When is a Tour the Best Option?

Adventure is a State of Mind

When is a group tour or cruise the best option? If you’ve read many of my blog posts, you might be getting the impression that I’m anti-tour or anti-cruise. I want to assure you that I’m not. Often, a tour or a cruise is the best option for your travel adventure.

Traveling Solo

What if you’re dreaming of exploring the world but you can’t find anyone who wants to travel with you? If you don’t have a partner or if your partner has made it clear that they have no interest in travel, and if your friends aren’t interested or available, a group tour may be the way to go.

There are some people who are confident enough to adventure by themselves. If you’re one of them, I admire you! I have done some short-term travel by myself – a flight to meet a friend or a couple of days in a large city to attend a conference – but in general, it’s difficult for me to find the courage to go out and explore without a travel companion.

To be fair to myself, as a woman, sometimes it’s not safe to do things by myself. There are places in the world where a woman alone is seen as an easy target for harassment or violence. And certainly, most of us females are taught to be cautious about where we go after dark by ourselves. If I’m traveling by myself, I almost never feel comfortable going very far from the hotel at night, which limits dinner and entertainment options.

A group tour or cruise is a great way to address this issue. You are paying not only for transportation and lodging, but also for built-in travel companions. What you lose in flexibility (as compared to traveling independently) is made up with an increase of safety and companionship.

As a bonus, over the years I have had friends who have taken a tour or cruise and made friends in the process, and sometimes those newfound friends became future travel companions. Obviously, the other members of your tour share similar interests with you or they wouldn’t be on the tour. And shared interests is one of the best ways to create a new friendship!

Health and Mobility

The primary motivator that gets me up off the couch to go for a walk and prevents me from eating an entire carton of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in one sitting is my love of travel. I want to be able to lift my carryon bag into the overhead bin and fit into an airline seat. I want to be able to walk down a cobblestone street or hike up a mountain path.

I’m grateful that I can still do these things, and hopefully will continue to be able to do so for many years. I know, however, that if I live long enough, some activities will become increasingly difficult to do.

I also know that many individuals are not as lucky, and health and mobility issues are a concern for many.

A group tour or cruise is one way to address and work around mobility concerns. There is more support in the form of help with luggage, or being driven closer to the entrance of a museum or historical site than you can likely do on your own.

Moving luggage in and out of your lodging can be a major hassle for all of us, but especially for someone with mobility issues. Being on a cruise means that you don’t have to move luggage everytime you change locations.

If it is difficult for you to sit on a long plane flight, and if your time is abundant, a cruise may be a way for you to visit far away lands. I didn’t realize until recently when our good friends booked one of these trips, but there are cruises that leave from the U.S., cross the Atlantic, and visit locations in Europe.

Whoever created the world went to a lot of trouble. It would be downright rude not to go out and see as much of it as possible.

Edward Readicker-Henderson

Comfort Level

I hope that in reading Brave Wise Traveler, you’re becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea of adventuring to places you’ve never been. Still, I know there are some hurdles that feel just a little too high to jump.

Maybe you’re considering traveling out of the country for the first time. The first time I traveled to Europe, I was visiting a friend who was living in England. I relied on her experience to help me learn the basics.

If neither you nor your travel companions have much travel experience, I’m confident you can figure it out and travel independently. But just because you can do something doesn’t necessarily mean you should do it. If you would feel more relaxed by letting a tour group do the planning for you, by all means, join that tour! You’ll enjoy your trip much more, and that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Simplifying Things

Even if you have travel experience and feel confident traveling independently to some areas, that doesn’t mean you’ll have that same confidence about traveling everywhere.

I feel very comfortable planning trips to many places, but there are some places where I don’t feel as comfortable. Someday, I suspect I will join an organized tour to visit some countries where I’m not comfortable with the language (such as China) and/or the culture and customs (such as India).

If there’s someplace you want to visit that, when you’re honest with yourself, you know you will never do on your own, consider taking a tour. The point of life is to actually do things, not to just think about doing them.

Limited Time and Maximizing What You Can Do

Not everyone is at a stage in their life where they have an abundance of time. This is especially true for Americans who work for employers who, on average, provide some of the lowest amount of paid leave in the world.

