I hope you have a wonderful trip with your family. I'm sure you all have a good time together or you wouldn't be planning this trip. However, you are not responsible for them having a good time. We like to share the things we love with the special people in our lives but sometimes they don't feel the same way about certain things as we do. So, you do the best you can in the end, if they don't like everything, just remember, it has nothing to do with you. I just love Paris...did I happen to say that I love Paris? My brother would just as soon never go back there. We were together, did the same things, ate the same places and all that. I don't know what it is..it just didn't do a thing for him. I have since disowned him and told him to mail me my Christmas present because he can't come to visit anymore Just don't stress and have a great trip.

crefloors - Love your sense of humor!

--sorry...hit Enter by mistake, before I was finished...

Diann,

I took the Italian Escapade tour, it was great, it went down to Sorrento, up to the Italian Lakes and Venice. And in Venice, we stayed IN Venice.

Most people who have never taken a tour, assume that with tours you stay away from the city, EDWARD2005 said that people who take tours are just lazy, that statement showed HIS IGNORANCE! If he had done some research, he would know that the higher end tours stay in the city. Also, he would know that most of the people on the tour had read tour books and knew about the places they wanted to see and as a result had picked the particular tour they had picked. Also, unlike what most people think, you have a lot of free time on tours AND you are not obligated to follow the tour if you don't want to, you are not all chained together.

KENDERINA,

The good thing about a tour is that you usually DON'T go at the same time as everybody else, at least it was my experience, maybe I had a great tour director. What I loved is that we did get going early and usually were in places before they were invaded with the independent travelers who had to figure out how to get to the site and where to find parking or how to get to the site from the train station. In some many locations, it was so great to be there when it was quiet and you could actually enjoy the place.

As I said, I don't know that I would do a tour again to Europe, but for people who have either never taken a tour, or taken a low end tour and to say that all tours are this or that, is one of my pet peeve. I'm sure not all tours are great, but neither are independent travelers' vacations.

I've done both tour and self-planned for Italy. I enjoyed my first trip (tour), but we did as another poster suggested and ate on our own instead of with the group. It was more economical for things like the gondola ride, and we did get to know some of the other travelers, which was nice. (On the other hand, we also got to know which ones would be consistently late returning from tours and therefore inconvenience the rest of us) A lot of our time was too "regimented" for our taste, but on the other hand we learned a lot from our tour guide that we could never learn on our own.
With the knowledge gained from my tour, I felt comfortable planning a return trip 2 years later, and now I'm returning this summer.
I also agree that it depends on your comfort level with the destination when you're making the decision whether to take a tour or not. If I were going to Japan or China, or some other place where I couldn't begin to fathom the language or local customs, I would definitely take a tour!

Although not Italy, just came back from a tour of Switzerland. Yes, there are things I didn't like, but a tour is not tailored to everybody's personal needs.

Some people hate to get out of bed before 9 am, some easily get up at 5 am. Some love to meet different people and be a part of a group, some like to walk off on their own.

I think this was my tour #6, 5 in USA, the last one - my first trip to Europe. Will I take another tour? Definitely yes. I can also understand people who hate tours. It's all individual.

Now, after being on a tour, I would not be afraid to go to Switzerland again, this time on my own, to spend more time in the places I liked, skip what I didn't like.

Before the tour I did my homework. Going on a tour you never know the exact schedule, so if you have a few hours here and there, you better have a map and a list of places to visit. Or to relax. Or to eat. I don't like tours with all meals included. Some culinary adventure needed!

The more you know before the tour, the more you'll enjoy it.

I did a tour 4 yrs ago and I just got back from going to Italy on our own. The differences are huge.

A lot of time on the tour consisted of driving from place to place with only a few hours in cities like Florence and Venice. We did stay 2 days in Rome & Paris but it was not enough time. The tour was a three week tour of Amsterdam, London, France, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, and to tell you the truth, I don't even remember where else we went.

Not staying in the city also made a big difference. We had to be back where the bus would pick us up and we didn't want to get left behind trying to figure how to get back.

By going on our own, we decided how long to stay in each place we visited, didn't have a set time to report back to someone, and could change our itinerary whenever we wanted.

The Italy I went to visit on this trip was very different from the one I first visited. I'm glad I was able to go back and experience Italy on my own and I would never do a tour again.

>>A lot of time on the tour consisted of driving from place to place<<

I have asked this question before and no one comes with an answer to me.....If you are going to several places not on a tour...do you magically get from one place to the other? Do you not also spend time going from one place to the other? I don't understand the difference there.

MV_RD,

I think if you had done the same itinerary on your own, you would also not remember what you did...you covered too much ground. Why do people choose a tour that DOESN'T stay in the city, and does every city in Europe and then blames the tour for doing what they signed up for to begin with ??????

If you're going to do a tour...do your homework, check out the hotels the tour is offering, make sure they stay in the city..read on how many nights and how much time you will spend in every city....and make sure what you signed up for ..... if you sign up for a 10 city tour in 10 days...logic follows that you will be on the go all the time.

There are higher end tours that are also at a more relaxed pace...if you buy cheap, you'll get cheap!

