Go Ahead, Take the Tour
Sometimes it's worth letting someone else plan your adventuring
In Mission: Wanderlust, I write and podcast about our family’s travel adventures and the things that we have learned along the way.
We are not tour people.
I don’t mean that we are opposed to taking tours. It’s just that on most occasions, we would prefer to do it all ourselves. I like to walk at my own pace, my husband Jeff likes to do the driving and pick our stops, and for all of our love for travel and toys and home renovation, we are also notoriously cheap about the majority of our expenditures. We hate spending unnecessary money on adventuring that we can plan ourselves for significantly less money.
But sometimes is it worth spending the money on tours planned and organized by the experts.
This has been true for us on many vacations. On our most recent trip as a couple, we did not have a vehicle with us for the time that we were staying on O’ahu. One of the places I really wanted to visit while we were on the island was Pearl Harbor, but this particular side trip presented us with two problems. First, we didn’t have a vehicle to easily get us to the national park site. Second, due to COVID restrictions, the number of tickets out to the USS Arizona were limited and visitors who chose to wait and get the tickets themselves had to do so on-site and hope that they would get one of the few available tickets earlier in the day. Our hotel concierge presented us with another option; we could pay for a tour company to both transport us to and from the site and reserve a ticket to the USS Arizona Memorial for us. By the time we returned to our hotel from a full day of learning Hawaii history and exploring Pearl Harbor, we agreed that it had been well worth the expenditure.
So if you are like us and prefer to do your own travel planning, when might it be best to take the tour anyway?
You don’t have easy access to travel
The first time I personally made the decision to take a tour was when I was in college for my semester abroad. My friends and I had decided to travel to Ireland during our fall break and wanted to see as much of the southern half of the country as possible. When we discussed doing the Rings of Kerry, it became abundantly clear to us that it was going to save us a lot of trouble to spend just a little extra and pay for a bus tour around the countryside.
Since that trip as an independent college student, Jeff and I have picked a few select occasions to let the experts do the driving and take us where we need to go when we are on vacation. It’s not usually our go-to, but like with our Hawaii experience, it can be well worth it to at least price it out.
You don’t have the time, skills, or knowledge to figure it out on your own
Time really is money, and when you are on vacation and you have a lot that you want to see or do, time is not your friend. This is especially true when you are visiting a new place and you are unfamiliar with customs or terrain. On a trip with Jeff’s family to Fort Lauderdale, long before we had kids, the adult children went on a night fishing expedition out in the ocean. None of us had the boat, the skills, or the knowledge to even consider venturing out on our own. The same was true of a family trip out to snorkel in Key West. And when I went with students to Costa Rica, there was no way that we would have considered a white water rafting trip without the planning and guidance of experienced professionals. Sometimes letting someone else do the planning and execution allows you to enjoy your vacation instead of spending the whole time worrying about the details.
You want to learn something new from the experts
I went on my first ghost tour during that same college semester studying abroad. We were spending a weekend in Edinburgh and some friends and I thought it would be fun to learn some of the more interesting history of the old city during a ghost tour. I quickly learned that a good ghost tour was about more than the strange and supernatural; it was about the history that made a place what it is today. We learned the same thing when we took ghost tours in Key West as a couple and then in Austin with our kids. The tour guides know more than just strange history; they know the history that helps to explain what makes each location unique.
Our trip to Pearl Harbor with a tour guide didn’t just give us a ride to the national memorial and tickets to the USS Arizona; we also got a complete history lesson about the Hawaiian Islands from our Hawaii native bus driver. I learned more than I ever would have about Hawaii if we had just chosen to drive to the site on our own. We’ve been told that one of the best ways to see the fields of Gettysburg is to hire a tour guide to come with you in your car because they will not only tell your family about the history of the Civil War but will be able to answer questions as you go. The experts are the experts for a reason, and sometimes it is worth seeing what they have to say.
We still aren’t the type to eagerly pay for every tour that comes along, but we have learned that sometimes, it really is worth it to pay someone else to do the planning for you. The key is finding the tour that matches your family’s needs and wants for your vacation.
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