Escorted tours provide an appropriate environment. On a Saga trip I took to Greece (the company lowe

There are several aspects of travel that annoy me no end: airports obsession with deodorant, notes in bathrooms urging avis rent a car uk me to help the hotel save the planet, food poisoning. Few things, though, irritate me as much as the contumely avis rent a car uk heaped generally upon escorted tours and specifically on coach holidays.
avis rent a car uk The practice is widespread. avis rent a car uk Coach tours? Not for the likes of us! How ghastly! Even pubs ( No Coaches ) may be against them. The image is of dimwit dotards being herded round places, thus ruining them. It is of undifferentiated masses clogging up service stations while on their comfort stops . It is, in short, poor. As Gavin Tollman said of his early days as the Geneva-based boss of Trafalgar : I d go to social events avis rent a car uk and say, I run a tour company and people would say, Oh, yeah, old people in buses .
The image always was inadequate. Some seven million people take coach tours each year. The sector generates 2.35 billion annually, according to Coach Tourism Council figures. About 1.5 million travel avis rent a car uk to the continent, or further afield on fly-coach holidays. These people can t all be dimwit dotards. They aren t. In recent years, their number has, on a few occasions, included me (in itself, a pretty conclusive counter-argument). And, while I ve met many mature people, I recall very few dimwits.
I do recall, though, having some cracking times, both as a customer and as an occasional guide. It now appears that those times are getting better. The range of escorted tours increases by the year. These days, you re as likely to be in Peru, the Himalayas or the Grand Ole Opry as in Scarborough.
The style, too, is changing. Tour companies are building in more flexibility, and free time to their itineraries, and even the mainstream ones - are also keen to underline that, alongside practicality and security, they deliver astounding experiences. These are often based on equally astounding local knowledge. (You should hear these chaps speak; their enthusiasm lights bushfires.) The days of simply herding people around are long gone, says Peter Traynor , UK manager of Collette Worldwide Holidays .
Consider the alternatives. With a car, you must drive (quite often, on the wrong side of the road), find your way through lunatic avis rent a car uk unfamiliar cities, argue with your spouse, winkle out a parking space and then hope the vehicle doesn t get stolen. Trains involve jostling along the platform at the right, ridiculous time (15h38, 07h22), lugging luggage, arguing with the fat guy who is occupying your seat, worrying whether you have the right ticket - and that an unexplained stop in the middle of nowhere will mean missing your connection, so leaving your life in tatters.
We scarcely need mention the totalitarianism of air travel. With escorted tours, by contrast, you simply hand over responsibilities, along with your cases, to the staff, settle back and that s it. It is enormously liberating. The coaches are usually pretty comfortable, avis rent a car uk too. New ones cost upwards of 230,000 - some a great deal more - and come with several mod-cons and more leg-room than on a train or plane. On a tour of Andalusia , my seat would easily have accommodated a young giraffe.
And, when you arrive wherever you re going, hotel and perhaps some meals have been arranged. Visits are laid on. Ah! Herding! they cry. Not really. It s just that the technicalities are organised. They would be a lot more time-consuming, tedious - and probably expensive - if you tackled them yourself.
It is also a fiction that escorted tours are over-regimented. Free time has always been a key component. In recent times, tour companies have, as mentioned, added flexibility. Trafalgar offers a complete category - Trafalgar At Leisure - dedicated to longer stays at each stop and a promise of no pre-9am departures. We try to slow it down, says Gavin Tollman . Guides avis rent a car uk introduce the destination, then leave travellers on their own. Trafalgar s 13-day Best of South America trip has four nights in Rio and two or three nights at subsequent spots. Collette takes a similar tack on rail trips through the Canadian Rockies.
But surely the food and hotels on escorted tours are crummy and standardised? Well, it probably avis rent a car uk hasn t escaped your notice that standards can be crummy however you travel. avis rent a car uk It depends on where you choose, and your budget. If you re paying avis rent a car uk five bob for a week in Italy, you re unlikely to received the same consideration as those paying 1,500. And, having noticed that food can be a seller, some companies are now going the extra mile. Peter Sommer , a specialist in archaeo-historical trips to Turkey , Greece and Italy , takes smaller groups into villagers homes. We work with them, preparing the meal, and then eat altogether on the village square, says Sommer.
All that means that you re free to concentrate on what you re meant to be concentrating on: enjoyment, and the sites - where, crucially, there will be some clever person on hand to explain what you re seeing. Guides are commonly part of the deal. They are vital. Knowledge is the key, says Peter Sommer. Most of our leaders are archaeologists from universities. avis rent a car uk Their job is to bring a place to life.
