Abu Dhabi Bus Tour

Other Ways to See the City

For a guided day in your own car see the private Abu Dhabi city tour and the Abu Dhabi city tour; the mosque has its own guide at Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque tour.

Should you take the bus or a private car? Nobody on this search will tell you

We sell private cars, so read this knowing that. It is also true that not one of the twelve results on page one for this search contains an honest bus-versus-car comparison, the bus operators do not make one because they sell buses, and the resellers do not make one because they sell tickets. So here is ours, including the cases where the bus wins.

Being blunt: if you are a couple who wants to potter around the Corniche all day, buy the bus ticket. We will not pretend otherwise to win a booking.

The bus numbers do not agree with each other

If you do take the bus, buy on the timetable rather than the headline, and check it, because the pages selling these tickets contradict one another and sometimes themselves. All of the following is quoted from live pages read today.

Frequency. One seller says the Red Route runs every 30–40 minutes. Another says the same Red Route arrives every 90 minutes. Those cannot both be true, and the difference decides whether hop-on-hop-off is a pleasure or an hour on a kerb.

Loop length. One says the Red loop is 90 minutes non-stop. Another says two hours. Same bus, same route, thirty minutes apart.

Stop count. Two sellers say 13 stops; a third contradicts itself within its own page.

The last bus. Nobody on page one publishes a final departure time. One gives an operating window, Red 09:00–17:00, Green 10:00–16:30, and no last bus; another gives a first bus at 09:30 and explicitly no last one. That is the single most important number on a hop-on-hop-off ticket, because missing the last bus turns a cheap day into a taxi fare from wherever you happened to get off.

Side by side

The verdict

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