There are a few people out there who will recoil in horror at this. Group tours? For solo travel? No, the two things are so contrary that you can’t possibly put them together! That’s cheating!
It’s not. Group tours are a great solo travel option. They’re especially great for beginners but they remain great throughout. Broadly, you travel solo to your destination, then you meet up with your group, have your adventure, make friends and then you all go your separate ways at the end. You’re still solo – you’re still travelling alone, without anyone you know, but the nature of the group tour is that it provides someone in charge who knows what they’re doing, safety in numbers, the opportunity to meet new people and to do something you couldn’t or wouldn’t on your own.
I’m going to do a group tour to Egypt at some point. I did the Laugavegur Trail in 2018 as a group tour. I couldn’t have carried my own stuff for four days and I’d have died in the snowstorm on my first day if I’d done it solo. Other people could, and do, happily do that trail alone and unsupported and might even do it in two or three days instead of four. Other people might do a group tour to just see the touristy highlights of Iceland. Other people might backpack around Egypt completely alone. What you want from a group tour really depends on you.
Until she got too frail to climb the high steep steps of a coach, my widowed grandmother went on coach holidays. Solo travel, in her way. She’d often go with Jean or Eve or the bowls club or TG but equally often she’d go on her own. You know what old ladies are like – you sit down next to someone on the coach or in the cafe and you just start talking to them like you’ve always known them. Honestly, if a lady of 88 years and less than five feet can do a solo group tour, you’ve got nothing to be afraid of. And you’ll probably be carrying a lot less luggage than her.
Yeah, group tours can be good. I have a habit of saying “That’s really expensive! I can do it for half that price!” but what you’re paying for is the expert leader, having the planning and organising done for you, inconveniences smoothed away without even seeing them, and that group of peers. You’ll get a group discount on some activities, which you won’t see because you’ll be charged an all-in price, you’ll get special access, you’ll be taken to places you wouldn’t think of or wouldn’t find yourself.
Let’s look at this trip to Egypt I’m dithering over. I’d never find and book a night on a felucca. I’d do the Valley of the Kings but I’ve never heard of the Temple of Hatshepsut or the Colossi of Memnon. I might be brave enough to do the overnight train to Aswan on my own but probably not. I’d like to go to Egypt solo but I think it’s just a little too far beyond my comfort zone at the moment and for my first time, a group tour might suit me nicely.
There are lots of companies that run these sorts of tours. One of the big ones is G Adventures – I did the Laugavegur Trail with a company that’s now called Adventures.com but was at the time called Arctic Adventures and we had a G Adventures group an hour or two behind us. The guides all knew each other, because these things tend to be operated by local guides so they’d meet up in the evening once their groups were fed and settled. Intrepid Travel is another big one. You might find Trailfinders on your local high street. There’s Medsailors if you’re under 35 and specifically after a boat adventure in the Mediterranean or their big sister Yacht Getaways if you’re a bit older. There’s Saga if you’re over 50. Or you can google hundreds of other companies.
Group tours can vary from a nice gentle city break all the way to adrenaline-fuelled adventures via beach party holidays, sightseeing tours, culture-dominated tours, all sorts. Whatever kind of trip you’re after, there will be a company that does precisely the group tour for you somewhere.
If a group tour kind of sounds like it would work for you but the idea of an entire trip being surrounded by strangers is just too much, day tours are a thing. I make great use of day tours. I decide what I want to do and when – subject to the tours being available those days – and then I book. Someone comes along with a bus. They take me where I want to go, I do the thing, I meet people (and if I hate them, they’ll have vanished from my life by bedtime), we all have fun and then I go home alone to do whatever I want all over again the next day. That’s particularly good for adventures you can’t do on your own – snowmobiling, for example. Did you bring your own snowmobile with you? Do you know where’s good and safe to drive it? Day tour! When I was in Iceland in February, I didn’t hire a car but I wanted to go to Hvammsvik. I took my driving licence with me just in case. I could have hired a car. But getting in and out of Reykjavik, which is a big city by my countryside standards, would be stressful and the roads were snowy which would also be stressful and I’ve never yet found somewhere in a hired car to use to hold my phone while it’s directing me, so finding my way would be stressful. Plus, it would almost certainly be more expensive to hire a car for a day than to book a day tour. So a man picked me up in a six-seater mini-minibus, drove me to Hvammsvik with two other ladies and we had a lovely morning. On the other hand, if you make your own way, you get to decide how long you want to spend there.
That’s the downside of day tours. You’re on their schedule. I’ve never yet been on a Golden Circle day tour where I get anywhere near long enough at Geysir. But if you can’t hire a car or don’t want to, or you don’t know where you’re going, or what there is to see, if you want an expert to tell you all about it or you want someone to sit next to and talk to because you’ve been solo and haven’t spoken to another human being in a week, day tours are great!
And they’re not cheating. You’re no less solo because you’ve got friends at the end that you didn’t have at the beginning. And anyway, this isn’t the Solo Travel Olympics. There are no rules to stick to, no regulations to pass. What does it matter if you can’t, or don’t want to, technically call something “solo female travel”? Did you have the trip you wanted? Did you enjoy it? Did you cross something off your bucket list? Did you have a holiday? Have you got something to tell everyone about at work next week? Then you did it!