Why everyone should go on a G Adventures tour

I recently returned from a 5 day tour of Iceland with G Adventures, a company that hosts tours all over the world (even Antartica!). I had an excellent time, and found G Adventures to live up to all my expectations and more. G Adventures is one of the vendors I use to sell travel, and it is also one of my favorites. Here’s why:

Great group of people

While on tour, I was able to meet a great group of people. Surprisingly enough, I think I was one of the least traveled people on the tour! The people who use G Adventures are ones that want to immerse themselves in the local culture and experience things that normal tours just don’t offer. I met a woman from Wales on the tour who had successfully completed the Camino de Santiago in Spain (for those of you not familiar with that, it is a pilgrimage of sorts where the participants walk their way across Spain), a guy from the US who had swam with sharks in South Africa, and another woman from the UK who had lived in a remote, nearly inaccessible village in Fiji for several weeks. Spending the 5 days with them left me yearning for more travel, and filled with more desire to learn about other cultures.
G Adventures also used a local tour guide, so we were able to ask questions about the day-to-day life of people in Iceland. He also was someone who lived a more adventurous lifestyle, so was no stranger to camping in his homeland. Talking with him and hearing about how he had left a day job in an architecture firm to lead tours full time and seeing how fulfilled it made him showed that its not just a job to the guides either. They are as passionate about the tour as the participants are.

Hilmar, our tour guide, on the far right and some of us who went whale watching as an optional excursion. Photo credit: Sarah Zettpunkt

No upcharge for solo travel

Another great advantage to using G Adventures travel is that on many of their tours, they don’t upcharge for solo occupancies. Many tours will tack on a fee if you are a solo traveler or if you don’t want to share a room. With many of G Adventure’s offerings, you can pay the same price for being a solo traveler as you would for double occupancy. This has great appeal to me as I actually prefer solo travel (as it forces you to go out and meet other people and learn about their ways of life).

See things that are off the beaten path

Finally, with G Adventures, they cater to those who really want to see things that are unique and not as touristy. They do this in part by maintaining small group sizes (usually 16 or less people per tour). They also do a great job of showing off aspects of the locale that you might not otherwise see. In Iceland, it meant sometimes we’d stop on the side of the road for a photo op, or the fact that we camped instead of staying in a hotel or hostel the whole time. It showed us aspects of the culture that we wouldn’t have seen had we been traveling on a large bus tour or more run of the mill tour.

Icelandic horses (breed only found in Iceland) that we stopped on the side of the road to see. Photo credit: Abigail Dorsey

So next time you are considering a trip somewhere, reach out to me to ask if there are any G Adventure tours that might fit the bill!