Eating is one of the most essential activities in life, and on their trips, travelers spend more time dining than doing anything else save for sleeping. So why do so many meals on group tours feel like an afterthought?
The traditional group tour template leaves little room for extraordinary dining experiences. Eager to save money, time or effort, many travel planners have opted for meal stops that are limited, predictable, quick and ultimately forgettable. Because they’re trying to please a variety of palates, the restaurants serving group meals often opt for a handful of menu selections that are “safe” but also boring. Groups eat quickly and then continue on their way, with little attention paid to the quality of the dining experience.
In the new age of tourism, this paradigm has to change. The ascendency of culinary arts in popular culture, coupled with the growing farm-to-table and sustainable food movements, has raised the expectations of the American consumer. Travelers want to experience the places they visit through the local food. They want mealtimes to be travel events, not utility stops. They want excitement, flavor and flair. And the typical group tour meal delivers none of these things.
Fortunately, change is on the horizon. Leading tour operators have already begun rethinking the way they handle meals to deliver experiences that today’s travelers crave. And the possibilities for creativity in dining are nearly endless.
Here are 15 great ideas for energizing your group dining. You don’t have to use them all; incorporating even a few of these concepts will help make your trips more exciting and memorable.
1. Ditch the buffet
If there is one cardinal rule for fixing your dining program, it’s this: Stop taking your groups to buffet restaurants.
It’s easy to understand the appeal of buffets: They allow you to feed travelers quickly and to offer a variety of dishes, all at an attractive price. But there are a number of problems with buffets. First and foremost is the fact that mass-produced buffet food usually isn’t very good. It almost never tastes as fresh and flavorful as a well-crafted, made-to-order restaurant dish.
Also problematic is the fact that buffets require your travelers to spend much of the meal waiting in lines and serving their own food, instead of relaxing, socializing and taking in the ambiance of the restaurant.
One notable exception is breakfast, where buffets often work very well. But for lunch and dinner, it’s smarter to avoid buffets unless you have no other option.
2. Offer the full menu
There are few things as frustrating as sitting down in an exciting restaurant only to be handed a special group menu with three options on it, usually beef, chicken or fish. Even more absurd is the practice of asking travelers to choose their entree for Wednesday evening on the bus on Monday afternoon. Nobody eats this way when they travel on their own; why would they want to be so limited when they travel with you?
Granted, limited menus and preselected entrees can keep costs down and enable restaurant kitchens to get food out to groups quickly. But travelers tire of these restrictions and long to explore the more interesting items on restaurant menus. Creative tour operators find ways to allow their travelers to have the full run of a restaurant’s offerings. It costs a bit more and takes a bit longer, but travelers love it.
3. Sit in the main dining room
Whenever I talk to group leaders about dining, they invariably tell me the same thing: Their travelers don’t like being relegated to the back room at a restaurant. They want to sit in the main dining room with everyone else.
A restaurant’s decor, ambiance and energy contribute significantly to the dining experience, and the private rooms that groups use for meals often lack all of these. It may take more logistical planning — you may have to split your group up at different tables or in various sections of the dining room — but sitting with everyone else in the restaurant makes mealtime more fun.
