Affiliate Disclosure

Plainly, and before anything else: Loire Valley Tours may earn a commission when you book through a link on this site, at no extra cost to you.

What that means in practice

The tours listed here are sold by Viator and GetYourGuide. When you follow a link from one of these pages and go on to book, the platform pays us a share of its own commission. You pay the same fare either way; the price on the booking page is the operator's price, not a marked-up one.

What we are not

We are not a tour operator or a ticket office. We do not run any of these tours, employ any of these guides or hold your booking. Your contract is with the operator, through the platform.

We have no connection with any château, estate, winery or tourist office in the Loire Valley, or with any of the businesses these tours stop at. We do not sell château admission; each château does.

How tours get listed

Operators cannot pay for placement, position or a badge. The badges are arithmetic: the best seller is the one with the most reviews, the top-rated tour carries a 5.0 across a large number of reviews, and the best value is the cheapest fare. Where one operator sells a similar tour on more than one platform or as more than one listing, both can appear, because both are separately bookable.

The featured tours at the top of the homepage are three different ways into the valley — three châteaux with tickets from Paris, two châteaux and lunch from Tours or Amboise, and a wine morning from Tours — and each starts somewhere different.

Prices, ratings and how current they are

Prices, star ratings and review counts belong to the operators and were read from their own listings on 16 September 2026. They move, and the figure at checkout is the one that counts. Everything is quoted in US dollars because that is the currency the listings were captured in; nothing is converted at an exchange rate. Every fare is per person except the Chartres Cathedral tour, which is sold per group of up to nine.

Where we state a fact about a château, it comes from that château's own website: chambord.org, chenonceau.com, chateau-amboise.com, vinci-closluce.com and chateauvillandry.fr. The Tours tourist office hours come from tours-tourisme.fr, and the Loire à Vélo distance from the route's official English site. Where a figure comes from an operator, such as a drive time or a group size, the page says so.

What we deliberately do not publish

• Prices and hours for Blois, Cheverny, Fontevraud, Ussé and Azay-le-Rideau. They are not printed until read on each monument's own page.
• Market days for any town whose own town hall does not publish them. The market days we print come from the town halls of Amboise, Tours, Blois, Chinon and Saumur.
• Train timetables, and journey or road times other than those a château or estate publishes itself. Climate figures are Météo-France's 1991–2020 averages for Tours.
• The Chaumont-sur-Loire festival's theme, which we have not read on the estate's own site, and who designed Chambord's double staircase, which is attributed, not proven.