Travel beyond Europe - Good tour companies?

Hi, Scott.

One caveat about Overseas Adventure Travel (commonly called OAT) is that I have not yet taken a trip with them yet, but have heard so many good things about them here that I signed up for a tour to Egypt and Jordan with them in early 2025. So far everything has been great.

Some of the comments I've heard here is that their guides are really good. The Egypt/Jordan tour attracted me because it's a very small group (from 8-16 people total). I also liked that they were touring on the Nile with the small Egyptian dahabeya boats, rather than the larger cruise ships. You can have them take care of the flight arrangements if you want. And they do not charge a single supplement fee for many cruises (although this may not apply to you). I'm also including a few other posts that discuss them.

https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/beyond-europe/logistical-questions-about-egypt-tours-and-o-a-t
https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/beyond-europe/overseas-adventure-travel-vs-odyssey-unlimited-vietnam

Lastly, here is an article I read that seems to really give a decent viewpoint of various tour companies. It's limited to ones who travel to Egypt, but I thought it had some good information it it. https://www.fodors.com/world/africa-and-middle-east/egypt/experiences/news/photos/11-tour-companies-to-make-your-trip-to-egypt-more-successful

Odysseys Unlimited.

Small group, native tour directors, better hotels than RS, bellman service so you can bring any size bag you want, excellent meals mostly with wine or beer included, no shopping stops. Local guides.

The prices qouted on their webpage include airfare but you can call them for land only prices.

Excellent customer service. I've traveled with them four times.

We have had a great experience with Gate 1 Travel.
Also, for a safari in Kenya and/or Tanzania we loved Good Earth Tours ( a firm in Tanzania).
In the past, we have enjoyed Trafalgar (New Zealand), that was excellent, but a bit pricey.
We had an excellent tour of Cusco, the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu, Peru with Peru Agency Tours.

We did some great travel tours in Russia and China with a firm that is out of business.

For a great four day Canadian Rockies tour from Vancouver, Key West Tours was super and the price was great.

Not me, but two different friends of mine swear by Natural Habitat Adventures, depending upon where you might want to travel.

Thanks, everyone for your input. It's very useful. There are a lot of companies out there and a lot of ways to travel. This gives me a head start when evaluating future trips.

Scott, there are a few tour companies that have been started by former Rick Steves guides, and all have gotten good reviews here. Sarah Murdoch is one - she now runs Adventures with Sarah and has tours all over the world. Another one is Imprint Travel started by Reid Coen. Seymour Tours with Mark Seymour is another one of these - his tours are mainly in the UK and France, but several members here have taken them and rave about them.

All three are smaller tour companies and use the same type of tour philosophy as Rick Steves, with small groups, lots of physical activity, you carry your own luggage and so on.

Gate 1 is a good company. However, the only tours they run that are guaranteed to be a “small group” (max of 22) are their “Discovery” tours. Their other tours can run to as many as 40 people.

Our Gate 1 tours were not small group and we had 30 in one and 33 in another.

I've done 3 small group trips with Road Scholar and like their offerings. They have larger groups as well so make sure you sort by group size if you search their site. They have tons of small group tours. I like Road Scholar's pacing. They tend to spend more nights in most cities vs. other tour groups.

Scott,

I've used Insight Vacations in the past for travel to areas other than Europe and found them to be excellent, and very close in many ways to the "Rick Steves tour experience". I would definitely travel with them again.

Have a look at their website - https://www.insightvacations.com/en-ca/vacation-finder/2023-2024-worldwide-premium-guided-tours?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIjMbQ-_ergQMVnyytBh2lLwUbEAAYASABEgJcXPD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds .

