Self guided tours are those tours to new places that many people prefer to take during their vacations without depending on a tour guide or a tour company to take them around.

All our trips (almost all the day trips too) have been self guided. Some times, we have made use of travel agents to do our bookings (eg. visa booking to some countries, flight ticket booking, etc) , but predominantly managed our own planning and execution for most part of our trips.

Self guided tours are for those people who have a little bit of patience to read up on the internet and plan based on their needs. In our case, we had almost always taken our children along and hence most of our trip planning was around child friendly activities only.

Such planning around self guided tours have resulted in memorable tour experiences – some of the specific advantages are:

• Flexibility around timing – you can start when you want
• Choice of food – we prefer free breakfast, but the flexibility to explore at our own pace for lunch and dinner elsewhere
• Choice of hotel with Internet access  – we always go for hotels with free internet access

Some of the things to consider are:

1. Visa applications
2. Flight Choices
3. Food choices in flight
4. Travel Choices (car or train or bus)
5. City Tour Choices (bus tour, duck tour or audio guide)
6. Travel adapters as well as converters (if required)

Some of the sites we have always depended on are:

• Trip Advisor: For experience of users on various hotels, cities, etc
• Wikipedia: To learn more about any city
• Weather.com: To find out about the weather at any place
• Google Maps: To get an idea of the driving directions as well as places to visit.
• XE.com: For currency conversion

This will be the basis behind each of the ‘Self Guided Tour’ recommendations on the Travel section of this website. Hope it is helpful.