- “I’ve had a tension headache for the last week.”
- “Maybe if you’d let go of things rather than focus on the idiocy surrounding us, you’d have a better time and your headache would go away.”
- “You may have a point, dear.”
As most of you know, I recent went on a ten day social justice tour of Cuba. It was a pretty spectacular trip and would have been slightly better if I had known in advance some of the things that were going to happen in regards to the tour itself. Or if I had known what to expect in regards to the people on this tour.
That said, here are my personal 10 Rules for Group Travel. They may not be for everyone and they may not relate to all guided tours, but they may help prevent some headaches and heart burn.
Rule 1: Check the demographics of the tour group before you go.
This is kind of important. You should really have an idea of what type of people you’re going to be with for over a week. If it’s a small group, there’s no real escaping them. Not being able to escape people is what gave me the tension headaches and the chipped tooth from gnashing my teeth for nine days straight. Not everyone in your group will be in the same field as you. If there are a large number of people in one field in the group, you can bet your ass that regardless of the discussion topics that it will become the dominant thing in relation to the questions asked of certain speakers.
Rule 2: Let the tour operator know medical/food things far in advance of the tour.
My partner and I are both highly allergic to seafood. This is not an eat around option. We let the tour operator, not the guide, know this long before we left. And it was included in the ten pages of personal and medical information we had to submit before we left. Guess what? Ten people out of 32 didn’t bother to let the operators know things like: seafood allergy, veganism, Celiac’s, and kosher. It’s hard enough to wrangle a meal for 32 people without having to also rewrite menus planned weeks in advance in 30 seconds.
Rule 3: Check your ego.
You are not the most important person on this tour. The guide is. Let me repeat that: THE GUIDE WITH ALL OF THE INFORMATION AND SCHEDULES AND TALKING POINTS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT MEMBER OF THE TOUR GROUP.
Rule 4: Check your privilege.
Like the previous one, this is kind of important. We’re in Cuba with a spotty at the best of times national power grid, and whining about the hotel only running the hot water boilers between 6 am and 10 pm to conserve power is just stupid. Hell, it was posted in your bathroom. Screaming in English at the desk clerk who doesn’t speak a word of English isn’t going to help your cause. Cutting the queue of 12 people trying to change money because “your bus is leaving shortly” is just f*cking rude. I saw more horrific behavior of this nature out of quote/unquote well-traveled Americans. Personally intrusive questions, loud vitriolic arguments with speakers about politics, not paying attention to the guides because the topic doesn’t interest you which leads you to miss out on key information like a schedule change, not bothering to learn anything about the local spoken language so you annoy the hell out of all of the shopkeepers with your demands that “you must have someone on staff that speaks English.” I saw all of it and spent several days truly embarrassed for America if this was the ambassadors we’re sending out into the global environment.
Rule 5: Have lots of patience.
You’re going to need it. If you don’t have any, group travel may not be for you.
Rule 6: Be on time.
The posted schedule say the bus will be leaving at 9 am sharp. The tour guides told you this three times yesterday. Yet somehow you’re 15-20 minutes late. Consistently late every damn day. Lots of this the first few days happened on our tour. Finally the behind the scenes tour operator had to call a meeting and explain that from here on out there would be a five minute grace period and then the bus would leave your ass at the hotel/tour stop/what have you and you weren’t allowed to complain. The first day of this new rule 15 people were left at the hotel. The next day everyone was 10 minutes early for the buses and this continued the rest of the trip.
The reason for being on time should have been pretty self-explanatory. Schedules like the ones we were on were pretty tight. Ten minutes late for one thing meant that they either had to cut 20 minutes out of something else or that the group would be 10-20 minutes late for everything on the schedule for the day. It’s rude. A lot of the groups we visited had taken unpaid time out of their lives to speak with us and it’s incredibly rude to ask for two hours of their time because we’re late rather than the one hour they had planned on.
Rule 7: Tell the Guides when you plan on skipping something or are leaving something early.
You do this because it is their job to keep track of everyone on the bus. It’s that simple.
Rule 8: Don’t leave certain talks early.
This goes back to American privilege and having some common courtesy. The tour we were on had to meet certain very specific guidelines for it to qualify for our license to travel to Cuba. One of these is we had to have a host group sponsor us and had to go to a talk given by the host group. Midway through an hour long talk, I watched in horror as several of my tour mates loudly pushed their chairs back and left. I don’t care how uninteresting the topic is to you, this was our damn host group and it was only an hour. Show some class and manners and sit through it. Bring a notepad and doodle if you have to, but sit quietly and at least pretend to pay attention to what’s being said.
Rule 9: Keep your discussions to the stated topics.
We had a bunch of guest speakers on our tour with some incredible presentations. We also had a large contingent of people on our tour who worked in the same field who would constantly bring the discussion with these speakers into that field. An architect certainly isn’t going to know much about public health and bringing him into a 20 minute discussion on that topic is just going to annoy them. And it showed on his face and the faces of the rest of the audience. That’s one example of about five overall that happened.
Moderators would have helped, but ours was violently ill most of the trip, so things happen.
Rule 10: Tip
Find out in advance what the suggested tipping is for the guides, bus drivers, museum guides, etc, etc etc. I suspect that some tour groups are currently trying to figure out how to work the tips for the guides and bus drivers into the price of the tour so that there’s not the wailing and gnashing of teeth that went on when it came time to discuss this.
All that said, will I ever go on a group tour again? Not if I can help it. I’m not a people person to begin with and dropping me into a group of personalities get set me on a path I would have preferred not to be on in the first place.
