Hank, I understand what you are saying, and I know many people feel the same. As did we when younger.
We are fortunate to have, at this point in our lives (late 70’s) to have more money than we need, as a result of our stable employment for many years, and our spending choices. And our kids don’t need any help at all.
We saved for travel by forgoing things that others spend money on—-we clean our own house and do our own yard work, while everyone else we know pays for these services, $$$ per month. We keep our cars for a long time—12-20 years. We have lived in the same house for 20 years and have little left of a mortgage payment. When it came time to add a room and renovate the master bath, we did the work ourselves. We don’t spend money to go out for dinner while at home, only when we travel. And even then, we mostly stay in apartments and cook for ourselves. We book our flights with miles, so they cost much less than otherwise. And we balance the expensive trips (one a year) with camping trips to the national parks.
It looks like the MHH trips have gone up in price, as we did the 10-day trip (/which I recommend) for $5000 each, or $500 per day per person. But note that their 10-day trip is 10 actual days of guided hiking—-they don’t include the arrival and departure days in the day count like most tours do..
For comparison, the 12-day Rick Steves Switzerland trip I looked at, for $4200, counts the arrival day (5 pm meeting at the hotel) and departure day (breakfast at the hotel and that is all). There are no tour activities at all on days 1 and 12. So really it is a 10-day tour at $420 per person per day.
For the extra $80 per day over the RS tour, what did we get? A small group ( 14), lodging in 4 and 5* hotels with very nice rooms, amazing breakfasts and 4-course dinners of the highest quality, plus bus transport and cablecar rides up to the hiking trails and back down. If you have ever done a high mountain lift in Switzerland or the Dolomites, you will know that this alone can add up to $100 a day, or more, if one is paying individually.
But it was the hiking that was the big reward for this trip—the hikes (with one exception) were outstanding. I said we had been to the Dolomites before —we went once as a couple, but I had been twice before on trips with a friend, planned by me. While those trips were good enough to keep pulling me back to the Dolomites, the hikes we did using information found online and in guidebooks did not compare to what we did on the guided trip. And the logistics of getting to and from the various trailheads on our own proved complicated and time-consuming. We also made mistakes—mis-judging the time it would take to get from A to B, so several times we had to find a shortcut to get back to the right lift in time for the last descent, or face a very long hike home in the dark. One such shortcut had us finding a cross-country route to the lift we could clearly see across the way, but we had to slip and slide down a steep slope into ravine and scramble up the other side, losing and gaining 800 feet of elevation each time. And then there were the electric fences— not fun if you make a mistake there in long wet grass.
On the Dolomites trip with my husband and adult daughter (2013) we stayed 3 nights in Val Gardena at a very nice small hotel before moving on to another valley to meet friends. One of our 2 full days there we chose to rent mountainbikes in Ortesei and take them up on the lift to Alpe di Siusi to ride in that beautiful place. We somehow got off-route and ended up on a gnarly hiking trail, pushing and carrying our bikes for a good half-hour until we re-joined the MTB route. I was sore for days.
After that, we were very happy to find a company that offered a guided hiking tour, and felt it was well worth the $500 per day. Note that the 2023 price is $600 per person for the 10-day trip, a better value than the 7-day trip.
