Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

Here’s the fourth and final installment in my round-up of the ways that we’re tweaking our tours to maximize experience in 2010: I believe that because our Best of the Adriatic tour is heavy on coastal towns, we end up rushing the powerful side-trip into Bosnia-Herzegovina, and don’t go into Montenegro at all. For me, Mostar is a highlight, and a trip into Montenegro would be touristic bushwhacking — which is a big part of what ETBD is all about. But you just can’t offer and sell a tour to Croatia without visiting the fabled Dalmatian Islands. As our itinerary stands now, we sail, have a long stop in Hvar, and spend two nights and an easy day (like a “vacation from our vacation”) in Korcula. Then, after a long day driving, we arrive in Mostar after lunch, and have the rest of the day there. We leave Mostar the next morning for an exciting drive through the relatively wild and completely untouristed Serb part of Bosnia-Herzegovina to get to Dubrovnik.

My sales staff weighed in on this, reminding me that if we add two days to the tour, it will be much more difficult to sell. (Tour length is a critical part of the sales decision-making process.) Given that this tour can’t be longer than two weeks and still sell well in here in the country with the shortest vacations in the rich world (USA), we agreed that for now there was no way to smartly extend the time in Mostar, and that Montenegro isn’t worth cutting existing stops out. I’m still frustrated with this, but we’ll have to go with our existing plan for 2010.

When our Germany, Austria, and Switzerland tour guides reported that a spa visit in Baden-Baden was no longer a part of our itinerary, I was disappointed. To me, Americans are childishly prudish when it comes to enjoying baths in Europe where the dress code is just a towel. This prudishness gets stronger (and makes more sense to me) when the Americans would be getting naked not just with a bunch of European strangers, but with fellow members of their own tour group…including tour buddies of the opposite sex. Much as I wish all Americans could experience the baths in a German spa resort, I finally agreed with my guides that you just can’t build it in as a group activity. So, while I encouraged the guides to recommend this experience, taking the spa is something people will have the option to do on their free time in Baden-Baden (likely sneaking in at a time when they expect nobody else from their group will be there).

Also in Germany, Trier is a fine stop, but I had a problem with giving it nearly a day and a half at the expense of the nearby Mosel River (which hosts my favorite castle, Burg Eltz, and the vineyard tranquility and river-town charm that many dream of — but never find — along the Rhine). So, in Trier, we decided to cut into a leisurely free day to create itinerary space for a long and beautiful day exploring the Mosel River. For 2010, we’ll drive up the meandering river, skip Cochem but have lunch in sleepy little Beilstein (where I go to convalesce when really fried with my work in Europe), then tour Burg Eltz, before catching the autobahn back to Trier in time for dinner.

In Vienna, Art Nouveau sights are trendy. But I learned that the consequence of our guides’ passion for Vienna’s organic and leafy architecture was that the Habsburg palace visit became a “free time option.” (Free time is vital for a good tour. But I’m skeptical about relegating great sights to “free time options,” as they often get beat out by easier, lighter activities — like shopping, laundry, and snoozing.) I may just be the world’s biggest Habsburg fan, and this was their capital for centuries, making Vienna the eastern rival of Paris in Europe. The Habsburgs had two palaces that attempt to outdo Versailles: Schönbrunn and the Hofburg. While Schönbrunn, the summer palace in a gilded park on the edge of town, is the most visually striking from the exterior, the Hofburg — right in the town center and an easy walk from other tour activities — is just as splendid on the inside and comes with a gob-smacking treasury, Vienna Boy’s Choir lore, and the Spanish Riding School. In 2010, we will do the Hofburg justice, and let Art Nouveau (whoever he is) just deal with it.

I am fascinated that British travelers make a virtual pilgrimage to France’s Dordogne to celebrate the force-feeding of the geese and, once the geese are slaughtered, to eat their huge and tasty livers — and yet, many Americans think the whole process should be outlawed. Few American anti-foie gras activists consider actually visiting a goose farm to talk with the owner and hang around for meal time (never much of a wait) to see the forced feeding. I have a favorite goose farm where our tour members could actually witness la gavage, as pulling the goose’s neck up and filling its belly with corn is called (the process reminds me of transferring cereal from one box to another). Our French guides were all for the visit, but when considering our itinerary, being there during hours the farm is formally welcoming the public would rush our Dordogne River canoe trip. I enjoy the canoe experience even more than a Mr. Rogers-type visit to a goose farm. I encouraged my staff to keep the canoe time sacred and beg the farmers — for the love of goose-liver pâté — to let us visit outside of regular hours. If that doesn’t work, we’ll visit an alternate farm, and have both wonderful French experiences as part of our tours in 2010.

