includes a history of the city’s unique burial traditions, Buckner Mansion (famously featured in American Horror Story), two homes formerly owned by Anne Rice, and mansions owned by celebrities like Sandra Bullock and John Goodman.

Our free cemetery walking tours explore the historic Bayou St. John neighborhood, the famed city of the dead, St. Louis Cemetery #3, plus other sites like NOLA’s oldest road, a landmark plantation house, other notable architecture, and even the site of New Orleans’ largest Voodoo ritual conducted by Marie Laveau II.