Group Tours

A group tour is the trip where the vehicle stops being transport and becomes the place you spend your holiday. On a week-long circuit a group can spend thirty or forty hours in their seats. That changes which things matter. Legroom, suspension over rough surfaces, whether conversation is possible over engine noise, and whether the people in the last row feel exiled all become significant in a way they never are on a two-hour airport run, and none of them show up on a price comparison.

The tempting economy is to book the smallest vehicle everyone technically fits in. On a long tour this is almost always the wrong call. A group of twelve in a thirteen seater is full for a week, with bags wedged wherever they go; the same twelve in a seventeen seater have a spare row for luggage, coats and the person who wants to sleep. The price difference across a week is modest. The comfort difference is the holiday. We will say so when we think you are sizing down too far, and we would rather lose the booking than have that conversation on day three.

Itinerary sequencing is where an operator earns its keep, and it is free advice we give before you commit. The difference between a well-ordered circuit and a badly ordered one is frequently a whole day of driving, because South India's hill routes are slow in ways a map does not show. Fifty kilometres of ghat road is not fifty kilometres of highway, and an itinerary built by adding up distances will be wrong. Tell us the places you want to see and we will tell you the order that costs the least road time.

Group tours also need someone to think about the driver's week, because an exhausted driver on day six is a genuine safety problem and not merely an inconvenience. Sensible daily distances, a realistic start time after a late night, and somewhere proper to sleep are all part of planning the trip. Where a hotel does not provide driver accommodation, that cost belongs in the budget from the start rather than appearing as a surprise.

Luggage is the constraint that sinks more group tours than any other. A touring group carries more per head than an airport group, because it accumulates. Count on the bags growing over the week and size the vehicle for the end of the trip rather than the beginning.

Pricing follows the outstation structure: per kilometre by seater against the daily minimum, driver's allowance per day, tolls, parking and permits at cost, and GST on the total.