Surveying all these changes, I’m satisfied that our 2010 tour will be more experience-packed than ever. I hope you’ll agree.

Still buzzing from the fun, sharing, and brainstorming our tour staff enjoyed with our tour guides at our annual summit last month, we are busy incorporating itinerary changes we agreed upon into our 2010 tour plans. Here is the thinking behind more of what I hope are improvements. (Sorry for the delay in getting this entry out. This has been a particularly busy week.)

For Spain, I suggested Gibraltar rather than the famous Andalusian hill town of Ronda (dramatically straddling its famous gorge). But our guides consider Gibraltar (the British military base-turned-tourist escape nippled onto the south tip of Spain) tacky, and strongly advised we stick with Ronda. Guides suggested we add Toledo’s Mezquita del Cristo de la Luz (a ruined mosque) to balance the sightseeing, since we already visit a church and a synagogue in Toledo. After cringing at that whiff of political correctness, I said I thought that particular mosque is underwhelming at best. Instead, we agreed to visit the new, fully functioning Great Mosque of Granada in that city’s Albayzín district, and see if our groups can actually check in with the imam there to see how Spain’s largest Muslim community (10 percent of the town) is living with its neighbors.

In Northern Ireland, we American visitors (even the sword-carrying Protestants) are predisposed to support the underdog Catholic minority. But to get the full story, we agreed to find an angry Ulster Protestant to talk with our groups about Orangemen activities in what we call a “reflections” setting. Orangemen have seemed to kind of terrorize the Catholic minority in Ulster — with its bombed-out Catholic churches, seemingly hateful Protestant marches through Catholic towns, and menacing bonfires that continue to this day. A reflections setting is when we sit down as a group with a local person in a quiet place, and our guide (without contributing otherwise) facilitates a reflective exchange between the local and our group. After participating in exchanges like this in El Salvador and Nicaragua, I’ve been encouraging them when the opportunity presents itself with our Europe tour program. (While Europe may be less contentious than political flashpoints, reflections meetings here can be just as instructive and inspirational.) We’ve done reflections meetings with Scandinavians who buy a kind of socialism by willingly paying higher taxes, Turkish Kurds supporting a separatist movement that threatens Ankara, Serbian Orthodox priests angry with American involvement in Kosovo, Hungarian grade school classes and their teachers, and American expats who’ve married into Italy (where mothers-in-law take mother-in-lawing to towering heights). We want our tours to connect with Europe in as many ways as possible. And reflections meetings are just another tool for this.

Dublin has a “Musical Pub Evening Tour” in which a trio of local musicians meet a group in a pub and, over the course of the evening (and several pints of beer), lead their group on a crawl. They visit three pubs while explaining and demonstrating their instruments, offering the group an educational foundation for Irish music appreciation (and generally a nice Guinness buzz). I absolutely love the experience. Our guides said they did music evenings in pubs in other towns, and doing that plus taking groups on this music tour would be redundant. Considering how an evening of live traditional music in a small-town pub is even more fun after having the pub tour education, I proposed that this kind of “redundancy” was a beautiful thing. In 2010, we’ll offer both experiences.

In Florence, we have always offered a historic “Renaissance Walk” through the core of the old town. While the Renaissance Walk is the main thing, we also recognize that it misses the town’s scant Roman history, its fascinating medieval history, and the heady years in the 1860s when Florence was the first capital of the new country of Italy. So, for our Heart of Italy and Venice/Florence/Rome tours, we’re covering more dimensions of Florence’s history by adding a local guide who’ll use generally overlooked sights tucked here and there in the old town as a rack upon which to sort out these layers of the Florentine story. Then the guide will walk our groups across the Arno River to lead an artisan-focused walk through the crusty-as-a-cobbler Oltrarno district.

In Slovenia, our guides were skipping the Skocjan Caves because they wanted to be sensitive to claustrophobic tour members. I love these caves and (at the risk of freaking out the paranoid ones) requested that we visit Skocjan instead of the visually impressive but empty Predjama Castle. We’ll include the 1.5-mile hike through Europe’s most awe-inspiring cave — a vast canyon evoking the hidden home of those flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz, and illustrating memorably the honeycombed geology of Slovenia’s Karst region. Some will need to be shepherded across the scary bridge over the subterranean gorge in the middle, and some may simply refuse to enter and wait with the driver at a café near the entrance. But we will include Skocjan Caves in 2010.

