What is it like joining a group tour?

What is it like to join a group tour? It is your holiday but do not expect to be able to sleep in. It will be embarrasing if you are late waking up to find the rest of the members in the group are already waiting in the bus for you to board. 

The Malaysian tour guide will advise on arrival at each hotel, what time you should be down to the restaurant for breakfast and/or dinner.  He will also advise what time you should check out to board the bus.  This was our schedule at each hotel:

If you enjoy socialising, it is a great way to network and make new friends. The people we met during this trip were great and we still keep in touch through our chat group. I hope that we will get to travel together again.  This is our group photo taken at the Mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Ankara, a site we visited on 16 Oct after checking out of Koru Hotel in Bolu.

It is great when you get tour guides who are experienced to lead and are able to handle members in the group, who may be difficult. Our Turkish tour guide was funny and he was able share interesting stories about politics and the history of his country. So, we enjoyed the bus rides most of the time. He gave us time we should spend for: 

-each toilet break
-each site we visited
-each shopping stop

He said that it was up to us to decide if we would like to linger longer in one area which can compromise the trip for the rest of the day. A longer stay at one site could mean a shorter visit at another or eating our lunch or dinner later then usual.  He also checked with us to see if we would like to visit sites noted for the following day a day earlier so that we do not have to rush through them on the stated date. We can also opt not to visit sites noted on our itinerary if we are not interested and go for other sites he suggested.  

We chose not to visit a candy store and visited Kircilar Leather Art outlet instead and we had a good time shopping there. We were supposed to be there for two hours only but some of us were stuck there longer than expected, bargaining and making decisions to purchase. We were lucky that the rest of the members already waiting in the bus did not complain about the delay.

So what was it like for us to join this group? We were lucky that everyone was very considerate.







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