The Importance of Traveling with a Tour Guide

Live Like a Local – Our dedicated guides are your key to unlocking an authentic experience.

 

You might not choose a trip for the guide, but he or she is often what you remember best and most vividly when you return home. A guide—as much as any other aspect of your trip—can make or break the experience. A guide should be more than a map-reader, an agenda-follower or a spouter of statistics. A truly wonderful guide is your cultural host, a person who opens doors, reads your body language and loves to make you smile. That’s why we only work with experienced and passionate guides who proudly call our destinations home.

 

For us, the best trips are those where you don’t feel like a tourist at all. Our guides are experts at giving you the insight, the sense of belonging and a level of comfort that let you truly absorb your surroundings—without the cultural barriers that most tourists encounter. Forget about lost hotel reservations, navigating a foreign city in a rental car or arriving at a museum only to find out it’s closed that day.

On a Classic Journeys trip, you get the kind of travel excitement you crave without the logistical hang-ups that can quickly ruin the best-planned vacation. Your guide will be the kind of person whose cousin is the llama-trekker; who not only knows the opening day of truffle season but is also close friends with the truffle-hunter who’ll let you tag along; or who can easily navigate the labyrinthine medina of Fès because she lives there. You’ll be on a first-name basis because your guide stays and travels with your small group throughout your Classic Journey.

LEARN MORE ABOUT CLASSIC JOURNEYS GUIDED VACATION PACKAGES.
 

We scout our trips with our guides and involve them in all decisions about the trips before, during and after each departure. We also chat extensively with them throughout the year, which provides us the opportunity to stay up-to-date on the interesting antics and anecdotes about their personal lives and what’s taken place on tours they’ve recently guided for Classic Journeys.

Classic Journeys’ local guides can change plans in a moment to take advantage of a local event, a harvest or an unexpected invitation into a home. And your guide will also be glad to offer ideas that appeal to your special interests. Some trips have two full-time guides, and on any itinerary you may also be joined by specialists in anything from birding to wine-tasting to archaeology.