Benefits of small group travel
Transfers
Still my biggest bugbear with independent travel – particularly airport arrival transfers. Which is why it is fantastic that Imaginative Traveller now include these on ALL our Traveller style adventure tours. I have far too many memories of arriving at strange airports in the middle of the night, bleary-eyed after a long flight, facing a barrage of over-enthusiastic taxi driversand porters, all eager for my business, having to haggle over prices and convince them that ‘No, I did not want to go to their uncle’s best friend’s son’s guesthouse’. To see your name on a sign, be met by a friendly face and transferred to a reputable hotel makes the start of your travels so much easier. To this day I get excited when I am actually met at airports – and am equally disappointed when I emerge to an empty arrivals hall.
Challenging Destinations
Whilst it can be fun to mix independent travel with joining groups there are certainly some destinations where I would highly recommend the latter. Definitely whenever I ventured off the beaten track to countries where visas are complicated or access is difficult or just the logistics of travelling around would require more time than my limited holiday allowed, I always went down the organised group travel route. Crossing the jungles of Indonesia would have been absolutely impossible without the back-up of an experienced organisation behind it. Packing in Casablanca, Marrakech, the High Atlas Mountains and coastal Essaouira on a week’s trip to Morocco would certainly have been challenging without the superb Imaginative Traveller guide coordinating it all. I would have been very unsure about arranging a solo trek to Everest Base Camp with all the logistics in hiring a Sherpa/porter team that involves without the helping hand of our trekking agency in Kathmandu.
Experiences
My experiences in India are classic examples of group versus independent travel. My first time there I had such a bad experience I actually brought my return flight forward so that I could leave early! This was partly my own fault from trying to pack in too much and cover huge distances in a limited time but it was also the endless red tape, the queueing, the ‘way of doing things’ that I simply didn’t understand. I found it simply exhausting and vowed that if I ever went back I would go with a group AND a leader. And when I did return to Rajasthan (with a group and leader), I had a completely different experience. Someone else took on the hassle of organising train tickets and porters, negotiating on transfer rates and camel rides and so on. What a relief – I could actually enjoy the country!
Professionalism
A classic example of where pre-booking a trip with a reputable company would have changed my experience of a place was Kilimanjaro. I just about survived a terrible week on a mountain in the hands of a bunch of local cowboy operators which totally marred my memories of what should have been a momentous achievement. After being held to ransom over a perceived lack of tips at the end of the trek I could not wait to escape Tanzania which is such a shame as the country has so much to offer the traveller in addition to Kilimanjaro.
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