Re: Guided tour to Italy mid-September?

Karen Selwyn wrote:

Ken Blake wrote:

In my post above which you quoted, I was brief, but I'll provide a
longer list of reasons I don't like group tours:

I respect your passionate dislike of guided tours, but you seem to
have misinterpreted what I actually wrote.


In that case, my apologies.


Barbara Vaughan has done a
fine job explaining what I wrote so I won't bother plowing that ground
again.
However, I think your aversion to group tours has caused you to
overstate the reality of group tours so I've added some comments
below.
1. It's easy to get around on your own.

In most cities. However, the minute independent travelers want to
venture into the countryside, the logistics become more complicated.


Absolutely, but remember that this thread was started by someone asking
about visiting Rome, Florence, and Naples, and most of my comments were
directed at using tours in such places. Admittedly, I could have and should
have made that clearer in what I wrote.

But personally I've never found even those more complicated logistics
unmanageable. My wife and I both speak a little tourist Italian, but we're
far from fluent. We've managed to get around and dealt with whatever
situation came up. In small towns in Italy, we've stayed in hotels where
nobody spoke English, and eaten in restaurants where nobody spoke English.
We've always found people eager to help, and we've managed with our few
words of Italian, gestures, etc.


Even renting a car produces its own set of issues.


Yes, if you rent in a small town. Seldom a problem if you rent in a big city
like Florence or Rome, and then drive elsewhere from there.


I can think of a couple of trips where even city travel wasn't easy.
Case in point: Moscow and Beijing. In Moscow, the concierge at our
desk handed us a map of Moscow with the street names in transliterated
English. Whoops! We discovered that the actual street signs were only
in cyrillic. That day, we coped using dead reckoning and lots of
laughter to accompany our mistakes,


Your "lots of laughter" sounds like you managed and you had a wonderful time
doing so. You had a small "adventure" instead of the typical tourist
experience, and I think that's great.


but we were glad we had a private guide our
remaining days in Moscow. (Our map had little schematics of some major
buildings like the Bolshoi and Red Square so that helped too.)

We scheduled some days of independent travel both before (in Beijing)
and after (in Hong Kong) our university tour of China. When we
ventured to destinations beyond walking distance in Beijing, we had
to prepare by asking the concierge to write our destination in
Chinese characters. Leaving the hotel, the doorman would also speak
to the taxi driver since many Chinese drivers are not literate in any
language.


The one time we've really traveled with an organized tour group was when we
went to China. Despite our having spent a couple of months beforehand
studying Chinese once a week with a charming young local woman here (and
learning just a little), we were reluctant to travel on our own in such a
country. In retrospect, I'm sorry we didn't do it on our own without a tour.
We wouldn't have been dragged to the rug store, the art gallery, the jewelry
store, we would have had real Chinese food instead of tourist food, and we
would have had a better time. We knew enough Chinese for the
essentials--things like how to ask where the bathroom is and probably
understand the answer. We would have managed--perhaps not gracefully, and
perhaps having a few adventures like yours in Moscow--but we would have
managed.


2. People who work in hotels, restaurants, tourist shops, etc,. in
major cities almost always speak English.

Again, this is not a universal even in major cities. In Moscow and St.
Petersburg in 2004, tourists would have to stay at the most expensive
hotels and eat in the most expensive restaurants to find people who
could speak fluent English. At most other places, we found that there
was always someone who could cope with the most routine interaction,
but ask an unusual question or get into an unusual situation...


Again, I was referring back to the original poster's question, and thinking
primarily about Italy. I've never been in Moscow, and have no experience
there. But I have been in China, and I agree that it's certainly not true
there.


Coping with struggles is as much a part of what makes travel special
for us as the easy parts, but we never forget they were/are struggles.


Yes, exactly the point I was making above.



3. When you travel with a tour group, you almost invariably stay in
a nice hotel, but typically one distant from the downtown tourist
center of the city. That means wasted time travelling everywhere.

There are group tours and there are group tours.


Unquestionably true.


Mass market tours
tend to fit your description. Upscale tours or tours run by special
interest groups tend to situate their participants as close to their
desired destination as possible.


Yes, I was thinking of the mass-market tours, because those are far and way
the most common types and what most people here are asking about when they
ask about tours.


4. You typically get around the city on a bus, rather than on foot.
That means a much less intomate contact with the city, and all sorts
of details are lost to view. Those are to me the details trgat make
the city special and different from other cities.

Again, yes and no. I can think of many Italian cities that prohibit
large coach buses from driving into the centro; independent travelers
and tour participants alike walk between destinations. Florence,
Arezzo, Assisi, Spoleto quickly come to mind as cities/towns that
prohibit motor coaches from driving in the city.


I agree again, but also note again that I was thinking of Rome, Florence,
and Naples.


5. You typically are given at least some meals, and those are almost
invariably set meals at large tourist restaurants. The food you get
isn't typical of where you are, but is designed to be as innofensive
as possible to tourists. That's not the eating expeience I want when
I travel.

Now, that's a valid criticism of group tours. Still, there are
work-around strategies even with group tours. When we went to China
with a university group tour, we deliberately selected a trip that
offered the fewest group dinners.


Reminds me of a story:

When we began our tour in China, our guide told us that about 1/3 of our
meals would be American, the rest Chinese. I politely told him that I didn't
want to have any American meals in China, and that whenever such a meal was
scheduled, we planned, at our own expense, eat our dinner in a local Chinese
restaurant. He got very upset, told us he was responsible for us, we might
get sick, lost, etc.and we should never do that. Rather than cause an
international incident, I agreed.

One evening, we returned to our hotel late. We were scheduled to have an
American dinner at the hotel, and I told the guide that we were tired and
would skip dinner and go to bed early. I lied. We went to the Chinese
restaurant in the hotel, but made the mistake of telling someone else on the
tour what we were doing. As we were seated in the restaurant eating our
dinner, I saw our guide enter on the other side and have a long conversation
with the restaurant manager. He then walked over to our table and said "I
thought you were tired." Laughing, I explained that we really wanted a
Chinese dinner. He then told us that he had just negotiated with the manager
for them not to charge us for dinner, since we weren't having the other
(probably more expensive) dinner. It was extremely nice of him, and wasn't
at all expected. I was fully prepared to pay for the meal.

He was an excellent guide, by the way. Although there many things we didn't
like about the tour, we both liked him very much.


I would personally greatly prefer what you do to a overall package
tour that provides transportantion, lodging, meals, etc., but I
still have never found the need of one.

Please don't misinterpret what I've written; I'm not a staunch
defender of group tours. I'm only saying that the model that most RTE
posters use as justification for rejecting a group tour tends to be
the least defensible variety.


I think I misunderstood you at first, but I understand much better now. I
don't think we're all that far apart in our views. We've had different
experiences because we haven't traveled with the same groups, and because
we're different people.And everyone has different likes and dislikes, not to
say needs. I hope that others reading our interchange (and Barbara's
additions) will benefit from the discussion and use it to help choose what's
best for them

--
Ken Blake
Please reply to the newsgroup


.

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