Absolutely fantastic tour guide and experience

A MUST TO … so interesting and historic facts built in fascinating
THANK YOU ALL

We visited the experience as a group of 4 adult family and friends. On arrival, we were greeted by friendly staff before starting our tour with our guide, Tom. It was a very full tour (school holidays!) which made some of the areas on the tour quite full and so it was harder to see everything especially in the factory area (which have a public area with full height windows into part of the factory) but our guide makes the group well here so everyone was able to see something interesting.

The tour started with a short talk, then moved over to the factory area, then the opportunity to strike your own coin, then a short presentation before being left in the exhibition area to follow that at your own pace. Tom, our guide, was excellent - engaging, amusing and knowledgeable, he managed to keep a very mixed group of visitors from young children to seniors and overseas visitors interested and moved at a good pace to keep attention but allow everyone to get a good experience, even in a fair sized tour group (based on the number of seats in the area for the initial talk, I think it group was pretty near maximum size!). There was an opportunity to strike your own coin - lots of people did this so took a while and I thought I would get one in the gift shop instead of holding the group up, but they were MUCH more expensive there (£21 Vs £7.50!) so I didn't get one in the end - it would be useful for this to be made clear when booking the tour. The exhibition area was well done and had some interactive exhibits too. Overall, a fun way to spend an hour or two and we all came away having learned a lot - and intent on using more cash to keep up the demand for coins!

Couple of points that could be adressed, however - whilst it is signposted, we found it a bit confusing finding the right place to park, as there are signs for "Car Park" and "Visitors", but that's for the actual mint itself, not the Royal Mint Experience. Similarly, when leaving the car park you are sent out of a different point in the car park and there are no signs to guide you which way to turn to get back to the main road - I ended up going the wrong way and up the side of the hill by their wind turbine instead, and based on the other vehicles I saw several others did the same!