Hop On Hop Off Dublin Bus Tour

I am a big believer in the value of a comprehensive city tour especially when you are unfamiliar with the area. Now granted I visited Dublin once before but on that trip, Al and I were driving, we parked along St. Steven’s Green, walked to the National Museum and the National Gallery and drove to the airport where our hotel was located. This is not a trip conducive to knowing your way around.

National Museum of Ireland

On this second trip we had two full days and our hotel was in Ballsbridge. We were as clueless about location as we would have been if this were our first trip. On our first day we ventured out on foot since we were visiting things more or less in a straight line away from us. Second day we headed up to Merrion Square to pick up the bus.

You may go up to Upper O’Connell St. to start the tour at the beginning or you can choose to do what we did, find the stop closest to your hotel and get on there. 

Once you have your ticket you have to put it into the machine on the bus which dates and times it, it is good for 24 hours. When I put my ticket into the machine, it broke. Needless to stay this was fodder for our very humorous driver for the next 20 minutes. The drivers are what makes this tour a real “must.” Not only to do they have a constant flow of fact and trivia but as I was a fine example of they use whatever is going on to enhance the tour.

If you stay on for the full tour, it will run approximately one hour and a half.  There are two separate routes red and yellow and your one day ticket is actually good fr two days so you can feel free to hop on and off quite a lot.

I would do this tour again in a heartbeat but you need to realize that once rush hour starts at about 3:30 the times between buses rises to about 20 minutes and after 5 p.m. no more buses leave the start so in our particular case we got back on at number 12 at about 4:15 and there was no way at that point we could get back to Merrion Square. We took the tour as far as O’Connell Bridge and then had to walk.

One of Dublin's iconic colored doors

For current information about stops and prices, go to their website.