Considering doing a trip to Europe with Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT). This is a 15 day land tour in Spain & Portugal with a small group (limited to 16). Does anyone have any experience with OAT or any other tour company that isn’t outrageously expensive? We are in our 50’s and wondering about the demographics/age range of the people on OAT (heard it might be older) and wondering what other tours are out there that are more active or skew a bit younger.
We do active adventure travel with groups fairly regularly, and I’m going to guess you will be on the younger to much younger side of the travelers. You can probably call them and ask the age of people signed up for the tour.
When we went on a 4 of 5 for activity level 14 day bike tour in New Zealand last year, we were on the young side at 61 and 63. On our trip last fall we were the youngest.
We went with Active Adventures for our New Zealand trip, and we’ve done several different bike/walking trip companies, including Backroads, VBT, Sojourn, and Wilderness Voyagers.
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I have a friend who has gone on a dozen OAT tours over the last several years. She is now early 70s and often travels with a niece who is now early 50s. Most folks are in that age range, but friend says it’s the fitness level rather than age that makes the difference.
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Something to look into is whether or not all excursions are included. We chose CIE Tours over Trafalgar for Scotland, for example, because for about the same cost, there were about 5 things that CIE included that Trafalgar charged extra for. In fact that is a CIE thing–no unincluded tours. We’ve done 3 tours with Collette and there were no extra charges for any excursions.
I have no idea where OAT stands on this, but I’d look into it. Scotland with Trafalgar would have cost use almost an extra $1000 for the two of us because of the additional costs.
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I went with OAT to Australia and will be going with them to South America later this year. My travel buddy has been on 7or8 trips with them already and won’t use any other travel company. My impression is they vet their guides very well. Most groups are limited to 16 participants. The trips are a few days longer than comparable trips, so they attract mostly retired folks who trend older. On our Australia trip, the average age was maybe 71 or 72. As one of the younger participants, I greatly appreciated the patience and wisdom of my fellow travelers. By the way, we plan to do the Spain/Portugal tour next year with OAT.
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Thanks for all the feedback. I did try asking for the average ages of the other people booked on the tour we were looking at but the OAT agent said she didn’t have access to that information.
I do agree that it’s the fitness level of the group and not the age that matters but no way to gauge that in advance. Although the trip got lots of great reviews, one of my concerns is that it is rated a 2 activity level but some reviews say that it should be classified higher as it is a lot of walking uphill so I worry about being stuck in a very slow moving group.
But my friend decided to book as she was specifically interested in this tour so I did too as I am not brave enough to travel solo (H only wants to do one long trip a year which is not enough for me). Will report back after the trip!
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For those of you have gone on OAT trips, did you like the controversial topics? I really don’t care to attend those on my vacation. I’m sure you can skip them but do people do that?
In Australia the topic covered was the treatment of the aboriginal people, and it was very worthy of our time. You can skip activities if you choose to without pressure.