I booked a tour for three of my family members through Sunseeker Tours and would give the company a 1.5 star for misleading advertising practices, and 4.5 stars for the actual tour, which averages out to 3 stars.
Let me explain - I purchased a Groupon for Sunseeker Tours, and planned a trip for my family to come visit LA for a few days - I figured we'd stay in Long Beach as its fairly close to Disneyland (Anaheim) and where I needed to be for work at my client. My family wanted to go on a tour of LA / Hollywood, and in my research I stumbled across a Groupon for Sunseeker Tours, which is based out of LB - perfect! I purchased the Groupon, booked our hotel in LB, and a few days before they had wanted to go on the tour, gave the company a call.
The person (owner ?) who answered let me know that he (1) doesn't book people with Groupons on the tour until the day before the tour if and ONLY IF there's extra space available that he can't fill with the full-price $100 tickets and (2) that it's high season and SUPER BUSY he's basically always sold out and can rarely honor Groupons. It sounded fishy to me since it was the middle of February, not summertime or near major holidays but whatever. I called him several times to determine availability (which he always responded that they were packed) and finally, he said that he could squeeze in 3 of my family members two days later, but would only be able to honor 2 of the 3 Groupons I purchased and I had to pay $100 - the full price for the last ticket. I was fine with that, since we really had no options then and I didn't want to drop them off in Hollywood for the other tour companies. I then had to go through the hassle of contacting Groupon for a refund of the last ticket.
So here's the crazy part - when my family actually went on the tour - they were the only ones! Yep - not another soul on their mini-tour bus. According to the driver, this was the low season and they didn't have any other tourists booking trips for that day. After this experience, I felt like this company only uses Groupon for free advertising and will say that the users need to buy full-price tickets through them, no matter how full or empty the tour is. I understand how Groupon can sometimes give business owners an overwhelming amount of traffic (not the case here) and also the need for small businesses to generate revenue (especially during low season) but being misleading should not be the approach.
For people who plan their trips around staying in Long Beach and paying the Groupon rate for this tour, its frustrating that they give you such a hard time to honor the Groupon.
With that said, from what my family told me, the driver John was wonderful. He took them to the places listed on the website (but they were not able to enter Griffith Observatory due to an event being there), provided a lot of fun and interesting information and was generally all-around very attentive. If you read their TripAdvisor reviews like I did, you'll see that the guides are generally very good. My recommendation is just to proceed with caution if you want to get the Groupon Deal ($60 instead of $100) and have to deal with the headache of going back and forth with the owner on whether he'll honor the Groupon.
