Okay- we just finished our ninth college visit with our son.
For all future college visits for which we have not yet signed up, we will skip the information sessions and take the tours. I advise anyone who can read to do the same!
Tours are great. They are run by students. They show you the college in action.
Information sessions seldom provide any information that cannot be found on a website or in a brochure. Sometimes you get a lively presenter with a sense of humor, but they still are telling you what you already know… if you did any research at all before showing up at the college.
Do your research at home to help you learn about colleges and narrow your search. Then, skip the info session and take the tour! Use the free time to wander around the campus on your own, speak with random students, and eat in the dining hall. It will be a much better use of your time!
My experience doesn’t match this at all. How the college manages the entire visit, including the information session, is an important consideration for our family. If I’m spending half a day or a whole day on campus, I’d like to know if the school values my time enough to put together an informative and high-energy session prior to the tour. Good information sessions DO provide guidance in a more accessible way than the college website, and a school that makes the effort to develop and present a good info session gets higher marks in my book. To each their own of course, but I at least have found most info sessions very useful.
But there are factors addressed in the info sessions at many schools that are NOT discussed at all on tours. For example, an interview is considered a sufficiently important demonstration of interest at some LACs (Bates, Colby, Pomona, Swarthmore to name a few) that a student potentially handicaps his chances for admission without it. Yes, that information is usually available on the Common Data Set or elsewhere online, but many parents and students have never heard of the Common Data Set.
In general, and particularly if one travels a long way to visit a college, I believe 60 minutes in the info session for many individuals is time well spent.
I always find value in the info sessions. I do my research up front and it either reinforces (or not) my opinions. I also usually pick up a nugget or two while I’m there that I didn’t get from other materials. If you’re making the time to visit the campus anyway, why not attend? You can still tour, eat in the cafeteria, etc.
Agree with every poster so far! 
Some info sessions were redundant and a big waste of time or even a turn-off. Others were extremely helpful, and provided valuable insight into college values and the admissions process. Especially if they included a student or faculty panel during/following the info session, or highlighted a particular dept/major, which some colleges do on certain days.
Unfortunately, there was no way to know in advance which info sessions were going to be clunkers so we attended them all. We did skip out early on some sessions and even dropped out of tours midway. And we always wandered independently around the student center, dining hall, library, and dept/major of interest.
I must say though, that in cases where we visited a campus on days/times when info sessions were not offered, it felt like we were missing part of the story…