The Best Websites for Booking Tours

Amateur Traveler trip to Cambodia – Angkor Wat

My wife and I are big fans of independent travel. We like to figure out how to navigate the local subway system, how to get around, and how to order food. It is challenging, but sometimes, the challenge is part of the fun. A tour is easier, and sometimes, easier is just what we need.

I am more likely to take a tour:

• When it is my first time in a country
• When I don’t understand the language
• When there are safety issues
• When my wife won’t come with me, and I don’t feel like traveling alone

A tour can be all-inclusive, everything is done for you, a day tour or a tour with free time on your own. Here are some websites to help you find one for you:

Tour Search Engines

TourRadar – I expect there will be more tour search engines in the future, but TourRadar is how I found a tour to the Balkans, for instance. It allows you to search across multiple small tour providers, including local companies you might not otherwise discover.

Bus Tours

One of the least expensive tours is the 40-person bus tour. This is not my favorite tour as you can only stop in restaurants that can hold 40 people and you tend to spend a lot of time looking at life through a bus window.

Globus – Globus provides escorted tours to over 70 countries on six continents. It also offers religious and family tours. It has several brands, including Globus, Cosmos, Monogram (independent travel), and Avalon Cruises (River Cruises).

Cosmos – The Amateur Traveler trip to Egypt was a Cosmos tout. Cosmos is the budget brand for Globus.

Small-Group Tours

I strongly prefer small group tours to bus tours. These usually max out at 14-16 people. You can do a tour just for your family if you don’t want to be in a group of strangers. These tours use smaller vans or sometimes local transportation and can be a great stepping stone when you aren’t quite ready for independent travel to a particular country.

G Adventures—I took my first G trip last year and loved it. I have also talked to a number of guests who have had great experiences with them. The brand is very similar to Intrepid; sometimes, the local guides will work for both. They are the company I check first for small group tours.

Intrepid Travel—I have taken an Intrepid Travel trip in China, and we also used them for Amateur Traveler trips to Morocco, Cambodia, and India, with an upcoming trip planned for Africa. They are a low-cost, connect-with-the-culture option. I am a big fan of their great guides.

Adventure Travel

O.A.R.S. – Oars specializes in multi-day rafting trips. On Amateur Traveler, I interviewed their late great founder about rafting the Grand Canyon, and I personally took their Gates of Lahore trip to Dinosaur National Monument. I highly recommend them.

Day Tours

Context Travel advertises as “private guides and (very) small group tours for the intellectually curious traveler.” They are not the cheapest day trips, but I love the ones I have taken, including a couple of recent walking tours in Berlin (24 Hours in Berlin, Germany).

Urban Adventures is the day tour brand for Intrepid Travel. If you book an extra extension for an Intrepid trip, you are using Urban Adventures, but you can also add a day trip or two to your independent trip.

Viator – I have enjoyed the various day tours that Viator offers, including a layover trip to Taiwan (Layover Tour in Taipei, Taiwan – Get Out of the Airport on Long Layovers) and a local food tour (San Francisco North Beach Food Tour – Viator My City).

Shoretips.com – A good alternative for cruise travelers to find shore trips independently of their cruise line. You can search by your particular cruise itinerary.

Make Your Own Tours

JayWay Travels – I have had JayWay as a sponsor on the show. While they don’t do guided tours per se, they can help set up something very much like that for your group or family. We used them to plan a trip to Bosnia and Croatia, where they booked all the hotels, arranged transportation, and provided a number of guided walking tours of cities like Sarajevo, Split, and Dubrovnik. If you want the ease of a tour but are not looking to hang out with strangers, then a company like Jay Way can be a good alternative.

Your Turn

There are a great many more tour companies than this. Which ones would you recommend? Which ones would you avoid?