Escorted tours Voyage Tips and guide

Escorted tours are comprehensive tour packages in which a professional tour director escorts a large tour group, usually by motorcoach, through a multi-day itinerary covering multiple travel destinations and multiple overnight accommodations.

At a minimum, a standard package includes the services of the tour director, plus the costs of all transportation, accommodations, one or more mandatory excursions at each destination, and some meals. Most packages include free time each day for optional excursions or meals for additional fees, or you may rest or go sightseeing at your leisure.

Escorted tours should not be confused with guided city tours within a single city. An escorted tour will usually check in and out of hotels in two or more different cities.

Escorted tours should not be confused with self-drive or independent tour packages, in which the tour company or travel agency prepares a set of reservations or vouchers and the burden falls on guests to redeem them with each vendor. On a true escorted tour, each vendor is ready for your scheduled arrival and serves the group as a whole; individual guests do not need to keep presenting the correct voucher to settle individual tabs.

An alternative that somewhat resembles an escorted tour is to travel by cruise ship. All your accommodation and transportation between destinations, plus most meals, are included in the package fee. Transportation and guides at destinations may or may not be included, depending upon which line and cruise you choose.

Escorted tours can be booked directly with tour companies or through travel agencies.

Tour companies often require deposits to secure your place which are usually nonrefundable. If enough people sign up to enable a tour to proceed as scheduled, the tour company will advise you and demand payment of the full balance.

Pricing is per person and assumes that you will share accommodations with one or more travelers. A single supplement is charged for solo travelers who prefer to stay by themselves in hotel rooms or ship cabins.

When booking an escorted tour, the vast majority of the tour itinerary should fall squarely within your must-see preferences. Otherwise, you are wasting your time and money.

Escorted tour package prices do not include the cost of transportation between your city of residence and the start and end of the tour itinerary. However, your tour company or travel agency can usually add on such transportation for an additional fee, or you can choose to book that separately.

Some itineraries start and finish in the same city. Others are one-way itineraries between different cities which will require a so-called "open-jaw" reservation (returning home from a different city than the outbound flight).

The tour director typically meets you at the airport when you arrive at the first destination on the itinerary, or in the alternative, arranges for someone to meet you. From that point onward, the tour company handles all transportation and accommodations, until the tour director drops you off at the airport at the last destination, or arranges other transportation to the airport.

Some tours start from a city center meeting point and return to the same meeting point, and there may be connecting coaches from other cities to this meeting point. This enables tour operators to advertise a "grand tour" of a broad region which is actually a package of several shorter tours connecting to each other through that city center.

An escorted tour package usually consists of several destinations where the group will stay for one or two nights. Travel between those destinations most often comes in the form of land transportation via full-size motorcoaches driven by professional tour drivers. If the tour needs to cover distances too vast to drive or cross large bodies of water, the itinerary will include flights, trains, or ships arranged for by the tour company.

The tour director personally escorts the tour group to every destination on the itinerary (hence the name), escorts the group to all mandatory excursions, and usually stays with them at each hotel on the itinerary.

While en route on the motorcoach, the tour director narrates the tour. The director points out upcoming roadside points of interest to photograph while passing by, provides interesting facts about what the group is seeing or about to see, and briefs the group on practical information for each destination and attraction. The tour director will also coordinate optional excursions and may accompany some of those excursions as well.

At each destination, and often in between them, there are several mandatory excursions to local attractions and restaurants. At each attraction, the tour bus will drop off the group and immediately drive away to park in a less congested area. For included meals and the simplest attractions, like scenic viewpoints, the tour director will personally guide the group.

For more complex attractions, especially ticketed ones, the tour director will hand off the group to a local tour guide. The tour director then follows the rear of the group, to monitor the tour guide's performance, to keep the group together, and to prevent unwanted third parties from slipping into the group to sneak into the attraction. Since attraction tickets have been prearranged, the tour guide leads the group through a dedicated tour group entrance, past all the individual tourists waiting in line, and takes them directly to the most important parts of the attraction. After a reasonable time for sightseeing and taking pictures, the tour director will contact the driver to bring back the tour bus and begin to collect the group. Everyone gets back on the bus and relaxes or rests, while the motorcoach glides away to the next attraction.

Escorted tours usually include multiple free time segments, but their exact length is rarely indicated on tour companies' published itineraries. For free time, the tour company may make available one or more optional excursions for additional fees, and the tour director will try to "upsell" those excursions to guests who have not already made plans.

The tour company will not finalize and send you the actual schedule for your particular tour until you pay the full price for the tour package. At that point, you can calculate available free time at each destination, then decide whether to take an optional excursion or plan your own sightseeing.

Most escorted tours include baggage handling, also known as porterage. This greatly eases the transition from one hotel to another because you will not have to wrestle your baggage in and out of the motorcoach. Each morning when you check out, you will leave your baggage outside your room at a designated time and turn in your key to the front desk. The tour director coordinates with hotel staff to get your baggage from your room to the motorcoach. At the next hotel on the itinerary, the tour director will check in the entire group, obtain a stack of keys from the front desk clerk and pass them out, and coordinate with hotel staff to deliver everyone's baggage directly to their rooms.

The exceptions are for air segments where you will have to personally check in and claim your baggage, and certain off-road destinations for which you will need to bring a backpack or carry-on and pack only the supplies you need for the off-road location. In the latter scenario, the motorcoach carries away your full-size baggage and meets the group several days later. These exceptions are usually indicated on the tour itinerary.

The primary advantages of escorted tours are that they move fast and greatly reduce the stress and expense of travel.

