Personal Tour Packages

What's a personalised tour?

Personalised tour packages are ideal for people that don't want to join a group tour or have a tour guide. Instead they would prefer a self guided itinerary, customised to match their specific interests. People often assume that personalised tour packages will be far more expensive than an escorted group tour. This isn’t the case at all, the costs are almost identical. In some cases personalised tour packages are marginally cheaper.

The process for a personalised tour package involves the five key steps described below.

Step 1: Gather ideas

We are passionate about creating a trip that matches what you want. To do this we start by discussing some of the basic factors that need to be considered when designing an itinerary. For example, do you have a date in mind that you’d like to travel? You may not have all the answers at this stage and that’s totally fine. We realise it’s sometimes a case of the ‘chicken and the egg’. You don’t know the answers because you're not sure of the options or how much it’s likely to cost. If you’re not sure where or what you would like to do, we are very happy to offer suggestions and recommendations based on our experience and feedback from other clients. We will help walk you through from start to finish.

Dates and duration - are you free to travel any time or does the itinerary need to ‘tie in’ with other commitments? Do you have any initial thoughts on how many weeks or months the itinerary is likely to run?

Areas – are there specific places or regions you would like to visit?

Transport - do you have any preferences for transport? For example, train, light plane flights, self drive or local transport such as ferries or bus?

Interests – when you started thinking about visiting a particular area, what sort of images and ideas came to mind? For example, photography, wildlife, meeting local people, walking, dog mushing, kayaking, history, native culture, quilting or crafts?

Accommodation – would you like to stay in clean and comfortable hotels, lodges, deluxe hotels or a combination?

Step 1

Step 2: Design itinerary and prepare quote

The next step is working out the itinerary and preparing a price quotation.

Draft itinerary - we start by sketching out a draft day by day itinerary. This involves us looking at timetables for various services such as trains, ferries, coaches and airlines. If there are hotels, tours and activities that only operate at certain times of the year, we also need to take this into account.

Detailed itinerary and pricing - after the draft is prepared, we generate a detailed itinerary and price quotation for the land and flight arrangements.

Review and feedback - the itinerary and price quote are then sent to you for consideration. After you have been through the itinerary, we are very happy to answer questions and make any changes that you require. Its not uncommon for an itinerary to be re-worked a couple of times before its finalised.

Step 3: Organise reservations

When the itinerary has been agreed, we start the booking process.

Deposit - before making any reservations we request an initial deposit of $500 per person. In some cases, we may need an additional deposit depending on the services that have been included in the itinerary.

Passport copies and booking form - to ensure the reservation process is smooth, we would like you to complete our booking form and to also obtain a copy of your current passport. This is imperative as we need to make sure that reservations for flights and other services are booked in the exact names shown in your passports.

Request reservations – we send out booking requests to our suppliers asking them to make reservations for the services included in your itinerary. If we are organising your flights, we may also start holding reservations. This will depend on the airline we are using and the rules that apply to the particular airfare(s).

Confirm reservations - we monitor the booking requests sent to our suppliers and record the confirmation details for each component of the itinerary. When a service, such as a hotel, is not available we will work out an alternative. If there is major change then we will contact you to discuss
the options.

Step 4: Payment and Travel Documents

Final Payment—we generally ask for the final payment to be received 2 months prior to departure

Documents – the various documents for your trip will normally be ready around 1 month prior to departure. The documents include: detailed itinerary, vouchers for hotel and sightseeing tours, list of hotel details, travel notes and tips, airline and rail tickets

Handover - it is important that you understand the various travel documents for your itinerary, so we like to organise a handover meeting or telephone call. If you live in the Melbourne area, we can organise a meeting in our office. For those people based in other states or regional Victoria, we can set up a telephone call to run through how the documents work and discuss any questions.

Step 5: Ongoing Support

Travel - this is the exciting part where you get to enjoy the tour.

Ongoing support - help is available if questions or issues arise during the course of your trip. We will provide you with contact details for our suppliers and you can also contact our office.

Review and Feedback - after your trip is completed we enjoy receiving feedback. You are welcome to drop by the office to discuss your thoughts or once again we can give you a call.