Is this really a “private” tour? How will I know?
It is common practice that when you book a “private” tour using OTA’s (Online Travel Agencies) like TripAdvisor, Viator, GetYourGuide, TourRadar, etc, you are presented with many tours labeled as “private” but they are not. Some of them can be private but most of them are not.
Let’s start with this:
When selecting the number of travelers (your group size), you can see the Maximum number of travelers that this tour will allow.
If this “Maximum” number is more than 8 (12, 16, 32, 60, etc) you are not booking a “private” tour! Not only that but when the time/date of the tour approaches, the agency will most likely cancel your tour if they don’t have enough passengers to justify their vehicle’s expenses and much-needed profit.
If the “Maximum” number is 8, then you have a chance of booking a private tour! However, it is possible that if -let’s say- your group is just 2 or 3 people, you will probably have unknown passengers next to you. Thus… a non-private tour! So, before you book, ask if there will be other people with you during the trip.
Unfortunately, most of the online booking systems and OTAs allow us (tour agencies) to label a tour as private because they don’t have the means or the time to check if a tour is private.
On the other hand, we -the tour providers/agencies- like to … mislead customers by labeling a tour as “private” when they mean that it is a “small group” tour. So, you will be traveling with some unknown passengers which is nice if this was your intention to start with.
Not honest? Misleading? Still, it happens!
You don’t have to discover on the day of the tour that your private tour is not! You will be picking up different people from different places. To avoid this issue, just do the obvious checks mentioned above and also explicitly ask the OTA or the supplier if you will be the ONLY passenger on the tour!
Checking and comparing prices will also give you a good indication that a tour is not private. The non-private ones will be cheaper to a lot cheaper than the private ones! We—the tour suppliers—all have very similar expenses to cover and a decent profit to make, so extreme price differences should be a warning sign for you!
Having paid a price for a non-private tour also has the risk of a last-minute cancellation if there are not enough participants!
A private tour is a totally different experience than a non-private one.