Escorted tours move fast because everything is researched, optimized, planned, and booked by the tour company in advance.

The tour director focuses on efficiently moving from one attraction to the next, while the tour driver handles driving, parking, refueling, and basic vehicle maintenance. They take over all the exhausting hassles of driving and navigating, and follow a carefully choreographed itinerary, while the guests rest on the bus. A well-planned escorted tour can cover far more territory and visit far more attractions each day than most people could ever do on their own.

When done right, the experience should be seamless and feel like magic. You do not have to worry about details, because the tour company does that for you. All you need to do is show up in the hotel lobby each morning as scheduled, follow your tour director on and off the bus all day, and enjoy the ride. You leave your baggage outside one hotel room and a bellhop delivers your baggage to your room at the next hotel. All included hotels, attractions, and restaurants are ready for and awaiting your scheduled arrival.

Escorted tours are especially valuable for international travel to other countries. They are an excellent option if you are too young or too old to drive in another country, or never learned how; the country drives on the "wrong" side of the road from your point of view; you cannot read or speak a country's native language and most locals don't speak your language; the country has a high violent crime rate; or several of your must-see destinations are located in hard-to-reach rural areas. If this is your first time crossing an international border, you may be overwhelmed with learning local laws, customs, and culture to avoid getting into trouble in a foreign country. An experienced tour director can accurately answer your questions and brief you on what is truly important to know.

Since the tour company buys everything (lodging, meals, transportation, attraction tickets) in very large quantities, the company may be able to obtain bulk discounts unavailable to individual travelers who purchase those things separately.

If your tour company is reputable, then you can be confident that all vendors were vetted and are probably not outright frauds or scams. If you were booking your own itinerary, you would have to research all the vendors yourself to avoid booking the hotel or restaurant from hell which could wreck your dream vacation. In the alternative, you could hire a travel agent, but your agent may have never visited your destination, or may not have booked it recently for clients. In contrast, the tour company is actually running tours with its vendors every few weeks. The company receives feedback on current vendor performance from tour directors who have to share the same accommodations and food, and mollify dissatisfied guests.

Vetting works both ways; an escorted tour can unlock unique experiences unavailable to independent travelers. Many landowners are reluctant to open their gates to the general public every day, but may tolerate occasional visits from tour groups who are more likely to behave themselves. This can mean the difference, for example, between visiting a farm theme park as an independent traveler to ride on a tram tour or miniature railway, while an escorted tour group can enjoy a quiet, intimate ride in horse-drawn wagons on an authentic working rural farm.

The main disadvantage of an escorted tour is the lack of flexibility. Escorted tour schedules are tight and rigid.

A tour group can only move as fast as its least punctual guest. It is a constant hassle to meet up with the group at specific times on the tour schedule after periods set aside for sleep and free time. If any guest fails to show up, that may lead to significant delays while the tour director goes to look for them.

A tour group can only move as fast as its slowest guest. Escorted tours often attract families and elderly retirees. Children have short legs, some old people move slowly for various health and safety reasons, and both groups may tire easily. Young adults with stamina and energy should focus on tour companies catering to active young adults.

Independent travelers have the flexibility to abandon the rest of their plans for any given day, in order to stay longer and savor the delights of a particular tourist attraction which exceeded their expectations. On an escorted tour, you do not have that flexibility. To stay on schedule, the tour director will have to constantly encourage the group to keep moving. Conversely, if the tour falls behind schedule because of unusually slow or tardy guests, traffic congestion, or bus breakdowns, the tour director might feel differently than you about which things to skip. An independent traveler may look at the weather forecast and decide to visit the museum during the morning rain and the gardens in the afternoon sunshine, but an escorted tour will stick to the tour schedule and visit the gardens in the rain.

Escorted tours will usually visit only those attractions which can take 45 to 55 visitors at once (i.e., the capacity of a typical charter motorcoach). The smallest historic sites are often omitted for this reason; you will visit the palace but not the laborer's house. Conversely, specialist small group tours can sometimes gain access to locations not normally open to the public.

It is nearly impossible to satisfy every guest all the time, especially larger groups on longer itineraries. On at least one or more days, you may find yourself trapped in one or more accommodations, transportation, restaurants, or mandatory excursions which are not to your satisfaction, which you would not have included if planning your own trip from scratch, and which you will tolerate only because you already paid for it and you want to stay on schedule.

The tour company and its vendors have to make a profit somewhere, and this is evident in certain elements of escorted tours. Unless you are booking an expensive luxury escorted tour which promises only the finest accommodations at every stop, most tours will stay in at least one hotel which is booking tour groups because it is overdue for renovation or is located in a noisy, unattractive, or inconvenient area (often next to an international airport). Tour companies usually only book hotels that can take the full coach of passengers, those with more than 30 bedrooms available, but some companies may split the coach between a few hotels possibly at different prices. Included meals may be from a shorter menu than a restaurant's standard menu. In cities with expensive tollways, a tour driver may try to save on tolls by taking the slower "scenic route" on toll-free streets.

Another disadvantage of escorted tours is the risk that the tour may not proceed as advertised because it failed to attract enough interest. Most tours are priced on the assumption that the motorcoach will be mostly or completely full, but make no sense financially if only two or three guests sign up. This risk is usually not a problem for the most popular destinations in high season. If you are trying to visit a less popular destination, especially during its low season, you need to prepare for a possible "staycation" or a backup trip if your tour is cancelled.

You may find the additional cost of optional excursions to be quite annoying, since you are aware that you already paid a very large sum for the tour package's base price.

• Guided tours, tours within or around individual city destinations
• Travel agencies