Independent travel is wonderful in that it provides you with the flexibility to go and do exactly what you want to do. The downside of independent travel, however, is that it can take longer to find your way around when you are new to an area, such as figuring out how to navigate public transportation.

Tours can be a very efficient way of covering a lot of ground in a short amount of time. Additionally, sometimes some of the transportation occurs when you are relaxing or sleeping. For example, if you are on a cruise, the ship often moves between locations at night. Instead of struggling with train schedules or driving a car to get to your next location, you can eat a relaxing dinner and go to bed.

If you have limited time but still want to see some of the world, a tour or cruise may be the best choice for you. And, as we’ll be discussing next, it can also give you a preview of where you might want to return in the future when you have more time to explore and enjoy an area.

Tasting Menu

I like to think of group tours and cruises as “tasting menus.” If you haven’t had the experience of enjoying a tasting menu at a restaurant, I recommend you try it at least once. Much like an organized tour, you don’t have much choice in what you will be experiencing, but you can trust that someone put a lot of thought and planning into the experience, and the odds are high that you will enjoy most of the experience.

Also similar to a group tour or cruise, you are getting a little bit of a lot of things. Many tasting menus start with an amuse-bouche, which is usually little more than a single bite of something delicious. The idea is to give you a taste of something wonderful while leaving you wanting more, and the following courses in the tasting menu tend to be small, tapas-size samples of the chef’s imagination and skill.

On a tour, you are almost guaranteed to visit some places for just a few hours while wishing that you could spend several days there. This is a frustration for many travelers, but I think the experience can be reframed to recognize that the little “taste” of a place that left you wanting more is a signal to yourself that you would probably enjoy returning to and spending more time there. In fact, I would recommend that you strongly consider planning your own independent adventure to that place later, when you can spend time getting to know the place in depth.

It Doesn’t Have to Be All or Nothing

You don’t always have to choose between independent travel and group tours. There can be ways to combine the two.

Increasingly, I think tour companies are realizing that travelers want some freedom to choose what they do with their time. This is especially true for small tour groups. If this sounds appealing to you, look for tours that offer opportunities to spend part of each day exploring an area on your own.

Conversely, just because you are planning your own unique travel adventure doesn’t mean you have to do every activity completely on your own. For example, when traveling with my niece and friends in England, we stayed in London and wanted to visit Stonehenge and Bath but didn’t want to drive there. As a solution, we found an all-day bus tour going to those locations, even though we planned the rest of our trip on our own and used public transportation.

If You’re Nervous

If you’ve never traveled to an area and you’re scared… wait! That is actually not a good reason to take a group tour instead of planning your own customized travel adventure!

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you’ve probably picked up on my very strong belief that anyone can figure out how to plan their own travel adventures. If you’re new to my blog, please stick around for a while and check out past posts. There’s an abundance of information about travel, including how to plan effectively.

As for the fear – everyone is afraid when they are trying something new. In fact, if it’s been a very long time since you’ve felt any fear or anxiety, it’s probably a bad sign that you haven’t been learning anything new. A complete lack of fear is a complete lack of growth.

When is a Tour Not the Best Option?

The most important part of the decision-making process is to think through what you want from your trip.

If you want to plan things that aren’t included in popular tours, such as visiting a tiny village where your great-grandfather was born, a group tour is obviously not the best option for you. Similarly, if you want quite a bit of flexibility to spend your days doing what you want to do, a tour or a cruise is not the best option for you, either.

There are times when you can get exactly what you want from a cruise or tour, with the added benefits of safety and support. If that’s the case, then you’re going to be happy with choosing that option. If you look at the cruise and tour offerings, however, and they are missing the experiences or locations you’re dreaming of, then going with a cruise or tour is going to leave you feeling disappointed and frustrated at the end of your trip. In that case, the extra effort of planning your own travel adventure is going to result in much more enjoyment.

If you have a good reason to travel as part of a group tour or a cruise, by all means do so. But if fear is the reason you are choosing a tour package over planning a travel adventure that is unique to your needs and wants, please reconsider whether you might actually enjoy yourself more if you face your fears instead of avoiding them.

Where are you wanting to travel next? Would the best option for that trip be to join a tour or cruise? Or would the best option be to plan your own, independent travel adventure?