Hearst Castle, California, United States

5sarah4nil 5:00 PM May 14, 2022

Enjoyable visit. Budget more time if taking multiple tours.
Hearst Castle is open again. We booked 2 tours from their website: the Grand Rooms tour at 11AM and the Upstairs Suites at 1PM. We arrived a little before 10AM at the visitor center and showed our reservation email barcode at the ticket counter, and they gave us wristbands with barcodes for each of the tours. The wristbands are scanned to get on the bus. Before the tour, we watched an informative 40 minute film in a nice theater that explained how WR Hearst’s travels at an early age influenced him in building the castle later in his life. At the appointed tour time, we boarded a bus which took about 15 minutes to get to the castle, sometimes stopping briefly if animals on the grounds happen to be near the route. The tour at the castle itself took a little over 1 hour, then boarded the bus again to go back to the visitor center. Since they don’t let visitors wander around the grounds at the castle, each tour must depart from the visitor center. So if you book multiple tours, it means multiple bus trips. This should be better explained in their website FAQ so that people can budget time when booking multiple tours. When I booked the tickets, I was worried that we might have to wait a long time between the tours, but due to the time it took to ride the bus, sometimes waiting a few more minutes for everyone to get on the bus if many visitors are on the same tour…we ended up having only 5 min between our tours for a quick bathroom break. I would probably space the tours by 2.5 hours apart if going during peak season to not feel rushed. There is a cafe where we got sandwich and soup to tide us over until dinner. There is a small museum and gift shop in the visitor center so definitely things to see/browse while waiting for tour bus. We enjoyed both tours. The Grand Rooms is a must do for 1st time visitors, but the Upstairs Suites tour is just as impressive and unique. Both tours start at the Neptune pool outdoors and end at the Roman Pool indoors. The Grand Rooms tour had about 40+ people while the Upstairs tour we went on only had 4, so we had opportunity to ask more questions and take more unobstructed photos. Both tour guides were very good and knowledgeable and we really enjoyed the day.

4Martin H 5:00 PM May 31, 2022

Well Worth a Visit
We signed up for the upstairs rooms tour. I would have liked to have done a bit more but there don't appear to be connecting tours and the pricing per individual tour is not cheap so this will start to mount up if you do more than one tour and you're a large family. This is a well organised operation and the guides are knowledgeable and friendly. We were lucky enough to be the only ones on our tour at the time we visited so we had a personal guide. The film after the tour is well worth seeing and is beautifully done. The artwork is extensive and impressive. As one of the other reviewers mentioned, you can't roam the grounds by yourself at the moment because of covid restrictions and our guide was very apologetic about it. There is a cafeteria on site but as this is a captive market, its overpriced for what they're serving. Will definitely come back another time to see another aspect of the house.