GLM TEAM 
If you’ve ever planned a trip to a foreign destination, you’ll know the level of organisation involved. Besides booking your flights and accommodation, you also need to manage all the daily logistics while you’re there – such as finding places to eat, buying tickets for (and queuing) for tourist attractions, and navigating your transport options for getting around. While independent travel can certainly be freeing and even exhilarating, it can also be overwhelming at times. Given this, it’s no wonder that the concept of touring – where your trip is planned by a company and you travel from place to place in an organised group led by a destination expert – has become so popular. Here are five reasons to choose touring for your next holiday:
- You get insider knowledge. One of the best parts about travelling somewhere new is exploring the change in perspective a new destination offers. But, as an outsider, chances are you’re limited for time and it can be hard to know what is worth seeing – and what’s worth skipping. With touring, you benefit from expert local knowledge on a particular destination, allowing you to get the best out of where you’re visiting. Organised tours are also typically led by knowledgeable guides who are full of information about the destination’s history and culture, which makes travel experience even more enriching. Some tour companies also include authentic local experiences, where you interact with a local who teaches you about local customs and way of life. On Insight Vacation’s Country Roads of Portugal tour, for example, you’ll meet a local boat captain at Alqueva Lake, and then explore the Templar Castle with a local expert.
- You save time. From buying train tickets to checking in to your accommodation to buying tickets for tourist attractions, researching every detail of your trip can be time consuming. Even simple things like navigating where to get to on a given day can take time‚ not to mention correcting your course if you get lost on the way. With an organised tour, these details are already pre-planned, leaving you free to immerse yourself in the destination and enjoy all it has to offer. Besides foregoing the planning, you’ll also save time at major attractions: many touring companies are able to organise special entries that allow you to skip the queues and go straight in.
- You save money. Tour operators often benefit from group rate discounts on flights, transport and accommodation – and they can then pass these savings onto you. In this way, booking an all-inclusive tour means you can often save a significant amount of money compared to booking each element individually. With most of your costs covered up front, you’re also less likely to overspend on spontaneous purchases or last minute bookings that can be pricier. Overall, an organised tour means fewer surprises to your wallet and more chance of you sticking to your travel budget.
- You get access to exclusive experiences. Organised tours often allow you to access unique activities – whether it’s a private vineyard tour or visiting a hidden gem off the beaten track – that you may find difficult to organise independently, Trafalgar Tours, for example, offers an entire range of “Stays with Stories” itineraries where you’re hosted by local families in everything from wine farms and castles to homesteads and former monasteries.
- You meet likeminded people. Travelling alone can be isolating, but being in a group can make it tough to meet other people, especially if language is a barrier. Touring is a great way of meeting people with similar interests who want to see the same destinations and enjoy the same kinds of activities that you do. From spouses and mother-daughter duos to solo travellers and groups of friends, your fellow tour mates all bring their own unique stories and experiences, which adds a richer dimension to your trip and allows you to come away with new connections you may not have made otherwise.
Besides saving you time and money, an organised tour lets you access authentic experiences of the place you’re visiting. The group tour industry has evolved and grown over the last few decades to the point where today there are tours available to almost every international destination you can think of, catering to almost every different travel preference too. Whether you’re excited by the thought of hiking in the mountains in Asia, exploring small European towns or soaking up the culture of a major city in the US or Canada, an organised tour offers you the experience of a lifetime while saving you the hassle of organising it all yourself. And that, surely, is a win-win.
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