I’m recapping a few of the changes to our tours for 2010, following up on our guide summit last month…

Our Heart of Belgium and Holland tour is particularly tuned in to current issues, social issues, and environmental issues. (Our Dutch and Belgian guides love leading it, and I’m seriously considering taking the tour myself.) We deal with challenges facing the EU at its capital in Brussels. We tour a massive dike project to learn about how the Dutch are raising their levies in anticipation of higher seas (people who live below sea level tend to take climate change more seriously than others). And in Amsterdam, we want to hit the hot-button social issues — pot and prostitution. Touring the Red Light District, we make a point to understand the “harm reduction” rationale of having legalized, regulated, unionized prostitution. And we visit a coffeeshop to interview a man who makes his living legally selling marijuana to adults. In 2010, we hope to drop by Ludo’s Paradox Coffeeshop — a mellow, mature, and comfortable place in the charming Jordaan District — for a drink and a Q&A session. While we couldn’t include more than this as a formal part of our tour, those who want more than a smoothie from Ludo will be welcome to stay after, as the Paradox visit is the last organized stop for that day.

Now that we’re staying in the more charming old center of Naples (Piazza del Plebiscito) rather than the gritty train station neighborhood, our guides are more enthusiastic about our time there. Naples offers one of Europe’s most fascinating “urban jungle” experiences, and we’re now able to do it better than ever.

We’ve come up with a clever new plan for our day visiting Pompeii, the ruined Roman city that was buried in ash by a volcano eruption in A.D. 79. First we drive our bus to the end of the road, from where our group hikes to the steaming summit of Mount Vesuvius. After our crater experience, we hit the Pompeii ruins, where our charismatic local guide, Gaetano, meets us. The bus goes into Sorrento without the group (to deposit our luggage at our hotel), and after Pompeii, the group catches the commuter train into Sorrento. From the train station, our guide gives an orientation walk through town, dropping by a famous gelateria for a demonstration and some tasting fun before strolling to our hotel to check in.

For our Best of England tour, we’ve dropped touristy, overpriced, and crowded Warwick Castle, and will stop instead at Ironbridge Gorge to tour the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. I’ve always felt Warwick was a bit cheesy. It’s one of those historic sights that has completely sold out to an amusement park company, which runs it like a very aggressive business rather than part of England’s patrimony. Ironbridge Gorge, on the other hand is classy, personal, untouristy, and — when you consider that the advances made here provided the foundation for British industrial dominance in the 19th century — quite a thrill to see and understand.

The plan in Britain was to zip directly from one pristine natural wonder to another: rushing from North Wales to the Lake District to visit the national park center at Brockhole, then take a steamer ride on Lake Windermere en route to our two-night home base in Keswick. Instead, for 2010, after leaving Wales, we’ll spend the middle of the day eating “candy floss” and taking white-knuckle rides in Blackpool for the “Coney Island of England” experience, and then arrive late in the Lake District. After the tackiness of Blackpool, the magic of the pristine lakes will be even more vivid. By cutting out a little redundancy, we’ll enjoy an entirely different slice of the English sightseeing pie.

Also in Britain, we’ll say goodbye to our “coach” (tour bus) upon arrival in York to avoid an extra day of bus rental. Then we’ll spend that money on train tickets for the group into London, which will get us there in two hours (rather than four hours by bus). Arriving at London’s Kings Cross Station, we stow our bags on a different bus, tour the British Library (which is just across the street from the station), then enjoy a full four-hour introduction tour to London by bus. The cost to us is roughly the same, and we’ll save two hours in transit, enjoy an English train ride, and take full advantage of the time saved to get a substantial bus tour of London before finally arriving at our hotel thoroughly oriented.

I am thrilled with how our Best of Turkey tour connects our travelers with Turkish culture in intimate ways other tours do not. For example, I love the casual sit-and-talk time with the imam in the extremely remote and untouristy central Turkish town of Güzelyurt. I wanted to promise this in our promotional literature, but we decided it’s an example of travel magic that can’t be institutionalized. The same is true of visits with a “whirling dervish.” Much as I’d like our groups to meet with a dervish to hear him explain why he whirls, this is not something that can be done routinely and on a strict schedule with a tour group. Some of my most vivid and wild memories of Turkish travels are in the public baths, or hammam. I was disappointed when I heard that our hammam visits had become “optional.” My guides convinced me that, much as we like to get our travelers out of their comfort zones, we can’t force people to go to local baths. American modesty is quite strong. We can enable people to enjoy this…but I agreed that it shouldn’t be an included part of the tour.