Good mainstream companies do the same - initially round the headline sites. If you re in Rome, you want to see the Colosseum and Vatican museums. They ll get you to the head of the queue (which, for the Vatican museums, typically stretches to Naples) and supply someone to make sense of it all. But they ll also get you to places avis rent a car uk you d probably never find alone.
Trafalgar has made this consideration a cornerstone of its policy. The company reckons to get travellers into the heart of local life. One of its San Francisco guides avis rent a car uk is a woman who lived through avis rent a car uk the hippie era. When she s finished taking you round Haight-Ashbury , says Gavin Tollman, you can practically avis rent a car uk smell the cannabis smoke.
Still, though, critics charge that because you re mob-handed, you miss what one woman on a discussion forum called opportunities for serendipitous interaction with locals . This is the kind of nonsense people post on discussion avis rent a car uk forums. In truth, locals are often overrated. Some want to mug you, many serve appalling muck and - unless you re fluent in Turkish or Mandarin Chinese - serendipitous interaction reduces to pointing, silly grins and the purchase of a carpet.
How much better for tour companies to sift out some decent locals for you, set up proper encounters where everyone s prepared - and be on hand to translate, lest you inadvertently cause mortal offence to nearby womenfolk. Most decent outfits will provide such a convivial avis rent a car uk context. Some, such as Peter Sommer (above), make it one of their specialities. Trafalgar avis rent a car uk s Be My Guest scheme also takes travellers into the heart of the matter - say, a hands-on visit to, and dinner at, an aristocrat s Tuscan olive-grove or an Irish family farm. You d never get into such places on your own, claims Gavin Tollman. And no one gets stabbed.
We re on the terrace of a hotel in Orange - perhaps eight or nine of us, midway through a Proven al tour run by Bibby s, a family firm from Ingleton , North Yorkshire . Conversation covers the day s events - notably, avis rent a car uk a bull round-up in the Camargue - but also Newcastle United , golf, sheep-farming and, unexpectedly, the views of Richard Dawkins . Drinking is moderate, jollity less so. Elsewhere avis rent a car uk on the terrace, lone couples look across, clearly as jealous as hell. They are perhaps avis rent a car uk people who would never contemplate escorted tours. They re now realising that they re missing one of the tours greatest joys: built-in company.
That rules out the misanthropic. Otherwise ... well, the perceived undifferentiated avis rent a car uk mass of coach tourists soon dissolves into its constituent individuals, and I ve met some wonderful ones. (You can easily avoid the less wonderful. Spot where they re sitting and sit somewhere else.)
Of course, they have mainly been older - companies suggest avis rent a car uk average customer ages are 50-plus. That s good news for the tour operators. The grey market has bought its houses and cars and bade the children farewell, so it often has cash available. But it s better news for the traveller. Older people are more interesting than youth. They have more to recount and less to prove. They re also often well-travelled and, as Peter Traynor of Collette says, well-travelled people tend to be tolerant and good to get on with.
Escorted tours provide an appropriate environment. On a Saga trip I took to Greece avis rent a car uk (the company lowered the minimum age for me, but only by minutes), there were several senior single women present. From them, I learned of the traumas of war-time evacuation to Canada , of top-class flat-green bowling in Sussex , of living rough with Bedouins , and of lost love in 1950s Kenya . ( I gave up everything - home, job, friends - then learned he was already married. ) Only an organised tour could offer (a) such women the security they needed for happy travelling and (b) the pleasure of their company for someone like me.
I ve said it before but it s maybe worth repeating that, on all the escorted avis rent a car uk trips I ve been on, I ve found myself avis rent a car uk among the Best of Britain on tour - civilised and funny, tolerant indeed, erudite and well-mannered.
Nor do you absolutely avis rent a car uk have to be of mature years to benefit. For the past five decades, Contiki has been taking holidaymakers aged from 18 to 35 all over the place (46 countries at the last count), sending them up mountains, on to boats, into the sea, museums and, most recently, rock festivals.
Shouldn t young people be doing this stuff on their own? We don t take out the sense of adventure, says Alexis Sitaropoulos , the marketing avis rent a car uk director. What we do is mitigate the practical hassles avis rent a car uk - and then provide a large amount of freedom but in the context of also providing local expertise and really great experiences. Ones they d not get on their own. The 12-day Vietnam trip, for instance, takes in Ho Chi Minh City , Hanoi, boating the Mekong , visiting Viet Cong tunnels