Tampa Bay Tours

Tampa Bay Tours has been walking visitors and locals through Ybor City’s brick streets since 2005, when Lonnie Herman started the company on the idea that Tampa’s cigar-district history deserved a proper storytelling tour rather than just a plaque on a wall. His son Max later joined him, learning the routes as an apprentice, and the two now run the operation together, which the company markets as the Official Tampa Bay Tour Company, a name that reflects the father-and-son team’s two decades of guiding the same streets together.

The core lineup covers Ybor City from a few different angles. The historical walking tour digs into the neighborhood’s founding as a cigar manufacturing hub in the 1880s, the waves of Cuban, Spanish, Italian, and Afro-Cuban immigrants who built it, and the social clubs and factories that still line 7th and 8th Avenue. A separate food-focused tour pairs some of that same history with stops at local restaurants, giving guests a taste of the neighborhood alongside the stories, and a downtown Tampa historical walking tour extends the storytelling beyond Ybor into the rest of the city center for anyone who wants the fuller picture of how the whole city, not just its old cigar district, grew up.

Then there are the ghost tours, which have become the company’s best-known product, running separate routes through Ybor City and downtown Tampa after dark. These lean on the same documented history the daytime tours use, layering in stories of reported hauntings tied to the old cigar factories, social clubs, and theaters, rather than relying purely on jump-scare theatrics. The company has picked up recognition for this approach over the years, including a TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence and a spot on USA Today’s list of best ghost tours, credentials that back up what is otherwise a very local, word-of-mouth kind of business.

Because the guides are the same small team that has been leading these walks for years, the tours have a personal, unscripted feel that is hard to replicate with a rotating cast of seasonal hires. Groups are kept small enough for guides to answer questions and go off script when something interesting comes up along the route, whether that means a building’s history, a story tied to one of the old social clubs, or a detail about the Cuban, Spanish, Italian, or Afro-Cuban immigrant communities who settled the neighborhood generations ago. Tours are booked online or by phone, and reservations are recommended for the ghost tours in particular, since evening slots on weekends tend to sell out, especially around Halloween, when demand for the historical, food, and ghost tours alike peaks for the year.