Also in Turkey, I find visiting the House of the Virgin Mary near Ephesus fascinating without getting too hung up on whether or not she actually lived there. I learned that visiting the house is actually controversial on our tours. People either believe she lived here, or they don’t, and to present it either way tends to anger half the group. So, rather than include it as a standard part of our schedule in 2010, we will leave it as an option for those who want to believe it — and help those who stay to tour it easily get back to the hotel with a taxi.

It’s taken a lot of time and effort to brainstorm, debate, and implement all of these tour itinerary changes. But my staff and I are confident than in 2010, our tours will be more experience-packed than ever.

The other day I talked about our annual review process, when we fly our guides in for our yearly summit and hammer out the details to make our bus tours the best and richest experience possible. You’ll notice that while we’re determined to maximize the experience we offer, we have to maintain our budget, too. Here are a few examples of changes where we reached consensus:

In 2009, we were trying to visit both the concentration camp at Dachau and have a quick stop in Munich for a beer-hall experience. It was both rushed and emotionally jarring. Guides oriented their groups to Dachau, and then the group members only had time to see the documentary movie and museum — or explore the grounds — before rushing into Munich for the beer hall. We decided to skip the Munich visit and do Dachau more thoroughly: orientation, museum, and time to explore the barracks and camp. Then, as we process that powerful experience, we’ll drive straight to a peaceful village in the foothills of the Alps.

Like every tour in Bavaria, we tour Mad King Ludwig’s fairy-tale castle of Neuschwanstein. While that postcard-image, most thrilling castle is on everyone’s list, Ludwig’s boyhood home — Hohenschwangau castle on the neighboring hill — is more historic. It gives a much better context in which to appreciate Ludwig and his Romantic Age. For our two Europe tours, we decided to get an earlier start (which means less free time in the afternoon) to visit both castles — first the older Hohenschwangau and then, with a fine historic orientation, the Disney-esque Neuschwanstein. We can reserve timed admissions to both, so the morning is both memorable and extremely efficient.

We routinely hire local guides (since it’s a passion of mine to let our groups enjoy a local voice and expert to complement the lead guide) and, concerned about tiring our tour members, use these great guides for only two hours. If you hire a guide, you pay basically the same half-day rate for a two-to-four-hour tour. I encouraged our staff to keep guides longer for more teaching. For example, after the two-hour Uffizi Gallery tour in Florence, take a coffee break and follow it with a one-hour old town walk featuring Roman, medieval, and modern aspects of Florence (which complement the Renaissance Florence walk we offer upon arrival in town).

Our popular Best of Europe Family Tour goes from Rome to Paris. A highlight is an overnight in an argriturismo (farm house). For this pastoral, hands-on experience in Tuscany, a highlight for the parents has been a tour of its winemaking facility and a wine tasting. The children were busied with some other non-alcohol-related activity. I suggested that we introduce the kids on our tour to Italy’s wine culture — and even let them enjoy a taste or two (if the parents are OK with that). When I was a 14-year-old kid touring Germany with my parents, friends we visited actually served their children “training beer” or “near beer” to drink along with the adults and their serious beer. Wine (and beer) can be a respected part of a cultural and social scene, and American kids can appreciate that as European kids do (without actually “drinking” until they are an appropriate age).

On that same family friendly tour, we decided to swap out the wonderfully Gothic Sainte-Chapelle church in Paris for a Seine River cruise. The cost is about the same. The kids have seen lots of churches by this point of the tour. Not doing the church takes the crush off an otherwise demanding Paris sightseeing day. Doing the cruise gives us something memorable to do in the evening. It stretches the activities by taking some of the time pressure off daytime hours, yet stays within our budget.

Whenever we enter a big city (like Paris) by bus — or hire a bus for a transfer from a train station, boat dock, or airport — it is efficient not to go directly to the hotel, but to take advantage of our bus and driver to get a guided orientation tour. This lets us efficiently see sights we likely wouldn’t get to otherwise.

