In some years – but not all – we offer a special group tour we call an Exploratory Adventure. On these trips a small number of travelers will be joining Zephyr Adventures owner Allan Wright as he scouts the tour in person for the first time. Last year we ran a hiking tour in Georgia and the Caucasus Mountains as an Exploratory Adventure. We organized a Bolivia Multisport tour. And, we are excited to head to the Middle East for the Oman Hiking Exploratory Adventure.
What is an Exploratory Adventure?
For most of our new tours, we spend months doing research online, communicate with local sources, visit the tour location the year before, and then in the days before the tour send our guides to scout it out once more.
For our Exploratory Adventures, we take a different route by hiring a local tour operator to be our on-the-ground partner. Just doing the research to find a local partner takes a lot of time. We are looking for a company (or individual) that communicates well, has years of experience, focuses on active travel, is locally owned, and receives excellent ratings from its customers. We then spend months working with this partner to develop a tour for us that fits our goals and is tailored to our customers. By the time the tour runs, we are quite confident the tour will be successful and don’t actually visit the location in advance.
What Advantages Are There?
All our trips are fun and designed with our travelers in mind. Our Exploratory Adventures have some distinct advantages to a certain subset of our travelers.
- The group will be smaller, with a minimum of only four travelers and a maximum of ten.
- You will be traveling with Zephyr’s owner, Allan Wright.
- You will have an inside view on how a tour company sets up a new tour.
- You will actually be part of the scouting process. We will together as a group analyze whether we want to change the itinerary, adapt the activities, visit different cultural sites, etc.
- There will be more uncertainty in our plans and that can lead to amazing experiences.
To What Type of Traveler Will This Appeal?
You should be a seasoned international traveler. You should be flexible and enjoy change. You should be patient if things go wrong. You should be a good group member, a better listener than a talker.
Make no mistake, our Exploratory Adventures are still full-service, including lodging, most meals, a local guide, ground transportation, and all activities. There is no need to rough it.
Michelle Simmons, one of the travelers in traveling to Bolivia wrote to us “I have been on first-time trips with Zephyr and am looking forward to this exploratory trip. Zephyr and local guides do all the heavy lifting to plan the tour. However, first-time trips are exciting with the little unknowns and the opportunity to provide insight into future travelers’ itineraries. That, to me, is one of the real wonders of travel, where many times the road less traveled and planned out is the best experience.”