Group travel for garden clubs is trending
Just like growing your own garden, our customized group tours allow you to craft an experience that’s all yours. Check out how two travelers enjoyed group travel with their gardening clubs.
These days, there isn’t much you can’t customize—from T-shirts to phone cases and beyond—but did you know that you can also customize an entire tour around your hobbies and interests? Every day, we help travelers like you craft the trip of their dreams. Think: multigenerational heritage tours with your family or visiting the hometowns of your favorite authors with your book club. What style of customized group tour is trending right now? Group travel for gardening clubs!
We sat down with seasoned travelers and Group Coordinators Julia and Carol to discuss their recent customized group tours. Both Julia and Carol worked with the Go Ahead team to craft custom tours that would make their gardening clubs happy. Julia jetted off to Spain with her group, while Carol and her crew toured the gardens of England. Read on for more about why these two loved their experiences and how you can make a custom tour work for you, too.
See why customized group tours can be the best way to travel ➝
A garden tour in Spain with Julia
Julia was a horticulture professor when she began taking groups of travelers abroad with Go Ahead Tours. She started by taking her students to the very rainforests they had been studying. “My first tours were standard, and they were fabulous and very popular, but my Tour Consultant once asked me if I had any interest in doing a custom itinerary to focus on horticultural topics,” Julia said. “I started with some simple research of locations we would like to see, and the creative team at EF took my ideas and came up with some suggestions, and we jointly created dream tours that were perfect for the curriculum I was teaching.”
Julia’s recent garden tour in Europe focused on Spain and started in Barcelona, where they visited the world-renowned Barcelona Botanical Garden—home to more than 1,300 plant species from around the world. From there, Julia and her group boarded a train and chugged to Madrid, then Cordoba, with an optional extension to Seville. Highlights of this garden tour in Spain included the country’s largest royal residence, the Royal Palace, and a guided tour through the nearly 20-acre Real Jardin Botanico—which houses more than 5,000 plant species—in Madrid.
Looking for a pro tip? Traveling by train, like Julia and her group did, is one of our favorite ways to explore. While in transit, travelers can still enjoy seeing the sights as they try to spot local wildlife, and—especially for gardening clubs—flora and fauna, while bonding with their fellow group members. This is just one of many ways that working with the Go Ahead team to craft your own Customized Tour pays off. We have all sorts of tips, like traveling by train to maximize sightseeing, to share with you and integrate into your tour.
An England garden tour with Carol
Carol has taken three tours as a Group Coordinator, her most recent being a customized group tour organized around the gardens of England. “Some of my previous travelers belonged to a garden club,” she said, “and they wanted to go to the Chelsea Flower Show.” So, Carol and our team of experts planned an 11-day trip from London to Bath to Oxford—with stops at the sprawling grounds of the Ashridge House estate, the iconic and vibrant Chelsea Flower Show, and even the expansive, 240-acre RHS Wisley Garden.
Carol chose to create a Customized Tour with EF Go Ahead Tours because she already knew and trusted the team she’d worked with before. She’s taken many groups on past tours with Go Ahead, so when a previous traveler asked her about creating an England garden tour, she jumped at the opportunity. “It was nice to be able to give [Go Ahead a list of] the places we wanted to go and let you guys do it. You took the work out of it,” she said. As far as what her travelers thought of the tour, she told us, “Some of them were saying they got to go to places they never thought they’d be able to go to. They were avid gardeners. So, there were a lot of ‘Oh that’s how they do it!’ moments.”
Highlights of Carol’s England garden tour included the 111-year-old Chelsea Flower Show, which features 23 acres of curated floral displays and gardens at the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London. This was a real bucket-list stop for most of Carol’s travelers, who enjoyed an entire day devoted to walking the famous grounds. Those who didn’t want to spend the whole day there took advantage of some free time to wander the surrounding area, grab a cuppa, people-watch, or shop. In short, there was really something for everybody.
See how other travelers have customized their tours
Why Customized Tours work well with group travel
Crafting a Customized Tour with a group means you can bring together people with the same interests. Just like Julia and Carol, who brought their gardening club friends together on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, you can assemble fans of “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” “Ted Lasso,” or “Outlander,” who want to visit locations that remind them of their favorite books or shows. Plus, if you become a Group Coordinator and bring a group of six or more friends with you, you earn your spot on tour for free—along with rewards points you can spend on even more travel perks, like flight upgrades and exclusive Group Coordinator-only trips called Convention Tours.
While you’re working to fill your tour, we’re with you every step of the way. Customized Tour or not, count on us for advice on getting people to sign up for your tours, plus materials like business cards and flyers to hand out and a personalized website to easily share your itinerary. If you’re like Julia and Carol and are looking to create your own custom tour, take a tip from them and lean on us. Both Group Coordinators told us how working with our team of experts was an easy way to get a Europe garden tour planned. They told our team what they wanted to see, and we put it all together. It’s as simple as that!
Meet Group Coordinator Brooke and see why she chooses to customize her group tours ➝
Why Customized Tours stand out in group travel
Building a Customized Tour naturally combines different elements that take your trip from memorable to unforgettable. Here’s how.
- Flexibility. From where you’re going to how you’ll get there—like Julia’s train adventure across Spain—to discovering the finest restaurants, museums, and shops on your route, we’ll help you experience the best of every stop.
- Bonding. When you choose to craft a customized group tour with us, you get to build the trip of your dreams, but you also get to build it around an interest or hobby that you share with friends and family. Being able to plan your trip around a shared love only deepens your connection to those people, which makes the experience even more special.
- Passion-driven itineraries. Your tour will be centered on a shared passion, making every stop, every meal, and every excursion unique to you and your group.
Looking for some travel inspo? Check out these 12 ideas for Customized Tours ➝
Thea fell in love with travel as soon as she arrived in Venice, Italy on a family trip as a child. Since then, she has made having adventures around the world a priority, with trips like retracing her grandfather’s steps through WWII, climbing glaciers in Alaska, and horseback riding in Iceland. Thea is a nomad at heart, always planning the next trip. In her off-time she is working on a novel inspired by the woman she was named after, mixing cocktails, and watching any procedural crime show she can find.
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