Lyb-
I know that we can't magically get from place to place. I just didn't realize back then that 3 wks of driving of would take a toll on me.

The point of taking the tour was so I didn't have to worry about doing "homework". I wasn't blaming the tour for what I signed up for and I realize that I should have checked in more detail where we were staying, etc.

I never said I didn't have a good time,I was just comparing a tour vs. going on my own and what a pleasant experience I had with being able to do what I wanted whenever I wanted.

MV RD,

I'm sorry, I didn't mean it to sound that I was attacking you personally, though I know it sounded like it. You just hit on many points that I've heard many others say, it's my pet peeve.

The driving from point to point....common complaint...yet most people obviously knew that all the cities they were visiting weren't within a mile of each other.

Hey, you learned from your trip and probably don't do "grand tours" anymore, do you? 8-)

I'd agree about having a sort of semi-tour. Let the travel agent take away the hassle of arranging flights and accommodation and then do your own thing. Travel agents will usually have a local representative in case of trouble and they will also arrange excursions.

It's a sensitive subject, but I have been going to Northern Italy for several years and the only ugly incidents I have seen with tourists have been with Italian Americans.
In one, a man tried to pay in a shop with an obsolete note. He ended up by being chased down the street after he got aggressive.
In another, an elderly man didn't understand the ticket system on a Lake Garda boat and thought that he was being cheated. Again, he got aggressive and he and the boatmen exchanged insults and shoves. His poor wife, who didn't speak Italian said that people pretended that they didn't understand him. Incidentally, the boat officials were very sweet to the wife and patted her consolingly when the old boy stormed off the boat to the ticket office, telling her that they wouldn't go without him.

It's true that many Northern Italians have a low opinion of Southerners, but it may go deeper than that.
Just after the War there were American troops around. The authorities thought that it was a good idea to have Italian Americans to liaise with the locals. Most would probably have been second generation Southerners. It's possible that the resentment still lingers to some extent.

My first time to Italy was on a Brendan tour - it was wonderful. The guide makes a huge difference in the enjoyment level, ours was young with lots of energy and in addition to the must-sees he saw to it that we got a taste of local restaurants, shops, etc. He purposely steered us away from the "traps".

For us the tour was the way to go. My Italian is non-existent, I didn't want my husband spending all of his vacation time driving, reading maps and worry about getting lost (walking lost if fun, driving lost is awful). I was also confident we had made the right choice when I saw an other group of travelers have a car fire on the side of the road, out in the middle of nowhere where they lost everything.

I have since traveled with other groups and have taken many independent trips to Europe, each has their merits and draw-backs.

The crack that people who take tours are *ill-educated* was lame. I think that if someone believes that it may be a mask for their own insecurities that that can not hold their own with others on the tour. I have met professors, business owners, museum curators and world-class chefs all on group tours, I am sure they would be amused that nytraveler finds them stupid.

For the second time - the "crack" about ill-educated was not aimed at tour group participants in general. It was about this couple in particular.

And I mentioned it to point out that perhaps one of the reasons they - in particular - were so impressed with the tour was that they went knowing essentially nothing at all about Italian, Catholic church, roman or etruscan history, culture, art, cuisine etc. So - they were very easily impressed.

As for the jokes about ill-educated - yes - if you go to school but manage to learn little or nothing you are ill-educated. Conversely - it is possible to be extremely well-educatd and knowledgeable with little formal eduation - if you bother to learn things for yourself.

(The most well-educated person I ever knew was a great uncle of mine who never went beyond high school - but spent much of his life in self-eduation and became incredilbly erudite.)

I know very well-educated, sophisticated, and well-travelled people who prefer tours. They just don't care for the planning and inconveniences of independent travel. They are generally very picky about their tours--no 24-hour a day lockstep, follow the guide with the whistle and flag tours for them.

I can't fault them or consider myself superior to them somehow just because they prefer tours to down-and-dirty independent travel. They just have different personalities and interests.

I was remiss last night when I first posted because I just remembered something very important about my friends/family who have chosen the tour route.

Heart problems...circulation problems. These are people who look great, they are in their 50s, but have health issues. They did not want to carry luggage around Italy.

I just spoke with a friend who returned from a tour two weeks ago, and her companion had heart problems. They would not/could not do it any other way. And, yes they enjoyed themselves (Venice was their favorite city).

Damn, we feel like fools. We never knew it was necessary to be ill-educated and have a heart/circulatory problem to take a tour and enjoy it.

We thought we did it because researching trains, buses, autorentals, lodging, restaurants, etc. is just boring.

We've been multiple times to Europe and while mostly independent, we have taken three tours; France, Italy and Scandinavia. We enjoy. (That is the whole sentence.)

My parents and I travelled in tours because it was easier to have everything planned for you, and, at that moment here in Spain, cheaper than doing it in any other way. It's just an option. I think now it's not so suitable for me because I want to travel in a more relaxed way but I have really good memories of the tours. I did one in Andalucia and Portugal in a bus where my mother and I where the only spaniards, everyone was American or Canadian. I enjoyed it to the full and had the chance of practising my english everyday , it was great !!!!