Long story short, I am determined at this point in my life to get my damn passport and FINALLY go to Spain! I’m toying with the idea of doing a guided group tour kind of thing to make sure I get to see and experience a wide variety. A Google search brings up a lot of different companies providing tours, so I’m hoping someone here will be able to narrow down the results for me.
FWIW, I’m single and will be 30 in January (wow it’s weird to put that in writing), so I’m not looking for a couples or families tour.
Most tours are going to cater to couples/families, for logistical reasons. You may need to pay a single supplement if you go on a commercial tour, which significantly raises the price of the tour. Be sure to check out the companies’ policies with regard to single supplements before you book anything!
I’ve not done a tour with a company, but I’ve heard good things about Adventures Abroad, Rick Steves Tours, and Intrepid Travel. Intrepid Travel caters to younger people and offers more “adventure style” tours rather than the sedate bus tours most other companies prefer.
saramamalana, maybe you should decide what do you want to see before choosing who do you want to see it with? La Alhambra, Toledo, Segovia, Madrid, Barcelona? Music festivals? Film festivals? Dali, Miró, Velázquez or El Greco? Beaches or skiing?
Spain isn’t very large in the map but it’s got enough material for years, to me saying “recommend me a tour operator” without more info about what you want to do there is like saying “recommend me a good college.” What do you want to do, study physics, go to law school or get drunk?
You should really re-think the idea of a tour. I did a solo trip to Spain two years ago, and the logistics were very easy to work out, especially the trains between cities.
A third for rethinking tours. With a little internet research you could put together a great itinerary for yourself and have the added benefit that you can abandon it if you want to do something else.
I agree that you don’t need a tour. If you get to a city and you’re desperate for someone to tell you about it, most places can recommend a guide who actually specialises in that place, rather than a general tour guide who’s usually more of a rep on the coaches. You may also find, based on my observations of coach tours while we were travelling round Europe, that tours catering to single people tend to be filled with late teen/early twenties Australians, South Africans and Kiwis who are really only there because they want to get drunk in as many countries as possible. If that’s your thing too, have at it; but I’d get very bored and pissed off very quickly if I wanted to see art, architecture, taste the real food etc, and they were just being childish.
Try having a look at the Eurail website. Details of rail tickets, extra benefits, and links to tourist information about Spain. Don’t expect to see the whole country though; decide what you HAVE to do, and do that. We spent three months in Spain and only scratched the surface.
