Rating foreign tour companies that customize tours

In ITN, I especially enjoy reading travelers’ write-ups about countries on the list of places my husband, Juergen, and I want to visit. For those countries, in addition to the travelers’ experiences, I am especially interested in the tour companies used and the costs, as we like to take customized private tours.

For example, Carol Probst’s article “Albania – Enjoying Europe Without the Costs and Crowds” (Dec. ’12, pg. 36) made our planning for a May 2013 trip to Albania very easy. We emailed the Probsts’ guide, Enea Kumi, and told him we wanted just what the Probsts had requested but for twice as long and with more activity. 

He replied with a 15-day itinerary that was perfect! We had the same great experience the Probsts had.

Juergen and I usually travel for about five weeks twice a year, visiting one or two destinations each time. Beforehand, I spend a great deal of time searching for tour companies in those countries. We really prefer to use companies local to the destinations, as we get to know the owners or representatives while shaping the tour, and they are more apt to know things to suggest and — best of all — to choose guides they think will match our interests.

We join group tours only when, due to politics or threats to tourists, we’re told we “must.” The tour groups we have joined have had only five or six travelers; in the last couple of years, those group tours were to Saudi Arabia and Algeria. 

We started using tours only after we retired and began traveling to more off-the-road countries. Small-group tours (12 members or fewer) were okay at first, but around 10 years ago it began to be that about 30% of the members of each group were physically unable to do much in the way of activity. It had little to do with age. Many 80-year-olds were able to keep up with the program while many in their 50s sat things out. 

We then looked into private tours, but US tour companies have usually been too expensive for us. 

We started having wonderful luck after finding foreign companies because, along with designing tours around our desired places, they would schedule a lot of activity for us — more walking and climbing — and they recommended towns, temples, monasteries and museums that we hadn’t seen mentioned in the US tour brochures we’d looked at first. 

Sometimes, after a tour was over, we had memorable get-togethers with the people we had worked with to develop our tour.

I know that many subscribers to ITN have had experiences with local tour companies overseas, companies that we would love to know about. Maybe, as we had, they never got around to writing to ITN about them. If only they’d share*.

I would like travelers to write in about tour companies AND local guides (local to places in other countries). I’m hoping they will describe their experiences — old and new — and state as many of the following details as possible:

• The name and contact information of the company or local guide (where they’re located plus phone, email address and/or URL).

• Rating — 1 = poor, 5 = passable, 10 = great. (Poor ratings from travelers are as important as great ones when considering companies found on the Internet.)

• An explanation of the rating (because sometimes a reason that is negative to one traveler is positive to others).

• The itinerary used.

• When the tour took place (month/year or just year).

• Length of tour (number of days/nights or what fraction of a day).

• Approximate cost of the tour, and what was included.

Note: ratings also are important even if detailed date and cost information is unavailable. Just having that reference would be a huge help.

• Any special or noteworthy experiences of the trip, both positive and negative, so we can learn from them and use them in planning the trip.

In general, the goal here is to develop a list of tour companies in foreign countries.

Juergen and I started our May ’13 trip with seven days on Malta, then continued to Albania with the tour described above. Before leaving the States, I couldn’t find a local tour company on Malta, so I resorted to ToursByLocals (1112 West Pender St., Ste. 600, Vancouver, BC, V6E 2S1, Canada; phone 604/777-4141 or, in No. Am., 866/844-6783, www.toursbylocals.com).

Out of the many guides listed we chose Victoria Bezzini, and she designed four days of touring for us in Malta. We wished to see most of the temples, which she said was not typical of visitors. 

ToursByLocals.com is a marketplace for customizable private tours and shore excursions in many areas of the world and connects travelers with local tour guides. For each location, there is a list of guides with their bios, photos and the tours they offer plus their prices. It seems that only day or part-of-day tours are offered.

I like that the price is per tour, not per person. Each guide has a different upper limit of tour members (some four and some eight, for example).

Reviews by their customers are presented. I saw where one traveler complained that a guide had been late. ToursByLocals replied to that review by saying that they talked to the guide and told him his behavior was unacceptable. So it seems both sides are represented. 

Travelers’ contacts with the guides must be through ToursByLocals, so the company tracks the activity, including the itinerary customization. When a guide and traveler agree on a price and itinerary, then ToursByLocals does all the money transfers and final arrangements, which is very convenient. All prices are in US dollars.

For our Malta tour, Tours By Locals charged us $1,526, which covered Victoria and a car and driver, nothing else. Victoria was great and made our experience in Malta very special.

More recently, while planning a 5½-week trip which started in Chile, we selected someone through ToursByLocals for three days’ touring in Santiago. 

In both the Malta and Santiago listings, the ToursByLocals guides presented “fixed” tours, but some of them claimed to be “flexible” and Victoria surely was. Our tour with her was very different from her canned tours, some of which are tours she designed for cruise passengers. 

Our first impression is that ToursByLocals is a more expensive way to go, but when you’re only a few days in a country, it works.

We are rarely in a country for only a few days, but we’d like to use ToursByLocals again whenever we are, especially if we can get recommendations from ITN readers on the guides they’ve used. There are quite a few to choose from at each location and they all are very different, which is good, but ITNers’ references would be great to help in the selecting.

And we’d still like ITNers’ recommendations for foreign guides and foreign tour companies for long tours.

YVONNE RICHTER

San Diego, CA

*Independent travelers, send in your appraisals of any foreign tour companies or tour guides with whom you took private tours. Write to Rating Foreign Tour Companies That Customize Tours, c/o ITN, 2116 28th St., Sacramento, CA 95818, or email editor@intltravel news.com.

Include the name and contact information of the company or local guide; your rating from 1 (poor) to 10 (great) and why; the itinerary; month/year; length of tour; tour cost and what was included, and special experiences good or bad. 

Responses will be forwarded to Yvonne and shared with ITN readers.