I haven't traveled with them, but just correcting the link to Imprint Tours cited above: https://imprinttours.com/

I've also traveled with Gate1 and GAdventures - not the RS experience, but I primarily wanted them for logistics/transport and they served that purpose. I had very good local guides on the GAdventures tour in Ecuador and Peru, the company has a pretty big presence in S. America. There was good communication from the company ahead of and during the trip, and things that went awry (like canceled flights) were outside their control. We had 20ish people in the group, which I think was probably unusually low. GAdventures uses a module system for tours, so your group size fluctuates depending on which tour you pick and how long you're gone. So for my Ecuador part of the tour we had 20 ish people, but only 10 of us continued on to the Peru portion. Pros and cons to that if you're wanting a cohesive group. One pro was we shed some of the difficult personalities after the first part (but con, we picked up new ones). Hotels were decent quality and well located for the most part. For solo travelers their single supplement was high compared to trip cost.

The guide for Gate1 in Vietnam was great, but the group size and composition (close to 40 travelers, many newbies due to the Groupon offer for the tour) made it impossible for him to excel at his craft. Their hotels were business style and typically not located in center of town (though you know this ahead of time as they disclose the specifics before you book). Gate1 uses the same module aspect as GAdventures - in Bangkok we had two people, Cambodia five, and Vietnam 40. Their single supplement was more affordable.

Short story, I'd use either company again, but it would depend on a number of factors that would be trip-dependent and based on comparisons to other options available at the time.

I just returned from my third Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) tour, this one "Crossroads of the Adriatic" through countries of the former Yugoslavia, and I like them a lot. I think they offer what your message describes. Group size maximum 16 on most tours, free single supplement readily available also on most. Impressions of the others you mention, with caveat that I have not myself traveled with them:
Gate 1: I saw something of their operations as their groups were frequently in the same hotels as our OAT, and their guides (as ours did) posted daily itineraries on the bulletin board, which were fun to compare. As stated by other commenters, their groups are larger, often at least twice the size of OAT. Gate 1 groups tend to have more of a mix of travelers from different countries, for better or worse. OAT focuses on the U.S. market and virtually all OAT travelers are Americans. The equivalent Balkan Gate 1 tours seemed to be a bit faster paced (less time in each city) and have relatively more "optional" (i.e., extra charge) activities than OAT, compared to those included in the tour price (which of course you can skip if you want, but have paid for, so most don't). The guides seemed equivalent -- ours was great, but they are independent contractors who often work with different companies, so she had done Gate 1 tours also, and knew the ones doing the Gate 1 tours we encountered. But obviously you'll get more personalized attention from your guide in a group of 16 than in one of 40.
National Geographic: With "name brand" tours like these (or Smithsonian, college alumni affiliation, etc.) I think you pay a LOT for that brand name. I've seen the Nat Geo brochures for Egypt, for example, which I did with OAT, and it looked like they charge at least twice as much for what appears to be more or less the same thing in every important respect (accommodations, tour length, activities). These brand name tours seem often to have a U.S. expert (such as a college professor) accompanying the group in addition to local guide, but frankly, there has never been a time on any of my OAT tours that I felt that I would have needed or wanted to be guided by a U.S. professor instead of, or in addition to our incredibly knowledgeable in-country guides, or had any desire to pay extra for that.

We don't usually do multi-day tours, but we did in Namibia. We did a private, custom safari with Tracking Namibia Safaris. This was recommended to us by someone on the Safari Talk forums who had done two trips with the owner.

It was absolutely wonderful, and wasn't any more expensive than doing a group trip. The owner, Francois, designed our itinerary based on the list I gave him, finding our accommodations for us, and finding savings for us in the process. The lovely thing about being on a private safari was that we could choose how long to spend at a sighting (within reason, of course), and sometimes choose our route, based on Francois' description (i.e. longer and more scenic, or shorter and also scenic but slightly less so).

Tracking Namibia also goes to Botswana, and, I think, the Victoria Falls area.

https://trackingnamibia.com/destinations/

So, I guess I didn't exactly answer your question. It's not exactly a Rick Steve's style experience, but it's excellent.

