Private Niagara Falls Tours from Toronto & Pearson

What is a private Niagara Falls tour from Toronto?

The coach tours are good value and we say so plainly; they leave downtown around 9 am, see the Falls from the top, ride the boat, stop at a winery and a gift shop and are back by 6 pm. What they cannot do is wait while your daughter watches the Horseshoe Falls for forty minutes, skip the gift shop, add the Journey Behind the Falls because the queue is short, or take the back road through the orchards to Niagara-on-the-Lake because it is October and the leaves have turned. The private tour does all of that, and it starts when you do.

The day, the way most people run it

None of it is fixed. A family with young children does the Falls and the boat and is home by three; a couple does one winery lunch and a long dinner and comes back at ten; a corporate group does the Falls at dusk when they are lit and skips the wineries altogether. The chauffeur adjusts; the day rate does not.

Starting the tour at Pearson

A surprising number of Niagara days begin in the arrivals hall. Visitors with a late-afternoon connection or an overnight before a morning flight land at Pearson, are met at the terminal exactly as on an airport pickup, and go straight down the QEW with the luggage in the boot — the Falls seen, lunch eaten, and the hotel or the departures door reached by evening. The Pearson-to-Niagara route page has the honest timing for that drive at every hour of the day; the tour simply adds the hours at the far end.

The Falls: what the chauffeur knows

Table Rock at the Horseshoe Falls is the view; the chauffeur drops at the Table Rock Centre door so nobody walks from the car park. The Niagara Parks Commission runs the attractions on the Ontario side — Journey Behind the Falls, the Niagara Parks Power Station and its tunnel, the White Water Walk, the Whirlpool Aero Car, the Butterfly Conservatory — and sells day passes that combine them; the chauffeur knows which of them are worth the queue on a given day and which are quieter after four. The boat is Niagara City Cruises, boarding at the bottom of Clifton Hill; it runs from spring to late November and the chauffeur will tell you whether the mist is worth the poncho that morning. Clifton Hill itself — the arcades, the wax museums, the Ferris wheel — is a taste; some parties love it and some want to drive straight past, and the chauffeur asks rather than assumes.

The Falls are lit every night and the fireworks run on a published schedule in summer. A tour that starts late and ends with the illumination, dinner at a Fallsview restaurant and the drive home in the dark is one of the better ways to see them.

Niagara-on-the-Lake and the wineries

Twenty-five minutes north on the Parkway, past the Whirlpool and Queenston Heights, is a nineteenth-century town with a main street of bakeries, a theatre and the lake at the end of it. Around it are the vineyards. The Wineries of Niagara-on-the-Lake association lists the two dozen estates in the appellation; the chauffeur keeps a shortlist by style and by welcome — the estate with the best sparkling, the one with the tasting room in the barrel cellar, the one whose restaurant is worth the whole afternoon, the one that pours icewine year-round. Three wineries in an afternoon is comfortable; four is a rush; two with a long lunch is what most couples end up preferring.

Tastings are paid at each estate. Bottles ride home in the boot, packed so they do not roll. The chauffeur does not drink, which is the entire point of the arrangement and the reason wine tours are the most common private tour we run from Toronto.

Who books it

• Visiting families — parents with children who need the flexibility to leave when the children have had enough.
• Couples and honeymooners — the winery lunch, the Falls at dusk, the dinner.
• Corporate guests — a client in town for two days, given the afternoon they will actually remember; often booked on a corporate account with the rest of the visit.
• Transit passengers — the twelve-hour layover at Pearson turned into a day at the Falls with the bags in the car.
• Groups of six to fourteen in an Executive Sprinter, which turns the QEW into a moving lounge.

What the day rate includes

The chauffeur and the vehicle for the day, fuel, all parking, tolls, waiting, the water and the route-planning. It does not include attraction tickets, tastings, meals or gratuity, all of which you pay at the venue or leave at your discretion. A tour that runs past the hours booked is extended at the hourly rate, which the chauffeur will mention before it happens, not after.

Winter

The Falls in January, half-frozen and lit, with the mist turned to ice on the railings, are a different attraction and arguably the better one. The boat does not run and the Parkway is quieter; the wineries still pour, and icewine season is exactly then. The chauffeur drives a vehicle with proper winter tyres and watches the Ontario 511 feed for the QEW; a snow day is a reason to book the private tour rather than a reason to cancel it.

The drive itself

The route from Toronto or Pearson is the QEW, the Queen Elizabeth Way, along the western end of Lake Ontario through Oakville, Burlington and Hamilton, over the Burlington Skyway and along the Niagara Escarpment to St Catharines and the Falls: about 130 kilometres, ninety minutes when it flows and two hours and more on a summer Saturday or a holiday Monday. The chauffeur watches the 511 feed and, when the QEW jams at the Skyway, knows the escarpment route through Grimsby that avoids it. On the way back, the sun sets behind the car and the traffic is against you only on the last stretch into the city.

The Niagara Parkway from the Falls north to Niagara-on-the-Lake — Churchill called it the prettiest Sunday-afternoon drive in the world — is the part of the day that coach tours drive past at speed. In a private car it is the point: the Whirlpool, the Floral Clock, Queenston Heights and Brock's Monument, the orchards, the first vineyards. Ask the chauffeur to take the Parkway slowly and to stop at the lookouts; it costs twenty minutes and it is the drive you remember.

The American side

The Falls are shared with New York State, and the view from the Ontario bank is the one everybody wants — you look across at the American Falls and down the Horseshoe. Crossing to the American side is possible on a private tour if everyone in the car carries a passport and the right to enter the United States: the Rainbow Bridge is a five-minute drive from Table Rock, the live border wait is on this site, and the Cave of the Winds and Goat Island are an hour well spent. Tell us at booking, because the chauffeur and the vehicle need to be cleared for the crossing; the cross-border page explains what that involves.

Combining the tour with a stay

Many visitors do Niagara as an overnight: the tour on day one, a Fallsview hotel or an inn in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and the chauffeur returning the next afternoon — or a second full day of wineries and the Shaw Festival. The return leg can go to Toronto, to Pearson for a flight, or on to Buffalo airport for a domestic US flight, which is forty minutes from the Falls and often cheaper than flying out of Toronto. The two-day version is booked as two hourly days or as a tour plus a transfer, whichever prices better for the shape of the trip.

Groups and corporate days

A team outing, a client entertainment day or a wedding party's day-before excursion books the Executive Sprinter or, above fourteen people, the mini coach: one vehicle, one chauffeur, everyone together and nobody driving after the third winery. The corporate account puts it on the monthly invoice; the planner gets a written timeline with the chauffeur's number on it.

Book a private Niagara day