I first met traveler Brandon Twine in 2022 on our Switzerland Adventure. He was on his first tour with us and his first group tour ever, even though his wife, Carol Guttzeit, had been traveling with us since 2007! Brandon has since traveled with us in 2023 to hike along Hadrian’s Wall and this year to hike in Scotland. So I was intrigued when I saw this Google Review Brandon left us after the Scotland trip.
We just completed Zephyr’s Scotland Hiking and Whisky Tour. It was one of the best adventure vacations we’ve ever experienced. They are a terrific adventure tour outfitter, a model of how it should be done. Their trips are extremely well organized, tons of fun in beautiful parts of the world, with an emphasis on adventure and exploration, along with scalable exercise options and cultural discovery. The Zephyr tour leaders and local guides are always top-notch. While the tours attract like-minded people, we can also have our own space and not have to be part of a herd all day. I cannot recommend Zephyr highly enough and am grateful we are able to enjoy their awesome tours.
Brandon agreed to answer a few questions for us so we could find out why he was converted from not attending Zephyr vacations to doing three in a row.
In your Google review, you wrote you liked the “scalable exercise options”. Why is this important to you?
We wanted to know we had options each day, whether that was the shorter or longer hikes. In case we were not feeling as great on a given morning, or wanted to take advantage of an optional whiskey distillery tour or tasting, we wanted the flexibility each day. Zephyr provides this on their tours, which is part of the appeal.
You also wrote about opportunities for “cultural discovery”. Can you tell us about that?
This is a priority for us in adventure travel. We want a diversified experience, including exercise and cultural discovery – which includes many things like getting to know local people and their lives and culture, food and drink, architecture, and history. We want to experience the world in interactive, fun, and physically active ways.
I wanted to ask you about the comment you made “we can also have our own space and not have to be part of a herd all day”. Why is this important to you?
As “extroverted introverts”, we prefer to have the options of interacting with other people or doing our own thing. This is a feature of Zephyr tours. We also like to be able to “design our own mini-adventure” within the bigger adventure, which Zephyr accommodates with its flexible day plans. For example on one day we called an audible and went with the fantastic local tour guide Ally to several distilleries not on the agenda. We skipped a leg of hiking to do this. Which led to fantastic side adventures.
We often have people consider joining us because they are interested in a tour location or activity but they are hesitant about joining a group tour. What would you tell someone like that?
Zephyr is very thoughtful with their tour designs, including not only the fascinating daily adventures but also not being rushed, with relatively spacious day plans. Zephyr also does an excellent job with moving our gear and luggage along daily, so we don’t have to worry about that. And the country inns and accommodations are generally very good. All things we don’t have to plan or deal with logistically, so we can focus on our experience. To me this makes this type of group tour totally worth it.
What would you tell someone about traveling with a small tour company like ours?
What stands out is the engaged and enthusiastic Zephyr alumni community. That tells me something about the quality of the tours and company, as well as the fact that we will generally have many like-minded people on the trips.
Anything else you would like to add?
I also really appreciate the engagement of the Zephyr team with alumni to add trips not in the upcoming year’s official catalogue, or even on the drawing board yet. The idea of the Scotland trip for example was concocted by my wife Carol and several others, and Zephyr wound up creating it, and delivering the tour in a fantastic manner. Thank you Zephyr so much for that!