Travel with a Tour Guide

Why Take a Guided Tour

Venture into a city armed primarily with the information you find on Yelp or Tripadvisor, and you may very well end up in an overcrowded tourist hot spot with a topical, if not stereotypical, idea of its culture and residents. But enlisting the help of an in-touch tour guide will give you the opportunity to understand the soul of a destination and experience its rituals and rhythms first-hand, says Biggs Bradley. 

“We have limited time when we're traveling,” she notes. “And a very good tour guide is somebody who can spoon-feed you a lot of the nuances that would take you a long time to uncover on your own.” Whether you’re on a food, art, or bike tour, you’ll learn everything from an in-depth history of the locale and the innovations occurring to the current challenges its citizens are facing, she notes.

For example, while on a trip to Saudi Arabia, Biggs Bradley went on a tour with a female guide who detailed her recent transition to working outside of the home. Throughout the day, there were conversations about “why women choose to veil, how much they veil…the culture and all of the different aspects of the role of religion, how modern Saudi Arabia is changing, and the fact that women now have the right to drive and can travel on their own,” she recalls. “You have that conversation with a tour guide, and you learn so much about the culture.”

While you could get a similar experience from striking up conversations with locals in cafés or bars, these individuals may not be as well-informed or capable of answering your plethora of questions, says Biggs Bradley. “The people who are attracted to [the tour guide] field take their role as ambassadors very seriously, and they want to be storytellers,” she adds. “They want you to better understand their culture, and so they've thought very deeply about what makes that place different and unique and how to share that with other people.”

Whether you venture on a tour during a self-planned vacation, a custom journey created by an Indagare Trip Designer, or one of the company’s small group trips, you can trust your guide will provide an excursion that digs beneath the surface. Many of the company’s 100-plus staff members travel to destinations across the globe to meet and spend time with potential tour guides, scoping out the ones who are the best storytellers and whose interests overlap with those of members. “Basically, we kiss a lot of frogs to find the prince,” Biggs Bradley jokes.

Essentially, planning with Indagare is a form of travel experience: The company takes out all of the guesswork, tailoring your itinerary to your preferences and needs so you’re guaranteed to have the vacation of your dreams, says Biggs Bradley.

“Most people take a lot of chances on their travels, but it's really precious time and precious money — you don't want to gamble with it,” she explains. “You want to be guaranteed that if you're taking a 10- and a 12-year-old to the Colosseum, they're going to have their attention captured for the hour and a half that you're there with a guide…For us, it's really about making sure that you're maximizing the experience that you really want.”

Through Equinox Circle, Equinox members have insider access to Indagare’s curated journeys, a 30-day complimentary trial of Self Planner membership, and $100 off annual subscription, plus access to VIP benefits including upgrades, complimentary breakfast, spa credit, and more.