We have often read people commenting “your tour pics look great, but I’d never take part in a tour with so many vehicles”. And we understand their point. However much big groups are profitable for us as tour operators, they can be a serious hassle for their participants, suffering from all the shortcomings of big groups – slower tour conduct, increased risk of wrong turns, a much higher probability of breakdowns (which further add to slowing down the tour and making emergency changes in the itinerary), and sometimes also not having the best communication and understanding among the many participants.
As we’re very fond of our tours offering a feeling of a spontaneous journey among friends, rather than looking like an organized tour with a strict timetable and official guidance, we decided to limit the size of our groups to 6 vehicles, which we feel still preserves that easy going, intimate and spontaneous small group feeling. That does not mean that we’re going to limit our tours to 6 bookings – we will simply split the entire number of bookings for a tour into smaller groups, which would start from the starting point with a 1-day timeshift, each group with it’s own guide. That means, for example, if a tour starts from something like June 12th and ends on June 21st, group two will start on June 13th and end on June 22nd. We’ll keep our clients updated with the overall booking numbers, and we will timely inform them if they’re in group 1 or 2 of a particular tour. If the overall number of bookings is under 12, we will evenly split the participants, to form groups even smaller than 6 vehicles, thus increasing the tour experience comfort further.
A tour is required to have at least 3 bookings in order to take place. In rare circumstances we will also accept to guide tours for which we have only 2 bookings (so most tours very quickly become guaranteed).
Too many vehicles in a tour increase the probability of breakdowns occuring. How much exactly?
Over the past decade we’ve found out that increasing the number of participating vehicles in a group brings exponential growth to the probability of breakdowns, rather than just a slight increase. If one single vehicle driving has a 1% probability of a breakdown, and 2 vehicles have 2%, 3 vehicles raise that to 4%, and 4 vehicles to 8%. However, 5 vehicles already bring that to 16%, and 6 vehicles to a (still tollerable) 32%. 8 or more vehicles mean a 100% probability that, at some point of a 10-day tour, at least one of the vehicles will certainly break down and require technical assistance in a car workshop (in practice, 10 vehicles usually means more than one breakdown during a tour). And that turns a tour guide from someone focusing on providing a seamless, nicely flowing experience for the participants, into an organizer of car repair, while the rest of the group are waiting for the affected car to be guided or towed to a workshop, so that they can continue with driving the planned route (and usually end up with a shortened itinerary for that day).
As we feel that you’ve not payed the price for tour participation to wait for solving other people’s technical problems, we simply decided to lower the number of participating cars to a number that practically guarantees us that a breakdown does not occur on every tour that we organize. Of course, unexpected events can never be completely ruled out, but small groups have an overall better tour experience!