`For all its drawbacks,” my brother-in-law said as we boarded a waiting bus at the airport in Catania, Sicily, “group travel sure cuts down on the stress of arrival.”
Indeed it did. Once the 43 of us, woozy and stiff, got our bags off the luggage belt after a short connecting flight from Rome, we walked into the Sicilian sunlight with no formalities and no need to find a cab, negotiate a fare, fit in the luggage or describe where we were going. Our chipper tour guide, Rose Rizza, found us and just swept us along.
As we knew from previous experiences, there would be times ahead when lock-step arrangements would really chafe. But we knew that the price we were paying — $200 or so a person a day for air fare, hotel, food, transportation, admission and a guide — would be unmatchable on our own. And in this case, the composition of our group — mainly college students from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, their journalism teachers and friends — made it possible to modify the tour as we went along.
This recent experience — a week in Sicily as a member of a tour group, then a week in mainland Italy as one of four family members traveling independently and coping on our own with such obstacles as canceled trains — provided insight into the pluses and minuses of going with a tour, and ideas on how to put some independence into group travel.
A key to the modification of our Sicily itinerary was the “stop the bus pass” — permissions given one apiece to the 20 students on the trip. Stops for great views, coffee or picture-taking could be, and often were, made. Those of us not granted such passes still could bend them to our own purposes: On one stop to photograph the snows of Mt. Etna, two of us seized the chance to loosen our legs by walking up the road until the bus caught up with us.
The most entertaining invocation came as the bus sped past farm buildings in the rural interior on our way to Piazza Armerina. “Sheep! Sheep!” came outcries from a dozen students or more. “Sheep — stop the bus!” The driver, who spoke only Sicilian, got the word from Rizza and eased onto the shoulder. The students, their cameras and lenses bouncing, swarmed out to mix with the clanking herd, stimulated by a student whose project for the course was Sicilian agriculture. In this case, running with the sheep was definitely the opposite of the herd instinct; it took our tour out of the predictable.
The stop-the-bus concept was a creation of the tour organizers, Prof. Norm Sims and Rick Newton, an adjunct professor of journalism, who were leading the field trip. They explained that the privilege could not be used if it compromised safety or a schedule, but it was otherwise pretty liberally interpreted.
When I interviewed Rizza later, she said the idea was not infinitely adaptable. Rizza, who grew up in Plainville, Conn., but attended the University of Catania and remained in Sicily, said that 85 percent of her clients were of “the third generation” — over 60 years old.
“They want to know the itinerary a week in advance,” she said, “and they do not like change. It drives them batty.”
It is an open question how much a tour, even one with education at its core, can be adapted if the group is not a unit before the trip, or perhaps does not even share a common interest. Chase P. Vokrot, vice president for marketing of Academic Travel Abroad, said her tours hewed closely to what was offered in the catalogs. Her organization, in Washington, arranges tours for groups such as Harvard alumni and Smithsonian Associates, with the itinerary set 18 months in advance.
Vokrot said her organization provides guidelines to local tour leaders that emphasize the needs of the group over those of one traveler who might, for example, want to photograph sheep. “Do not eliminate advertised sights unless there is absolutely no choice,” the guidelines say.
Crucially, they add: “Voting puts travelers on the spot and always results in `winners’ and `losers.’ Make a decision with all the staff based on your collective knowledge of the alternative and present the decision to the group.”
Smithsonian Associates dispatches 350 tours a year, domestic and foreign, most of them bus-sized, as ours was, with fewer than 50 participants. Amy Kotkin, the program manager, said that although itinerary changes are not a good idea, events not advertised — “lagniappes,” in Kotkin’s word — can be, if the opportunity presents itself. Sometimes, when a popular professor is a tour organizer, he or she can get access to artists’ studios if the timing is right.
Vokrot said that leaders’ discussions after a tour about favorites and unpopular events often led to adaptations in the tour for the following year.
Reading the group, Rizza said, is a big part of being a tour guide, and of course is a key factor in the success of a tour. She read us with acuity and made changes accordingly: a trip to an outdoor market in Catania, for example, replaced a boat ride to view papyrus.
For lunch after a winery tour, the scheduled stop was discarded as too expensive and Rizza chose an inn on a virtually trackless farm where she and her friends repair to relax. It was known as Casa Delle More, although I did not see a sign. “I wouldn’t take most groups there,” she said. “I’m selfish and want it for myself.” The meal was a delight, and a high point of the trip.
Many aspects of group tours are tied to the question of price. Our Sicily trip was pretty much rock-bottom: $1,635 for the students; $1,585, or about $200 a night, for the rest of us, including air fare, eight hotel nights, all admissions and two meals a day. We stayed in one hotel, the Ariston in Taormina, and all breakfasts and all but one dinner were served buffet-style in the hotel dining room. Like many on tours, a number of the adults fled on foot to downtown Taormina a couple of times and paid for a meal at one of the easygoing small trattorias — an essential break.
Kotkin said that Smithsonian tours cover a range of prices, $345 a day for 15 days in China, for example, or $430 a day for 12 days in Spain, air fare included in both.
One thing could not be modified: the morning departure. The call was 7:30 a.m., 8 or 8:30 aboard the bus, sometimes with students staggering aboard with clothing in one hand and breakfast in the other. This sort of thing requires organizing the night before, even for an early riser like me, but it is an unalterable penalty of group travel. The compensation was having a professional driver handle mountainside roads with which he was familiar, and being able to drink wine at lunch or dinner.
On the Alitalia departure line at the crowded airport in Rome, we met a couple in their 60s who had just completed a trip with Grand Circle, a Boston tour company that serves people over 50. The couple, Nancy and Roy B. Wolfe of Dallas, had taken a trip roughly parallel to ours: 15 days of bus travel around Italy as part of a group of 42, with a four-day “extension” in Rome, where they made their own schedule.
It was Nancy Wolfe’s fourth trip with the company, Roy Wolfe’s third. They enjoyed both parts of the trip, saying all their local guides were “excellent.”
The Grand Circle itinerary was strictly adhered to, they said; on two free days, the Wolfes took extra-cost day trips. The basic price for their 15 days was $1,995, including air fare from the East Coast, or $133 a day — well below ours. The longer the trip, the more days to amortize the air fare is the usual rule.
One problem that comes up with many of her adult group tours, according to Rizza, is that by the third day clients do not show up for the day’s bus trip, but go shopping instead. Bus tours often conflict with shop hours. Many tours get around this problem by “scheduling” shopping.
Academic Travel Abroad and Smithsonian do not schedule shopping, focusing on education and culture, but always leave half a day “at leisure” that solves the problem.
Looking back on a busy and occasionally stressful 17 days, we would be game to take another tour with a group of mixed ages. The students kept us entertained, amazed and on our toes, although we sometimes had to fight off anxious-parent behavior.
Watching Sebastiani, the bus driver, defeat two students at once in a knock-hockey game at the canteen at the Gola di Alcantara was a priceless moment. And our experience with all-senior-citizen groups has been that sometimes the conversation sounds like the gossip in a clinic waiting room.
But it is clear from the “extensions” offered by operators that travelers tolerate the demands created by a group, young or old, better when they know they can decompress afterward on their own. And, for the third generation, having someone to drive and to haul luggage up the stairs is a crucial plus.