In Bruges, the Half Moon Brewery tour is great, but eating there is like eating at a Belgian TGIF. This year, we’ll still tour the brewery. But then, rather than tasting beer and having lunch there, we’ll enjoy our beer-tasting in a characteristic pub in town. These pubs generally don’t want an American tour group killing their time-honored ambience in prime evening hours. But it’s our hope that we could invade the place early, around 5 p.m., for a beer-tasting session with the option for tour members to linger for dinner there.

With all our meetings, I realized that I was under-appreciating the local expertise of our guides. We don’t need to supplement their guiding skills by hiring local guides for city tours, as we would have back in the days when I was guiding and most of our guides were generalists. These days, most of our Spanish guides are Spanish, and our French guides are likely French. Many of them also work as local guides; they can capably do local tours. They prefer to do this. And they can give the tours in the context of what the tour members have already learned and experienced on our tour. Local guides are territorial, and their claims to their turf can be backed up by local laws. While it may be illegal for one of our guides to overtly guide a tour through many Italian cities, it’s perfectly OK in Britain. (In cases when it’s illegal but we want our guide to lead the tour anyway, we have to hire “silent local guides” who get paid but just accompany our group silently.)

More tour changes later.

For over 20 years now, my guides and I have had an exciting review process where we fine-tune our tour itineraries. For me, it’s an important and exciting process because itinerary innovations and improvements can be multiplied by literally thousands of trip experiences.

Originally, when we were tiny, it was a “mind meld” where my few guides and I would connect in a bar or café somewhere in Europe for a brainstorming pow-wow. Now the process is much more involved and takes place here in Edmonds.

Our itinerary review has three stages: First, I meet with my tour operations staff. Steve Smith coordinates all our seventy-some guides. Michelle Kono directs our tour operations department. Michelle divides the tour operations responsibilities for each of our 35 itineraries among her staff. Each person is responsible for arranging and reserving all tour activities for the various tours they are assigned. They know these routes intimately and personally. For each separate itinerary, we review each day’s plan and I weigh in with changes I’d like in an ideal world. We debate these and come up with a consensus as to what our vision is.

For the second stage of the process, we factor in our guides’ experience and advice. We fly our guides to Seattle from all over Europe for our annual itinerary planning summit — a series of round-table discussions covering each itinerary we offer. Michelle’s staff oversees the itinerary sessions as all the guides share their experiences, discoveries, and lessons from mistakes from last year’s guiding. They give my pie-in-the-sky wishes a hard reality check (factoring in drive times, legal limits on how long bus drivers can work, endurance levels and interest levels and comfort levels of their tour members, and their experience with these activities). I am intentionally not in these meetings so the guides are comfortable lambasting my ideas when necessary. They accept, reject, or modify my proposals and come up with proposals of their own. Michelle’s staff distills all decisions into a summary document.

 After the guides fly home, we have the final stage of the process. Michelle and her appropriate staff person follow up with me — reviewing the synthesis that came out of the first two stages. We then finalize the changes for the coming year’s tour program.

Yesterday we finished up this collaboration. I am impressed and even humbled by the expertise and commitment to quality our guides exhibited in this process. They beat up a lot of my proposals, improved others, and came up with great suggestions of their own. And I am thrilled with the improvements we’ve reached consensus on.

Our main theme through this process: Wring maximum experience out of every mile, minute, and dollar for our travelers in 2010. In challenging economic times, our guides know they need to work harder than ever. And we need to exceed higher expectations than ever.

For 2010, we are determined to enrich the tour experience we offer. We will promise more in our promotional materials and tout the extras we offer more aggressively in our marketing. When we have a bus reserved to transfer a group from a boat or train to the hotel, we’ll use it for a two-hour city orientation tour. When we hire a local guide for a two-hour museum tour, it’ll be a particular guide…not just any local guide. And we’ll keep that guide for a one-hour city walk after the museum. We’ll nurture relations with local experts who enjoy giving our groups their personal insights into their cultures in casual happy hour/reflections times. We’ll trade any redundancy for itinerary variety. We’ll abandon the bus when the train will save two hours of time in transit. We won’t baby the group if a particular activity may be out of some tour members’ comfort zones. (We’ll do the visits to the local baths, the coffeeshops, the concentration camp, or the force-feeding of the geese — offering those who just don’t want that experience a comfortable alternative.) We’ll be sure those on our tours will never be stuck in lines that Americans on other bus tours think just go with the territory. If there’s an option that only half the group will likely have energy for after dinner, we’ll commit our guide to organize the experience and escort it, even if it’s not included in the actual tour.

I’ll share some of the specific itinerary changes next.