Looking for a unique way to bond with your friends? Have you ever considered joining a group tour for all the benefits of traveling with friends and none of the challenges of traveling with them!
Chances are you’ve done a trip with friends before. On the other hand, perhaps it has been a while (who else remembers those amazing trips with friends in your early 20s), and perhaps you have become a bit more set in your ways and more particular about what it is that you want from a vacation.
Traveling with friends is really a way to take a friendship to the next level, but it is not without its pitfalls. Traveling with friends on a group tour basically takes all these problems away.
Let’s dig deeper into how group travel can be the perfect way to travel with friends. All of the benefits with none of the challenges.
Someone else is the bad guy
When you are traveling on a group tour, there will be some sort of guide or tour leader accompanying you and the group. When traveling with a friend, there can be a conflict about what time to leave. Perhaps one friend likes to sleep in on holiday, and the other likes to get out and about early. When you have a tour guide or tour leader, there is an agenda and a timetable, and this needs to be stuck to. They are going to have to be the ones to tell everybody that they need to be ready to leave the hotel at 8 am packed up, breakfasted, and all ready to go for a long travel day and not you!
No money conflicts
On group trips, most (if not all) of the costs are covered. In the case of World Vegan Travel trips, everything is covered (apart from flights to the destination, insurance, and souvenirs).
Once you are on the trip, you can be sure that there will not be any uncomfortable conversations about the cost of the activities you do, restaurants you eat at, or hotels you stay at because it was all paid for months ago.
No accounting skills needed
We always highly recommend that you set up some sort of system ahead of time to take care of this if you are traveling with friends. Outside of North America, splitting bills can be difficult, and many restaurants will refuse to do it. For this reason, someone needs to pay the bill. These costs can escalate, and unless they are properly noted, one person might become more and more resentful each time a bill is paid.
When we travel with friends, we usually nominate someone to be in charge of finance. They pay bills and keep travel of everything and how they should be split, and then at the end of the holiday, they work out who owes who what in which currency. This system works, but it is not a lot of fun. Going on a group tour eliminates all that.
There are other people to speak to
When was the last time you spent time with your dearest friend 24 / 7? Probably a while ago, and perhaps never! When you travel independently, you are highly unlikely to chat much with other people because you don’t actually know anyone else (unless you are a social butterfly and love getting out there and meeting new people).
When you are traveling on a group tour, there will be lots of other people to sit with on buses, have aperitivo with, eat dinner with and share experiences with. This means you can have a break from your friend and get to know other people (and they can with you too), and if you are an introvert and need to have a time out, you can because you won’t be leaving your friend to have drinks by herself.
None of the travel stress
Chances are all will be fine with your friend if everything goes really well and nothing stressful happens, but let’s face it. Travel CAN be stressful. Can’t find the way to the hotel? Someone forgot to download the travel vouchers, and you don’t have wifi to check-in? When you travel in a group, there are people who take the burden of this stress away from you, so all you need to do is sit back and enjoy the ride.
So, what was your experience? Did you travel on a group tour with a friend? How was it for you? Let us know in the comments.
Group travel is for you if you want all the benefits of traveling with others or traveling alone with hardly any of the disadvantages. If you’re vegan or vegan-curious, like to travel in style and be spoiled, then you should definitely consider traveling with World Vegan Travel!