I don't want to knock anybody, and I have no personal experience, and if I have misremembered somebody will correct me; but with the new resurgence of the scourge of covid and stories in several of the forums here about people having to cancel or drop off tours because of catching covid; isn't OAT one of the companies which we read a lot about here on the Forums a couple of years ago because of their reluctance to refund in that case?

Our originally scheduled OAT Egypt tour was in 2020. We didn't ask for a refund, but rescheduled it for a year later, which worked out very well. Regarding those who get COVID (or have another medical problem) on the tour and have to drop out and/or incur additional expense, I think their policies are the same as most companies, which is that that's what travel insurance is for (which they sell as an add-on, or you can buy your policy separately). One person did get COVID on one of my OAT tours, and while I don't know the financial details, I do know the guide and their other staff worked very hard to make sure she was well taken care of in terms of medical treatment, accommodations and onward travel.

Good to know, Slate! And Nigel, before I booked my tour, I scoured this forum for mention of OAT to check reviews and so on. I didn't see anything about what you were talking about.

@Mardee - I do recall that there were stories about tough refunds from OAT. I also have seen tons of stories about poor airfare connections and routing if you let OAT book. But I think poor airfare choices are a problem when any tour company books your flight.

I am giving OAT a try later on this month for a Baltics tour. It's my first trip with them. I'll post a review at some point, I am sure:)

My wife and I have used OAT and Nat Geo, but don't love the larger sizes of their groups which can often feel like a "bus tour". I believe Gate One has even larger groups, but we've never traveled with them.

We've found some companies that send much smaller groups and give a more "intimate" feel. They still give you the group travel dynamic which we love, but without being in a huge group at each destination and have more direct access to the tour guides which is really what we want. My personal favorite has become Wilderness Travel. They're a little more expensive than GAdventures and OAT, but you absolutely get your money's worth. They go all over the world and we've never been disappointed in our 8+ trips with them! https://www.wildernesstravel.com/

My husband and I just used Gate 1 to go to Vietnam in October. It was our first experience of a group tour and we were quite pleased. There were 37 in our group, but it didn't feel too large to us. The tour group members were well traveled, some independently and some on multiple Gate 1 tours.

The hotels were nice and mostly well located to do things on our own if we wished. Not quirky, but that's fine with me. I appreciated that we never had to handle our own luggage and there were no buddies or name games. I hate that kind of thing.

Our guide was super well organized, personable, and incredibly knowledgeable. We liked it so much that we booked another Gate 1 trip to China for May 2024.

It is encouraging to me hear the positive reports about Gate 1 travel. I am going to try them for first time next October.

I love Rick Steves tours. I've done 5 of them. However, when I started looking at Turkey and could compare the two tours side by side for the same dates, I discovered I could follow the same basic route and save $1700 by trying Gate 1. (Single room on both tours and all the "optionals" from Gate 1 added in). I don't expect the tour to be the same experience and I know that there will be more people on it. I do think it will be a good experience. I will report back to the forum afterwards with the results of this experiment.

I went to Belize last year and have an upcoming trip to Japan with EF Go Ahead tours. Was very pleased and the group size was 16 for Belize. I think they cap at 22. They take tours all over the world and I know four or five other couples who have used them multiple times and have always been happy.

I'm going to take my first tour with Travel Fever Tours next month. It's a tiny company (mom and pop) in Vermont. I have friends who have traveled with them. They just have a few destinations. I'm going to Oaxaca and the max on the tour is 12 people. I think this is the case on most of their tours, which are mostly art oriented, culinary oriented or hiking oriented (Camino, among others). They're currently offering eight tours between January and September 2024.

We have friends who have enjoyed Exodus, particularly their Costa Rica trip. They are going with the same company for Italy in 2024. Another set of friends loves Nat Hab (Natural Habitat) that is connected to the World Wildlife Fund. They are actually traveling the world based on trips to see certain animals. I have done 12 domestic outdoor trips with Sierra Club but they also do international trips.

