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| - I'll admit this from the outset, the fifth star is primarily due to the fact that my beloved Steelers call this their home. If I was rating purely with my mind and not my heart, this would be a four or 3.5 star review (I round up on yelp.)
On our trip to Pittsburgh, we opted to take the $8 public tour on Friday Oct. 7. This was the only day during our trip a tour was available, for understandable reasons. We arrived early, more than the requested 15 minutes and there was already quite a line. Or at least a couple of different lines, and no one was really sure what was happening. Turns out a tour group that had been scheduled for an earlier tour (students from a local school) was late, causing a major disruption. In fact, they still had people running in AFTER the 10 am tour start time. This caused the tour guides to be quite discombobulated, and the public tours to start late. A minor inconvenience, and not necessarily the fault of Heinz Field or their staff/volunteers, but it definitely didn't start the day off right.
Once the tour got started, it wasn't too bad. They split the larger group into several smaller ones (still about 40-50 people each) and headed out and around the field. I don't know if it's because they were rushing to make the time back up or what, but there were MANY times the groups ran into each other or got confused during the tour. It seems there could have been better organization there. That being said, the tour moves fast, but does allow you time to take pictures, etc. You see various parts of the seating area, the scoreboards, the press boxes, the luxury boxes and my favorite part - the locker rooms and the field. During this time, you get a lot of information that you can probably find on google, with a little personal commentary from the tour guide's experiences thrown in.
Overall, for a Steelers fan (and one guy married to a Steelers fan) it was an enjoyable experience, despite the organizational snafus. Definitely worth the $8 (which, compared to other stadium tours I've experienced is very reasonable.)
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