Small groups are a big hit for tour ops
Since the pandemic, travelers have gravitated more toward small groups, and operators have shifted resources and crafted new itineraries to meet the demand.
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.
‘Small is big’
Tauck said a “small is big” philosophy has reshaped the company’s product offerings over the past several years, extending from its land journeys to its river and ocean cruises.
Mahar and others are quick to cite the advantages that small groups hold for many tour customers.
In lodging, small groups open up the option to stay in charm-soaked paradores, inns, guesthouses, villas and historical properties that are too small for traditional tour groups.
In transportation, beyond the Citroens and other Instagram-ready vehicles, there are more rail options for smaller groups as well as smaller vans and minibuses that can more nimbly navigate crowded streets and narrow lanes.
Small-group tours that stick with full-size coaches can offer guests more room to spread out and not be packed cheek-by-jowl with fellow vacationers.
While bigger groups can overwhelm many desirable restaurants, these eateries can usually cope with a smaller group of 10 to 20.
And as crowding becomes more of an issue in major cities such as London, Florence, Barcelona and Venice, smaller groups don’t have as much impact at one time.
In some cases, regulations are influencing group size. In August, Venice implemented rules limiting tour group sizes to 25 people, forcing large tours to be scrapped or split in half.
Smaller groups can also be deployed to secondary cities, such as Bath, England, or Siena, Italy, and visit hidden gems in out-of-the-way locations.
Specialists in small groups
Some companies have always specialized in small groups. Boston-based Odysseys Unlimited has been doing them for 26 years, taking 12 to 24 people to destinations ranging from ever-popular Italy to a newly launched tour of West Africa.
“Our distinction, I think, is that we’ve only ever done small-group tours,” said Sue Bonchi, vice president of marketing. “When we were founded [in 1998] there were some companies that did smaller group travel, but they didn’t exactly promote it that way, they just took fewer people in a full-size bus. After we started getting known, other companies that did typical group tours of 35 to 40 people started having small-group divisions. A lot of them were just taking their regular tours and having fewer people on them.”
At Odysseys, tours are designed around activities such as cooking classes or concerts that can be problematic for bigger groups to navigate. As other companies have come after the small-group market, Bonchi said, Odysseys has stuck to its knitting.
“We don’t do river cruises, we don’t own ships. We don’t do ocean cruises,” said Bonchi, adding that theme tours and other trendy trips (like skip-gen, grandparent-grandkid tours) are not offered.
Odysseys instead focuses on small groups and “excellent value,” Bonchi said.
“We won’t offer a tour if we can’t provide it with great value,” she added. “It’s not necessarily cheap or inexpensive, but what you get for what you pay — it’s significant.”
Smaller group, bigger cost
Small-group tours can average as few as 10 people at Intrepid Travel, but most come in at between 15 and 24 guests. Large coach tours tend to carry 35 to 50 people. (In the U.S., motorcoach capacity is capped at 56 people by safety regulations.)
Companies that do both large and small groups say that smaller ones naturally cost more for them to operate.
At Collette, there’s more back-of-the-house work to do, said Diana Ditto, Collette’s senior director of product marketing.
“In some ways, it’s more complex because we’re operating basically two small-group departures for every classic-size departure we would have operated in the past. That has a trickle-down effect for sales, marketing, inventory management and tour delivery,” she said.“Because the itinerary experience is a full redesign, there’s additional time and effort that goes into the research-and-development process of these smaller tours.”
In addition, the fixed costs of a tour is spread among a smaller base. Collette’s small-group departures are about 50% smaller than its standard tours.
Those costs get passed onto guests: generally, the smaller the group, the higher the price. At TTC Tour Brands, small-group tours typically cost 15% to 20% more, DaSilva said. The cost of Globus Small Discovery Tours is 30% to 35% higher, while small-group departures of its traditional tours cost about 10% more, Born said.
Lael Kassis, vice president of market development for EF World Journeys, said that in some destinations like Southeast Asia, where going small is more of the norm, there is no price difference.
The incentive for advisors
For agents, selling small groups instead of big ones means potentially less volume but higher per capita income.
“The per-person spend is higher, so the commission will be higher,” said Collette’s Ditto. “We also see higher retention rates on our small-group tours.”
Other operators emphasized the benefit of supplying what is in demand and reaching new potential clients.
“Maybe in some cases there’s a next-generation emerging market that would be a fan of a more intimate experience that offers the types of inclusions they just can’t get on their own,” said Globus’ Born. “So it opens up the window to broaden the market for an escorted tour sale, and then when [agents] have it, it expands their revenue opportunity because it’s going to be a higher ticket.”
Suppliers said some destinations seem especially suited to small groups. In addition to Southeast Asia, Costa Rica, Thailand and Peru offer an outstanding small-group experience, EF’s Kassis said.
Although small groups are in vogue, big tours remain a draw to segments of the escorted tour market and are still growing, operators say.
Beyond affordability, some vacationers wind up on big tours because they have scheduling conflicts with their preferred small tours or simply start planning too late and take what they can get, advisors said. Preformed affinity groups with more than two dozen participants are also going to be customers of large tours.
“There is also a portion of the population that wants a high-level overview of a destination, and our Classic Tours do that exceptionally well,” said Collette’s Ditto.
Still, after the pandemic, small seems here to stay.
Operators say guests have discovered that the intimacy of a small tour feels good and find the sense of connection with their tour guides, with the communities they’re visiting and with their fellow travelers deepens with fewer numbers.
“Time and again, people are investing in experiences over things,” said Matt Berna, president of the Americas at Intrepid, which markets itself as “an antidote to loneliness.”
“They want deep human connection with the countries and communities they visit, and with what could turn out to be new lifelong friends on these trips,” he said.
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