As I’ve frequently talked about here on The Royal Tour, my preferred travel style is slow-moving, flexible, and self-planned. I like to go to just a few cities, and to spend weeks or longer in each, immersing with the locals and feeling like I live there. But there is no one right or wrong way to travel, and over the past few years, I’ve also had the opportunity to take several guided tours. These present a different set of challenges and opportunities to my normal way of doing things on my own.
Today, I want to talk to you about guided tours, about my experiences on them, and about what some of the pluses and minuses of traveling on them might be.
Positives of Guided Tours
1. Having a guide
I pride myself in doing a significant amount of research about a place before I arrive. I read about the history, look over maps to orient myself geographically, review the writing of sources I trust, and even watch documentaries when I can find them. But no matter how much I am able to research and learn, I will never be as knowledgeable as a good, trained guide.
A good tour guide can point to buildings and features I wouldn’t even know about or notice. A good guide can talk about a place firsthand, and answer any additional questions that might arise. A good guide knows the best way to get from place to place, has the scoop on things to eat, and can explain the significance of pretty much everything.
Even the best self-guided walking tour I can possibly download, or the best museum signage, cannot make up that knowledge gap.
2. Transportation and Lodging are Arranged
Logistics of travel can be complicated. Changing locations involves a lot of steps. Consider moving from Rome to Florence, for instance. I need to check out of my lodging in Rome, and get to the train station, where I need to have the right tickets (navigating this in Italian or via a conglomerate site can have challenges). I need to get off at the right stop, then get myself to my new lodging, reservations for which I will obviously have had to make. And so on.
It gets even more complicated sometimes within a city. Let’s say from Florence I want to take a day trip to Pisa. I need again to get to a train, have the right ticket, get off at the right stop, get to the Leaning Tower, have my admission taken care of via whatever website or in person process exists, find food, get back to the station, and head back to my Florence lodging.
Well, a guided tour takes care of those things. Are the lodgings always those I would choose? Of course not. But I know my room will be there when I am, and getting to that hotel will be taken care of, as will getting to the next or to whatever sights we are seeing. It removes a significant number of things needing to be sorted personally, which can be freeing.
(Note: tour companies – and costs – have a pretty wide range. My tours with Overseas Adventure Travel have largely included solid to good lodging, while on my recent tour of Morocco with G Adventures, I found most of the hotels to be of poor quality.)
3. Getting to Harder to Reach Places
No matter how good I am at figuring out logistics, there are some things that are just very difficult to do on my own. If I want to see a castle in the middle of nowhere, I will either need to rent a car or to find private transportation. And if I want to see several such places over the course of a week or two, rental car prices can get prohibitive, not to mention I have to navigate and drive in a foreign country, and perhaps on the wrong side of the road.
Again, because tours take care of the logistics, I don’t have to worry about getting to those more off the beaten path sorts of places.
4. Seeing More Places in Less Time
Finally, guided tours are more efficient with their time. It is rare for a tour group to wait in line for tickets for a site; those are generally pre-arranged. Worst case, there is a guide to handle that while the group uses the restroom or has a snack.
The same thing goes for an itinerary as a whole; more efficient usage of time means seeing more cities or places over the course of a trip. Less time is wasted. Even long bus rides are typically broken up by things (like those in category three) as stops on the way. That is harder to do on my own.
Negatives of Guided Tours
1. Less flexibility
To be honest, while there are a few other negatives I’ll mention, this one is the real issue. A tour comes with a schedule, both in the form of basic itinerary (it’s Tuesday so we are moving from Tokyo to Kyoto today, and then Friday moving again) and in terms of the daily plan. Some days it means getting up really early to be on the bus with your stuff at 7am. Some days it means doing something you didn’t really want to do, but you have to because you’re doing it on the way from one city to another. (If you don’t want to do the day’s plan, and you are remaining in one place, you can typically just tell your guide you are opting out. But that doesn’t work when you need to get to the next city.)
And while you can opt out of some of the included things in order to increase your own flexibility, if a group included dinner is at 6pm, you not wanting to eat at 6 means that you are paying for something that would otherwise be included.
I find that the pace of many tours is overwhelming. It has been rare on my tours to have more than three nights in a single location, and some tours can move even faster than that. Days tend to start early, and while there may be some down time in the afternoon and evening, it is still busier than my normal half-day sort of pace. I sometimes return home from a trip like this having had more incredible experiences than I’d have in a similar time period on my own, but even more exhausted than before I left.
(And this isn’t even as bad as it can be. When I was a child I went on a European bus tour that hit 11 different cities in 8 different countries in just over two weeks. As they say, “if it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium.”)
2. A Lack of Immersion
For some, this might be considered a positive. But for me, when I’m on a tour, I feel like I’m merely an observer in a place rather than a part of it. I am pretty much with other Americans at all times. Restaurants cater to the group in English, and basically no effort to speak other languages is required, although I still try. I am in hotels with other tour groups. Food is more Americanized.
For many, these make adjusting to a new place easier. For me, it makes me feel a step removed from what I normally would want. I miss talking to locals, eating local food, navigating transit, and trying to understand customs and language.
3. Cost
If you add up everything you do on a guided tour (lodging, transportation, included meals, admission to sights, etc…) it is significantly more expensive than doing those things on your own. You pay for the packaging, and the convenience. And those are worth something.
But for those of us on a tighter budget, tour costs can be prohibitive. My recent Costa Rica trip was almost $5,000 per person for two weeks (a huge thank you to my aunt for treating me), a price I couldn’t afford while still balancing other travel.
One More Neutral Consideration: Other People
On a guided tour, you are sharing the experience with other people. This can be both wonderful – making new friends is a joy, and a great group can add a ton to the atmosphere – and also less good. Some people may show up late, holding everyone else up. Sicknesses spread. And you won’t always jive well with a group.
I’ve had experiences with groups that have been incredible, and others that have been truly terrible. On my recent Costa Rica tour, the group got along so well that we all chose to spend our free meals eating together anyway. And on my Sicily tour, just about everybody got a severe respiratory illness due to selfish participants who wouldn’t mask or distance themselves. (I did not get sick, but I double masked and opted out of a number of activities.)
So is a guided tour right for you? Well, if those positives seem awfully good and the negatives not so bad, then yeah, it might be the right thing. If you prefer to have others make your arrangements, to handle your luggage, and such, then yeah, guided tours might be a great option. If you want time just to yourself, and to go at your pace and do what you want to do at any given time, maybe not.
