Obviously, there are drawbacks to tours. You are on someone else’s schedule, visiting sites as prioritized by someone else. You are confined to the same group of people with all their quirks and foibles, and you won’t get to visit as many local haunts. However, there’s a great deal to be gained from taking a tour!
The most important thing to decide before choosing a tour is whether you want to see a lot of places and spend as much time as you like at each, avoid tours! Tours can last a long time and cover the same topics repeatedly! On the other hand, taking a tour means you don’t have to worry about transportation, navigation, or communication! Plus, I can guarantee you’re better off being supervised on a zipline or cage dive with a great white shark!
My favorite tours are the free ones! They usually happen at small museums! I love them so much because they tend to be run by passionate volunteers, rather than bored, underpaid tour guides, which makes them more engaging and more flexible! For instance, when I visited Cove Fort with my brother, Woodchuck, the docent tailored our tour to fit our 20-minute window and enthusiastically covered the most fascinating parts of each room: telegraphs, ox shoeing, hair embroidery, window glass dating, and more amazing frontier facts!
Sometimes the tours go outside the box! When I visited the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton, California, their field research took me on a tour around the community, showing off some of the most perplexing Bigfoot sighting places. The stories were sometimes hilarious and sometimes terrifying, and I even got a great visual layout of where the Bigfoot tribe could be lurking in the Santa Cruz Mountains! (Something about that quarry…)
Then you get into the larger, more commercial tours, which are more hit-and-miss for me. When I visited China, I had to be part of a tour, because even the hotel concierges spoke strictly Chinese! That was important, but as I came to find out, it’s really easy for tourists to get caught in tourist traps! Our visits to the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and the Reed Flute Cave were all cut short because the tour company required us to shop at their overpriced affiliate stores: the Silk Factory, the Cloisonné Factory, and the Pearl Museum. We wanted nothing to do with these places, but the tour had its schedule, which left us no choice!
Despite all of this nonsense, the tour guides taught us all sorts of neat facts about the Emperor’s special “fork room” for his concubines and the Chinese media’s policy of fudging temperature reports when the summer heat is technically too high to be safe for work! They also kept us safe at all times, which is great for any place where you run the risk of blundering into a rough part of town! That, I think, is the biggest benefit to taking a tour!
So take your pick! Explore on your own or make a friend and share a memory! If you have time for a tour, try one out, and you’ll be surprised at the wealth of knowledge available! No matter what you do, stay safe and have fun!