When you are in a foreign country or even in the states on vacation, you’ll want to see all the important historical and significant sites of the area. Guided tours can be a great way to see a lot in a short amount of time without the hassle of attempting mass transit or renting a car. And guided walking tours are a great up-close way to experience parts of a city especially with specialty tours like pub crawls and foodie tours.
Damon’s Getaways recommends a combination of guided and solo tours to enjoy the complete color of a city or area. Guided tours offer a lot of information but lack the freedom to wander on your own. Doing both will give you a more well-rounded vacation.
There are a lot of benefits to guided tours, one is there are so many to choose from in any given city. Your hotel concierge should be able to recommend the best tour operators. You can book ahead with Damon’s Getaways or you can opt to play it by ear day to day. Either way, you won’t have to lift a finger, just get on the bus or put some comfortable walking shoes and away you go.
In foreign countries, most tours are in English as well as several other languages. A great benefit and added feature of guided tours are that you’ll also get to make friends with people from around the world. Some tours include traditional foods of each locale for either a lunch or dinner meal so that you can meet your other tour mates.
Guided tours are especially popular with novice travelers, who aren’t comfortable with adventuring out on their own. Guided tours offer safety in numbers and won’t take you to unsafe areas. Also, if you are limited on time a city tour can show you the highlights in under two hours. Whole country tours can include a handful of cities and are packaged so that visitors can enjoy the best country has to offer and attempting to see them on your own could take a lot more time as well as more money.
Most guided city tours have convenient schedules that you can hop on and off throughout the day. In addition, guided tours have highly trained and experienced tour guides that know the city or country. They offer a lot of information that you wouldn’t get walking or driving on your own.
There are also a variety of specialty guided tours in every location, art, food, and wine, pub crawls, historical, famous people tours, and the list goes on. These tours are especially suited for travelers interested in a particular topic or hobby.
Also, for tours outside the city called side trips or day tours as well as country tours, transportation is provided so you don’t 
have to circumvent the foreign roads or attempt to read a road map or mass transit schedule. You’ll get to enjoy the countryside in an airconditioned or heated bus or van and be transported to a castle, winery or museum or historical site in luxury and worry-free. Plus, all along the route, your tour guide will call out significant points of interest that you may miss traveling alone.
One downside is that some guided tours can be quite pricey, but you get what you pay for and there is seldom a lack of tour operators or price points to choose from.
Some additional cons of guided tours can be that you may not enjoy interacting with some of the people on a tour or like the restaurants and hotels chosen by the tour operator. Another con, on some guided tours, is that you must follow the tour schedule that will have multiple stops. Some travelers will feel they need more time at a particular stop, but the tour only allows an allotted time for each stop. So, basically, you may not enjoy all of the tour. You can try to avoid this by carefully looking over the tours to assure that you get a tour that more closely matches your likings. Consider timetables, stops, restaurants, hotels, and the number of people allowed on the tour.
What Damon’s Getaways recommend is a mixture of guided tours, day trips, specialty tours, and self-guided tours. Also, it’s important to make room in your day or your week for you and your travel mates to just relax too. Have scheduled downtime or free time to do whatever you want. It just may be to do some walking, shopping, sightseeing by foot or just drinking in some local flavor. It’s wise not to overschedule yourself. Lastly, if you are doing a guided country tour, it’s always a great idea to extend your trip one day either side of your trip for a day on your own!
Damon’s Getaways is just a phone call away to answer all your questions on tours, flights, hotels, and more. Give us a call today so we can plan your next getaway.