Private trip or group tour?

The two things, side by side

A set-departure group tour is a fixed itinerary that leaves on a printed date whether six people or thirty-six have booked it. A private trip is the same country with a vehicle, a driver and a guide belonging only to your party. Both are legitimate products. They cost very different amounts for reasons that are entirely mechanical.

Why the price differs — the arithmetic

The gap is not margin and it is not quality of service. It is division. A vehicle and a guide cost roughly the same per day whether two people or sixteen use them, and the whole of the price difference comes out of that one fact.

Sixty-seven dollars a person a day, before a single hotel room or entrance ticket is counted. Over an eight-day trip that one line is USD 536 a head. The coach costs the operator more than our sedan — twice as much — and still lands at a fifth of the price per person, because sixteen people are carrying it.

Hotels widen the gap again. A group operator buys an allocation months ahead, twenty twin rooms at a time, and pays USD 40 to 55 where we pay USD 90 to 130 for a named room in a hotel we chose for its location. That is a real buying advantage and we cannot match it. What the allocation cannot do is tell you the hotel’s name before you book, because it is not certain until the group is sized.

The same division works in your favour on a private trip too, which is why our own price grid has four rows for party size. Six friends travelling privately pay about a quarter less each than two people on the identical itinerary — the arithmetic on the pricing page shows exactly where that comes from. A private trip for six is not far above a good group tour, and it is a different holiday.

When the cheaper option is the right one

We do not sell group departures, so we have nothing to gain from this section. It is here because we would rather you had the right holiday than our holiday, and there are three cases where a set departure is plainly the better buy.

You are travelling alone on a budget

The single supplement is what breaks private travel for solo travellers. A room costs the same whether one person or two sleeps in it, and a car and a guide divided by one is the worst possible arithmetic. On our own trips the supplement runs from about USD 210 on a short northern route to nearly USD 1,000 on a long trip at the top class, and the vehicle line is not shared at all — a solo private traveller can pay well over twice the per-person figure a couple pays.

A group departure solves both problems at once. Most run a room-share scheme that pairs same-sex travellers at no supplement, and the ones that charge a supplement charge a fraction of ours. If you are one person with USD 2,000 for two weeks in Vietnam, that is a good two weeks on a group tour and an impossible fortnight privately. Take the group tour.

It is your first long trip and you would rather not be alone with it

A private trip gives you a guide and a driver and, for the rest of the day, your own company. Some people find that the point. Others discover at dinner on the third night that they have run out of things to say and that there is nobody to compare the day with. If travelling with other people is part of what you want from a holiday — meals with company, someone else deciding, a group that has already worked out where the pharmacy is — a set departure gives you that and a private trip cannot manufacture it.

This is also the honest answer for nervous first-time travellers to Asia. The fixed structure of a group tour, where somebody counts heads and the day is printed in advance, removes a kind of low-level worry that no amount of private service replaces.

Your trip is under five days and stays in one region

The private premium buys freedom, and freedom needs room to be worth anything. On a four-day trip in the north you will see Hanoi, a bay night and perhaps Ninh Binh, and you will see them at roughly the same times of day whichever way you buy, because the boat sails when the boat sails and the sites open when they open. There is very little itinerary left to bend.

Short trips also concentrate the cost. Fixed items — the airport transfers, the bay night, the one long drive — make up a bigger share of a four-day trip than of a fourteen-day one, so the per-day gap is at its widest exactly where the benefit is at its narrowest. If you have four days and one region, a small-group departure with a reputable operator is decent value and we will say so.

When private earns its money

The mirror image, stated as plainly:

• You are three or more. At four people the per-person gap has already halved; at six it is small enough that the group tour’s advantage is mostly gone and you still get your own vehicle. This is the single most common reason people move across.
• Light matters to you. Terraced fields, markets and old towns are photographs at 05:30 and crowds at 10:00. No coach leaves at 05:15.
• Somebody in the party has a real constraint. Reduced mobility, a small child’s nap, a medical routine, a diet a set menu cannot handle. A private day absorbs these without anybody being made to feel like a problem.
• You want two nights where the brochure says one. Ha Giang, Phong Nha and Hue all reward a second night, and no set departure will give you one.
• Your interests are specific. Ceramics, the war, birds, coffee, textiles, cooking. A general itinerary gives each of these forty minutes; a private guide can give one of them two days. See the full list of routes.
• You are travelling in the wet months. A private trip can move the order of the days when a forecast turns; a coach with thirty rooms booked cannot. When to go sets out which months this matters in.

Deciding, in five steps

1. Count your party and divide. Take USD 170 a day for a private vehicle and guide, divide by the number of you, and add it to a hotel room. If the answer is under about USD 40 a person a day, the mechanical argument for a group tour has largely gone.
2. Decide whether other people are a cost or a benefit. This is a real question, not a polite one. If you would enjoy dinner with eleven strangers, a group tour is giving you something free that we cannot sell you at any price.
3. Name the one thing that would ruin the trip if you missed it. A market that runs on Sunday, a light at six in the morning, a nap at two in the afternoon, a grandparent who cannot manage 300 steps. Then ask whether a fixed departure can accommodate it. If it cannot, you have your answer.
4. Check the length and the geography. Under five days in one region, the gap in what you actually experience is narrow. Over ten days, or crossing the country, it is wide — flight timings, hotel locations and the ability to rest on the right day start to matter a great deal.
5. Price both, honestly, on the same class of hotel. Ask the group operator which hotels, by name, and what the single supplement is. Ask us for the grid at your real party size. Compare the two totals including tips, entrance fees and the meals each excludes — and read how a cheaper quote is made cheaper before you assume the lower number is the lower number.

If you finish those five steps and the group tour wins, book it. We would rather that than have you spend three times as much for a benefit you did not want. If it is close, send us the dates and the party size and we will price it properly — how to book sets out what happens next.

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