A city is a different city at scooter height.
Whether you need a licence in Rome. What a rented 125 costs for a day. Which Saigon food ride really stops eleven times. Reviews of every scooter, moped and Vespa day you can book.
The cities that ride
Four rides that explain why people book a scooter instead of a bus.
A Tuscan back road, a Saigon dinner run, a sidecar through Rome at seven in the morning and an empty desert highway. What each costs, and what the riders say.
01The Tuscan roadFlorence Vespa Tour: Tuscan Hills and Italian CuisineOut of Florence on a Vespa, up into the Chianti hills, lunch at a farm. The day everyone comes back talking about.
02The Saigon runAfternoon Saigon Unseen Adventure by Scooter |Opt: Ao Dai RidersOn the back of a scooter through traffic that looks impossible until you are in it. Evening, when the street kitchens light up.
03If you would rather not rideRome Morning Vespa Sidecar Tour in Rome with CappuccinoA sidecar and a driver, the centro before the coaches, a cappuccino standing at the bar. No licence, no nerves.
04The empty roadScooter Tours of Red Rock CanyonRed Rock Canyon on a scooter with nothing in front of you. Half an hour from the Las Vegas Strip and a different planet.
Italy runs more scooter days than anywhere else. Three kinds, and what each costs.
A third of the riding on this site happens in Italy, and it splits cleanly. An hour on the back through a city, a half-day out into the hills with lunch, or the full circuit of a place with a driver who knows the lanes. Pick the shape first, then the city.
The Vespa is the one scooter people book by name.
Seventy-five years on, an Italian scooter is still the reason half the riding on this site exists. Rome and Florence run the most of them, Vietnam runs the prettiest ones, and the sidecar crews will drive while you look.
Six cities where a scooter beats every other way of getting around.
Rome runs on two wheels and always has. Saigon eats on them. Prague hands you an electric one at the top of the hill. Six starting points, and the best ride out of each.
Rome on a scooter: the centro before the coaches, the hills after lunch.
Everything in Rome →
The city was laid out for something narrower than a car and it shows. A scooter gets down the lanes behind Piazza Navona, up the Aventine for the keyhole, and out along the Appia without ever parking. These three carry more riders than anything else in the city.
Pillion on a Vespa, through the centro
You are the passenger. The driver takes the lanes a taxi cannot, stops where the photographs are and gets you back before the afternoon heat. The most-booked shape of Roman ride by a distance.
The sidecar, if you would rather be driven
A 1960s Vespa with a chair bolted to it, one passenger per machine, so a couple books two. Slower than the pillion tours, better for photographs, and the drivers know which bar still charges a euro at the counter.
Colosseum, Circus Maximus, the Aventine keyhole
The full circuit in one go, which on foot is two days and a blister. Morning departures beat both the traffic and the queues at every stop on the list.
The scooter days more travellers book than any other.
Every scooter tour we have reviewed →Across every city on the site, these are the rides with the longest queue of people who have already taken them.
1
Florence Vespa Tour: Tuscan Hills and Italian Cuisine
Follow guides such as Leo, Chris, Ado, or Alex from Florence into the Tuscan hills on an automatic Vespa. After a safety test, ride past Piazzale Michelangelo, Villa del Poggio Imperiale, and San Miniato al Monte, then share bruschetta, pasta, cheese, salami, and wine at a country estate.
From · $78
Read our review →
2
Scooter Tours of Red Rock Canyon
from $135
3
Vespa Sidecar Tour By Night with Pickup
from $146
4
Rome Morning Vespa Sidecar Tour in Rome with Cappuccino
from $163
5
Budapest Small-Group Guided Tour on MonsteRoller e-Scooter
from $72
6
Food Tour by Scooter with Eleven Tastings
from $28
7
Chianti Vespa Tour with Lunch from Florence & E-car Option
from $125
8
City Highlights and Saigon Unseen Scooter Combo Tour
from $25
The electric scooter fixed the two things people hated about hills.
No gears, no clutch, no sweat, and in most cities no licence either. Prague sends them up to the castle, Budapest runs fat-tyred ones along the Danube, Spain puts them on the seafront. Stand-up or seated, they go where a coach cannot.
Every electric scooter tour →
In Vietnam the scooter is not the tour. It is the country.
Seventy million of them, and a whole industry of riders who will take you through it. Saigon does the food, Hanoi does the Old Quarter and the road south to the karsts, Hoi An does the rice paddies and the fishing villages. You sit on the back and hold on.
