To Use a Tour Company, or Not to Use a Tour Company? That Is the Question.

In an age of the internet, when travel sites are popular and pervasive, it’s common to question the need of the traditional travel agent. However, there are many good reasons to use a travel agent when looking into planning a trip, especially if you’re going on a music performance tour. Listed here are just a few of the many advantages of using a performance tour company:

1) Saves time – You have things to do, places to go, people to see. Planning a big trip can use up a lot of your valuable time, between sifting through magazines, books, and websites to find itinerary and lodging options (among other things), and organizing your research to come up with a fun, safe, and enlightening trip. Travel agents have been at this task for years – not only do they have all the resources at their fingertips, but they can organize it all for you. Meanwhile, you get to use that extra time to do your own thing.

2) Saves money – Maybe you’re thinking it would be more expensive to work with a travel agent, due to agency fees. However, agency fees are usually quite small, if even required at all…and what you dole out, you more than gain back. Agencies are often offered special deals on airline tickets and hotel prices that the individual trip planner might not be eligible to receive on their own. Thus, using a travel company could in fact save you quite a lot of money.

3) Personalization – You have a general idea of where you want to go, what you want to see, the types of things you might like to do, but it’s time to get to specifics. Between your desires and needs, and the knowledge a travel agent has about your destination and preferences, your agent can build you the perfect tour, set with an itinerary built to fit your individual preferences. You sing in a choir specializing in early music? They’ll send you to Germany to sing in the same venues that saw the likes of Bach, Handel, Beethoven, and more! You play in a marching band? They’ll send you to the Dublin St. Patrick’s Day Festival! They’ll even deal with individual needs such as dietary restrictions and making sure venues and hotels are handicap accessible if need be.

4) Knowledge – In all likelihood, there are some truly wonderful things to see and do in your destination city that you’d never know about without the guidance of a knowledgeable travel agent. Along those same lines, it’s entirely possible there are sights you think might be cool to see because they’re popular tourist spots – your travel agent can weed out the rewarding stops from the ones where you’d perhaps be waiting in line for hours just to get a brief glimpse of a sight that isn’t necessarily worth the wait. Additionally, your travel agent would have up-to-date information about location details such as peak and off-peak times, recent closures, construction, or special events occurring at the venue. In addition, your travel agent knows just how important your instrument is to you and will make sure to find you only the best and safest means of instrument transport available in your destination city.

5) Connections – Travel agents have been at this for a while, thus have made many connections with people all over the world. Not only can they set you up with a personable and knowledgeable tour guide, they can also probably book concerts for your group in amazing venues you might not be able to sing or play in if you were planning the tour on your own.

6) Troubleshooting – Now, hopefully your tour would go off without a snag, but let’s play devil’s advocate here – what if something did go wrong? Well, lucky for you, you’d have your trusty tour manager on call to help troubleshoot your issue and speak to the right people to get your problem solved quickly and easily!

What are you waiting for? Get started on planning that trip of a lifetime!

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