Australia: To tour or not to tour?

Planning your travels can be a really daunting thing. Deciding whether to go with a tour company or independently is tough, as there are pros and cons to both options. There is so much information out there on the internet that you don’t really know where to start and wish that you could speak to someone who has done it all before. Luckily for you, that’s exactly what we’ve done. Alicia is a 24-year-old, who embarked upon a 2-week tour with travel company STA to Australia, travelling down the east coast.

Q: What was the tour that you went on and what did it entail?

A: We went on the STA Contiki tour, which meant that we flew into Cairns, then went along the east coast, stopping at Brisbane and then flying back from Sydney.

Q: What did you think of STA, the company you travelled with?

A: Well really I wasn’t very impressed with sta. when I went in, the lady in the shop that I spoke to implied that she was an expert in Australia and implied that the advice that she gave was from her own experience, and she’d actually done the tour that we went on herself but when we went on the tour we realised that a lot of elements to it she didn’t describe properly or accurately and she also really misled us  in terms of the amount of spending money She said that we would need in Australia. She told us that £800 for 2 weeks would be absolutely fine in terms of spending money and Australia is very expensive and it very much was t. To put in in perspective  if we wanted to do just one of the activities on the tour we went on, which was a skydive, it would have cost us £500 so £800 spending money was not accurate. 

Q: So how much spending money would you advise people to take? 

A: It depends on what people want to do, if you’re interested in a really activity holiday where you want to do things like skydiving, bungee jumping, cannoning in rainforests, things like that, then you need to be prepared for a 2 week holiday to take a couple of thousand pounds not dollar. I’d say maybe 2-3 thousand pounds. If you are a bit more relaxed and you’re happy doing things like what my friend and myself did, walking around, looking at the cities rather than kind of doing specific activities, then you can take less. But I still took £1,200 spending money and I came back with around £400, so maybe £900.

Q: Was there anything good about the tour?

A: The good thing about the tour was that we got door to door transports for our accommodation through each from cairns from the top up he easy coast of Australia to surfers paradise, which is about just past the middle point of the east coast, so that was kind of a good thing because when we were on our own we had to get greyhound buses and public transport to get to our hotel, sometimes taxis do that was a really good thing, and also another good thing was that the tour did introduce us to places and certain activities that we didn’t know existed so it was good for kind of opening our eyes to what Australia had to offer. 

Q: Did you ever feel unsafe at any point as a female? 

A: Not in Australia and not where we went. Having said that though, we didn’t go out to any particularly rough areas or I wasn’t out particularly late at night. We didn’t go to areas where people were sort of drinking lots or to kind of anywhere that might make someone vulnerable. So I didn’t feel unsafe at any point but that might have been because I didn’t really put myself in those situations, I didn’t go down any alleys by myself or anything.

Q: What was the best experience?

A: The best experience is hard to say, probably being in Byron Bay or in Sydney and just walking around and just seeing these iconic places and just being there and soaking up the energy, probably walking through the botanic gardens in dude y was one of the best experiences because it just gave amazing views of the city, and you saw nature and man made building completely next to each other and looking beautiful.

Q: So would you advise people planning on travelling to Australia to do it independently and not with a tour company? 

A: I think so, my friend and I both agreed that when we went solo we ended up doing exactly what we wanted to do and seeing exactly what we wanted to see and not being bound by an itinerary. So I would advise doing that, and I also think that it can be done cheaper when you do that. It takes more time to plan, but it’s probably worth it in the long run.