We have been packaging up our destinations now as Allworld since 2007, and between our main staff we have been organising these destinations even longer. One question that keeps coming up is “Do I have to travel with a Group?”which is normally followed pretty soon afterwards by the query “Isn’t it more expensive to travel on your own?”
To me it feels in some ways like a running battle to keep people informed, but the truth is that almost anywhere that you travel on group tours you can do individual tours with your own private guide and drivers, so the answer is always NO, you do not have to travel with a Group. See? Nice and simple! The next answer though is not, because the price will vary widly dependant on where in the world you are travelling. For example if you travel in Egypt or Vietnam the cost of independant travel is usully within a few dollars per day of what you would pay on a group tour on a daily basis, so no it isn’t really more expensive to travel individually. In Europe though a private tour is incredibly more expensive then a group tour, so yes in some cases it is more expensive to travel individually.
It is for these reasons that we work differently in each of our destinations. For most of our destinations we work on individual tours, because the price is similar to group travel, or in some cases (like Yemen for example) trying to run scheduled group departures just are not feasable. In some destinations we offer a combination, like in Peru where we can orgainse a trip suited for you, but put you on regularly scheduled day tours with other travellers in the main cities and towns to keep costs down. Then we have destinations like Turkey, where the majority of our tours are group departures, simply because doing things individually with a private guide and driver for small groups (2 – 6 people) can be incredibly expensive.
So as you can see, the whole “Group vs Individual”travel is not something that is always straightforward, at least as far as cost reward goes. In general though for the majority of our destinations we don’t hesitate to tell people that Individual Travel Options are much better than group travel, and we can tell you why!
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