Family travel or group travel... or combine both?
One of the most popular vacation options is a group tour, you see travel agents offer them all the time. There are a lot of good reasons to take advantage of these tours. There are however a lot of people who shy away from them because they don't want to go on vacation as part of a group, in most cases this is not necessary.
There are a lot of advantages to travelling as a group, in most cases the biggest is the cost. Usually when you sign up for group trip you are able to get a much better price than you would get if you booked it on your own. A group trip also allows you access to people who have local knowledge which can be a huge benefit when it comes to things like booking hotel rooms or in deciding which sites are worth seeing. This is why group travel has become so popular over the years.
While travelling with a group does offer a lot of advantages it does also come with some disadvantages. The biggest of these is that your schedule is largely out of your control, you will have to do things according to a prearranged itinerary. This is not a huge problem since you don't actually have to take part in the tours or things like that. However you will have to stay in the same location as the group which means that if you find that yo want to take a side trip somewhere you probably won't be able to.
Travelling as a family offers advantages and disadvantages that are pretty much the opposite of those for group travel. You will have a lot more freedom but you will also have to figure a lot of things out on your own. Many people prefer to take a family vacation rather than a group vacation specifically so they won't have to be around other people. Obviously whether or not this is you is going to depend on how sociable you are.
One option that you do have is to combine both a group vacation and a family vacation. One thing to keep in mind is that there are a lot of different options when it comes to group vacations. Certainly you can find them where you go as a group and you spend the whole trip together going on guided tours as a group. However there are other trips where the group vacation is simply a bunch of people going to the same place. You may fly on the same plane and stay at the same hotel but beyond that you will never spend any time with the other people on the same tour. If you want to take a family vacation and still get the benefits of a group trip this may be a good option.
