Small groups are a big hit for tour operators: Travel Weekly

At Vacation Designers near Madison, Wis., owner Lori Derauf spends a lot of time talking to clients, explaining the changes that have been taking place in the guided coach tour model over the past 24 to 36 months.

The biggest one, she said, is that small tours are multiplying.

“Years ago, the only options were a large coach, full of people, with very fast-paced itineraries,” Derauf said. 

Now, she added, it has become common to find tours capped at 15, 18 or 22 people on some departures. 

“Our clients prefer that,” Derauf said. “They like the fact that it’s a planned itinerary with some free time and all the logistics are taken care of, but there’s not this huge group of people moving around at the same time.”

Tour operators confirm the trend and say a catalyst for the change was the Covid pandemic. When travel started up again after the initial lockdown, vacationers were distinctly wary of large groups. Big names in the tour business that had always depended on the classic motorcoach model suddenly had to innovate.

“We pivoted and we began offering smaller group versions of our classic tours,” said Steve Born, chief marketing officer for the Globus family of brands. “So you could choose between the regular departure and the small-group version. And what we found is it really took off.”

The result has been a flood of new options for travelers and advisors. Each company has a slightly different definition of small, a slightly different approach and a slightly different idea of pricing. But everyone seems to be jumping on the bandwagon with a small-group tour option.

Among the destinations that were launchpads for the trend were the national parks in the U.S. Southwest. They offered an outdoorsy comfort level where social distancing was a built-in feature.

In May 2022, TTC Tour Brands unveiled itineraries that visited national parks throughout California, Arizona and Utah. Offered through the Trafalgar and Insight Vacations brands, these itineraries used Sprinter vans rather than motorcoaches and capped tours at 17 guests.

Melissa DaSilva, interim CEO of TTC Tour Brands, said some brands are better suited to small groups than others. 

“It really depends on the price point the consumer is willing to pay,” she said. “It isn’t a one-size-fits-all.”

TTC considers Insight Vacations its premium brand, so that’s a natural home for small groups. This year its small-group tours performed “remarkably well,” DaSilva said, a run she expects to continue into next year. 

As such, Insight significantly increased its small-group portfolio for 2025, offering more than 100 itineraries on its customized “Business Class” coaches.

At Globus, increased demand for small-group tours prompted a new product line for 2025. The company’s Small Group Discovery Tours will be crafted to capitalize on having fewer people. 

“They’re new tours, and they’re designed from the ground up around the idea of ‘hey, we have fewer participants, let’s do some different sorts of included features or restaurants or experiences that were unattainable with a full-size group,’” Born said.

The idea emerged after Globus executives noticed that small-group departure dates for its standard tours stayed hot well after the pandemic subsided.

“It has grown to being in some regions as high as 30% of our volume, where we have customers choosing the smaller-group option, which has about a 10% price premium on it,” Born said. “So even despite the fact that it’s a little bit more expensive, they were gravitating toward that.”

Small Group Discovery Tours will be even smaller, but significantly more expensive — up to 35% more than traditional itineraries.

As an example of how different the tours are, Born cites Paris, where a full-size tour would connect “must-see” sights such as the Louvre and Notre Dame through a combination of a walking tour with a local guide and a motorcoach.

On the Small Group Discovery Tour, Born said, Globus plans to employ a caravan of vintage Citroen 2CV cars to ferry guests from site to site, something manageable with 15 participants but impractical with a group of 30-something.

“That’s an example of what you can do,” Born said. “To have that sightseeing delivered in a much more intimate, much more authentic and exclusive way.”

At Tauck, a small-group product introduced in 2021 now accounts for more than half of its noncruise business. The company doubled down this year, creating Smaller Group tours, where group sizes average 15, compared to 24 previously.

Tauck’s 26 departures on seven Smaller Group itineraries this year are all based on existing tours. Next year, the program will expand to 124 departures on 12 itineraries, including three African safaris.

“Although a large segment of our guests remain devoted to our classic group size, we’ve also seen incredible growth in our Smaller Group departures over the past several years,” said Tauck CEO Dan Mahar.