Scott, do you have on your current bucket list that you can post? Depending on where you would like to go I am sure this board can provide you with a lot tour companies and guides.

A bit more on Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT): we used them for an African safari last year. The guides were outstanding, they include several experiences to interact with the local people and culture, and groups are limited to 16 participants or less - not a large bus tour. I personally recommend their quality - and very competitive pricing!

Nigel’s right, there were several posts on this Forum by people 3 1/2 years ago who wanted complete cash refunds when Covid-19 broke out. OAT apparently offered credits for future travel, and while Rick Steves Tours apparently gave full refunds at the time, apparently OAT did not.

I can’t verify the details of all that, but we had also signed up for a trip this year to Jordan and Egypt, which also originally included Israel. We actually were supposed to be on that tour right now, but after the war started, OAT took the Israel portion off the trip, and added Cyprus, plus Greece as an option. Well, a week-and-a-half ago, they cancelled the trip outright for safety reasons, and offered a complete cash refund. They also offered a credit incentive if we rescheduled the trip into the future - which we’ve done. OAT has a substantial catalogue of trips around the world, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a better company for a better price.

Thank you for the great replies.

Ed: Bucket list is pretty much everywhere. :) , but Japan is on our shortlist, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

We have gone to Japan and Egypt/ Jordan with Odysseys Unlimited. Their tours have a maximum numbers of 24 participants. Lovely hotels, excellent guides. Highly recommend them. These are our only tours as we are basically independent travelers.

We were on a tour in Yellowstone NP two weeks ago and our driver / guide who works for Xanterra spoke very highly about both National Geographic and Tauck. With any tour company it comes down to what you want to do, how active you want to be, do you want to travel privately or with a group and ultimately how much you want to spend.

We recently took a Globus Journeys small group(21 people) Highlights of the South Pacific Tour to New Zealand and Australia. It was wonderful! I posted a trip report on the New Zealand portion in the Beyond Europe Forum and will do Australia next week. There were no captive shopping opportunities(except olive oil tasting) which really wasn't much of a shopping thing since transporting those bottles would not be easy. I highly recommend this tour. We have never been on a RS tour so don't know how it would compare. This is not a blanket recommendation for Globus but an enthusiastic recommendation for a tour that was done really well.

Bucket list is pretty much everywhere, but Japan is on our shortlist, as well as Australia and New Zealand.

I suggest you look at
Tauck Tours:
https://www.tauck.com/
and Smithsonian Journeys:
https://www.smithsonianjourneys.org/

Not as upscale as the other two, but good:
https://www.gocollette.com/en#
Although their opening page is currently promoting "Experience America", they have tours to Europe, Asia, Australia, and many more destinations.

Thanks to everyone for the replies and suggestions!

I've been on a number of OAT trips (over 10). Their strengths are small size, no single supplement (number of singles is limited though), excellent guides, wide variety of destinations, and interesting offbeat itineraries. Single retirement age females seems to be their target demographic. They don't necessarily take you to the greatest hits places.

However, dealing with their admin end is very very frustrating and solving problems if anything goes wrong is very difficult. It is not uncommon to receive inaccurate info from their phone reps and to get inconsistent answers from different reps. They will often change the rules of the game partly through-like changing a refund to a credit, etc. Refunds if you can get one take at least 6 weeks to process and recently they had problems bouncing refund checks to a number of people (blamed on a banking error). During Covid they were so bad in not following their own policies regarding refunds that many, many people had to resort to intervention from the Massachusetts Attorney General. Their technology is very outdated-you cannot make online bookings with them.

In general, their trips are great but their office is not. They are no longer my top choice, even though I have really enjoyed the trips. It's just too stressful trying to deal with them if anything goes wrong. I'm not saying never again, but they're not my go to choice any more. I wish Rick Steves went beyond Europe!