The Pros and Cons of Guided Tours

I recently chaperoned my brother's class trip to Washington D.C. and Williamsburg, VA. We rode a bus all the way to our nation's capital where we picked up a tour guide. She led us through our whirlwind four days and helped to make it as jam packed and educational as possible. While on this trip I learned many pros and cons of guided tours.

Pros:
More bang for your buck. With a guided tour, you are more likely to get group discounts. These discounts can either make your trip cheaper, or they can allow you to purchase extras. While touring Colonial Williamsburg, our cheaper group rate saved us enough to hire a special tour guide that led us through the buildings and told us the histories and bits of inside information. Without this addition, we simply would have been handed a map of the buildings at the entrance and told to proceed at our own peril. While we would have gotten to see more of the buildings, we wouldn't have known anything about them.

Another bonus with guided tours is that they have connections. While in D.C., there was a large protest march. It started by the Lincoln Memorial at the time appointed for us to tour the monuments along the Mall. Our guide was tipped off, and we went to the Smithsonian instead. Had we attempted to see the Memorial, we would have been stuck in traffic for three hours. As a result, we were able to rearrange our schedule, saving time and salvaging half a day.

A good tour guide knows short cuts. Traffic can be very heavy at certain times of the day, and a good tour guide will know little detours, keeping you right on schedule.

They know history. A good tour guide can not only tell you the history you came to hear, but they can also add bits of little known trivia to make it that much more personal. A good guide can even make the most boring of subjects entertaining.

You don't have to drive. Riding on a guided tour affords the tourist the ability to think only of the camera in hand and the next destination on the itinerary. You don't have to worry about directions, parking, gas, or a myriad of other little inconveniences.

Despite the many benefits, there are also inconveniences with guided tours.

You aren't on your own time. While in D.C., we were given an hour to tour all of the monuments along the Mall. That meant we could walk to the memorial, pause for a photo (without taking the time to focus the lens), and then continue to the next monument. Our schedule was so tight, we often didn't even have time for restroom breaks. I came home wishing that we'd had more time to enjoy the places we'd seen.

One bad apple spoils the whole bunch. Like them or not, you are stuck riding with the same people the whole way through. That annoying man that coughs in your ear every few minutes, will still be sitting behind you after lunch, except now his breath will smell of tuna fish.

You could get a bad tour guide. At times our tour guide would start to stammer, or she would digress from the subject at hand. Often, she'd get so far off track that we weren't able to get her to finish the story she started.

Guided tours aren't for everyone, so think about it before you decide on one. If you like to linger or if you have children, a guided tour might not be wise. However, if you want to get as much as possible out of your trip, they are definately the way to go.