Trips
Trips, a boutique tour operator that specializes in trips for bank groups, has been including interactive experiences on its itineraries since before the practice became trendy. So its recent changes have focused less on attraction visits and more on tweaking core elements of a trip — dining, scheduling and transportation — to optimize them for today’s travelers.
“People are looking for a little bit more freedom,” said Trips president Brian Doughty. “Instead of having a dinner included every night on a tour, we’re trying not to have them included every night, especially in places where there’s a wide variety of easy, comfortable places for people to choose.
“It’s not a cost issue — people want the experience of going off and eating by themselves. If we want to try to keep people traveling in groups, that’s a big thing going forward.”
The free-time approach to dining works especially well in cities worldwide that are walkable, safe and known for great food. It is also becoming increasingly popular on cruise ships, where the tradition of eating in the main dining room in an assigned seat at an assigned time has given way to a much more diverse set of dining options.
“We include one to three of the cover charges at the alternative restaurants so they don’t have to pay for it once they get there,” Doughty said. “They’re going to the Brazilian steakhouse or the Italian restaurant and don’t have to pay the cover, and they’ll have an experience they never would have had if it had been left up to them.”
Trips has also begun applying the same principles to its itinerary scheduling, offering free time and transportation in some of its destinations.
“On our Italy trips, we’ll sometimes stay six nights in one location and sightsee in different places,” Doughty said. “One of those days we’ll leave completely free and make a motorcoach available for transfers. So if they want to go to Florence, they can use the motorcoach to get there.”
Globus
As a large-scale international tour operator, Globus has been taking travelers to favorite destinations such as Italy or the British Isles for decades, and its standard tours in those places run like well-oiled machines. But after seeing the need for products that would appeal to people interested in visiting these places for a second or third time, they recently launched new tour itineraries that present favorite destinations in new ways.
“We have created two new tours in Italy: the Italian Vista and the Italian Sampler,” said Jen Halboth, Globus’ director of channel marketing. “They are totally new for us. You still fly into Rome and see Venice, but you’re also staying in some secondary cities. You can overnight in Padua, the Chianti Hills or the Verona area.
“We’re able to keep the per diem cost down because you’re not spending every night in Rome or Florence. They have been two of the most successful tour launches that we’ve had in a long time.”
Another new tour, From the Shannon to the Thames, takes the same approach to the British Isles. The tour includes an overnight in the town of Bristol, “a 13th-century picture-book village,” according to Halboth, as well as dinner at a local pub.
The emphasis on local experiences that go beyond tried-and-true tour attractions has begun to show up in other Globus tours, as well. Some itineraries in Germany, for example, include overnight stays at a family-owned hotel in the Black Forest or visits to the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. Groups can visit Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory while in Krakow, Poland, or stay at a first-class ski resort in Gstaad during tours of Switzerland.
“We want to give people a couple of moments like that to remember,” Halboth said. “When we talk to group leaders, we explain that getting into that hotel or having dinner at a Sicilian farmhouse is something that would be hard to do for your clients by yourself.”