- 1Ninh Binh HIGHTLIGHT & HIDDEN GEM Tour From Hanoi: Skip-The-Linefrom $89
- 2Food Tour by Scooter with Eleven Tastingsfrom $28
- 3City Highlights and Saigon Unseen Scooter Combo Tourfrom $25
Can you actually ride it? Licence, helmet and who is holding the throttle.
Almost everything on this site splits two ways. Either somebody else drives and you are a passenger, which needs nothing but a helmet you will be handed, or you ride your own machine, which needs a licence that covers it and in a lot of countries an International Driving Permit to go with it. Rentals want a deposit and a card. Stand-up electrics usually want neither. Read the ride, not the country.
What a day on a scooter actually costs.
Every ride on the site, grouped by price. A rented moped for a day is cheaper than two coffees in most of the cities on this list.
Day rentals, stand-up electric tours and the short city loops on the back of somebody else’s scooter.
The standards: a Vespa morning in Rome, an evening food ride in Saigon, a half-day out into the countryside.
Full days with lunch and tastings, private riders, sidecars to yourself and the photo tours with a real photographer.
Three rides you cannot do any other way.
Coach tours reach the same monuments. They do not reach a Saigon alley kitchen, a 1962 sidecar or an empty Chianti back road at the hour the light goes gold.
Eleven stops, one pillion seat
A rider collects you, hands you a helmet and rides into traffic that from the pavement looks unsurvivable and from the back seat turns out to have rules. You stop at eleven kitchens, most of them a woman, a wok and four plastic stools, and eat things you would never have ordered from a menu. The crews in the ao dai are the same people who invented this format.
- 1Food Tour by Scooter with Eleven Tastings★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,502 reviews
- 2Saigon Evening Food Tour by Scooter★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 944 reviews
- 3Saigon Afternoon Unseen Street Food by Scooter |Opt: Ao Dai Rider★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 854 reviews
The chair on the side
The sidecar rigs are mostly 1960s Vespas with a chair welded on, restored and repainted and now earning a living. One passenger per machine and the driver takes the corners knowing exactly how much the chair will lift. They run early because the centro is empty and the light is low, and they stop at a bar where you drink the coffee standing up.
- 1Vespa Sidecar Tour By Night with Pickup★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,803 reviews
- 2Rome Morning Vespa Sidecar Tour in Rome with Cappuccino★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,771 reviews
- 3Highlights Vespa Sidecar Tour with Coffee and Gelato★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 747 reviews
A rider, and somebody shooting it
Somebody worked out that the best photograph of a trip is the one you cannot take yourself, and now half the Vespa operators in Rome and Florence carry a photographer on a second machine. You get an hour of riding and forty edited frames of yourself on a scooter in front of things you would otherwise have queued to photograph.
- 1Explore the City by Vespa with an Optional Photoshoot★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 1,103 reviews
- 2Rome Vespa Scooter Tour with Professional Photographer★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 857 reviews
- 3Vespa Photo Tour with Historic City Highlights★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 395 reviews
Four scooter days that will not wait for you.
Most riding can be arranged the night before from a hotel lobby. These four run on entry permits, sunrise start times and a fixed number of machines, and none of them cares when your flight lands.
- 01Scooter Tours of Red Rock CanyonRed Rock Canyon runs timed-entry reservations for the scenic drive through the busy months. The tour needs a slot, and the slots are booked online in advance.
- 02Angkor Sunrise Vespa Tour / Tuk Tuk or CarSunrise at Angkor means a pickup in the dark, and the temple pass has to be bought before you set off, not at the gate.
- 03Vespa Sidecar Tour By Night with PickupOne passenger per sidecar. Two of you is two machines, and the morning runs are the ones that sell out.
- 04Award-Winning Acropolis Guided e-Scooter TourEntry to the Acropolis runs on timed slots with a cap on each one. The scooter gets you to the gate; the ticket still has to exist.
The food ride is the best invention in scooter tourism.
A walking food tour covers four streets. A scooter covers a district, which is where the good kitchens are. Saigon does it best and Hanoi does it cheapest, but Rome, Bangkok and Phnom Penh all run their own version now.
Rome, Florence, Prague, Saigon: the run that turns anyone into a scooter person.
Prague
Budapest
Ho Chi Minh City
HanoiBy city and country
By kind of ride - pillion, electric, rented or driven
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