My father and I received this as a Next gift experience from my mother - she paid £60 each and chose this location as it is fairly accessable from home in the Midlands. However, the tour starts and finishes in Kensingon, London at 08:15 in the morning every Friday. What you get for your £60 is bus travel between the venues. You have to pay your own entry fees into the locations you are shown on the tour - this amounts to an additional £20 or so. If you give this experience as a gift to someone, you are basically handing them a bill for £20. They first stop is Laycock in the Cotswolds, a two hour drive away on the bus. Once in Laycock, the guide shows you around he village and you get to look at the outside of someone's house and get shown a still photo to demonstrate that it's the same as the one in the scene from one of the films. You are then taken to Lacock Abbey, a nice National Trust property and a day out in its own right. The admission fee is £8.70. You then walk 15 minutes to the abbey and see some bare and dusty rooms that were used to film Snape's potion room. This takes about 40 minutes and you are then given just under an hour to either have a look round or go back to the village for some lunch. We went back to the village where the only viable option was something made of pastry from the bakery. The only other option was the pub, but there wasn't really time for that. Then it's back on the bus for an hour to go to Oxford. Here you go to Christ Curch College. The entry fee is £8.50. You go and have a look at the stair case Proff McGonnegal stood on to welcome the students to Hogwarts. Again, there is a still photo to prove it. This all takes less than 20 minutes. Next is New College (£3 entry) for a flying visit to see the tree that Malfoy sat in for the Goblet of Fire ferret scene. Then it is off to Trinity College (£1) entry to stand in a hall used in a single scene from one of the films. You then go directly back to the bus for the journey back to London (2 hours). There is about a mile and a half of walking to be done in Oxford to get to all the venues. In all we were on the bus for about six hours and at venues for about three hours. There wasn't really anything happening on the bus other than watching both Deathly Hallows films on the on board DVD player. A few of the customers on the tour agreed with us that it was a long and tiring day to go to some locations that would have been much better enjoyed as day trips organised under your own steam. There was simply nothing included in the £60 cost of the day other than coach travel. For this price, one would have thought that there would have been entry fees and a lunch included at the very least. In all this trip cost us around £250 including trains and left us wondering exactly what we had to show for it.
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