Globus has made a bold play at the intimately sized group touring trend, introducing more than 50 new Small Group Discovery tours, while making many of its legacy core trips available on a trimmed back capacity.
“We’re aggressively moving into small groups in 2025,” Scott Nisbet, President and CEO of Globus family of brands told LATTE last week at Virtuoso Travel Week in Las Vegas.
“We’re seeing this trend everywhere. People moving from big ships to small ships, moving from Rome to Puglia and Umbria – people moving to less busy, more calm, more intimate experiences,” he said.
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In Europe the average guest count for the Small Group Discovery tour is 15 and for the rest of the world (North America, Asia, Africa and South America) it is 18 guests.
“The program opens up all new possibilities due to the group size. We can stay in different accommodations, do different excursions that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to do with a full size group.”
“Glamping in Yellowstone, staying in boutique hotel in Aix-en-Provence or a former Monastery in Tuscany – all these unique styles of accommodation, but also excursions. In Paris, we do a guided tour in vintage Citroën cars,” Nisbet said.Plus, nearly all of Globus’ tours will also be available for small groups, he said. Those itineraries will cater for 24 guests on average as opposed to the maximum of 40.
“Added all together, we’ll have 250 tours that have a small group option. That’s 5,000 departures across 70 countries.”
Meanwhile, Nisbet told LATTE the Cosmos brand is set to make solo travelling more appealing, with reduced single supplements to be offered in the near future. He was also enthusiastic for the arrival in 2025 of a new itineraries on the Garonne and Dordogne Rivers from Bordeaux in France, building on the launch in March this year of Avalon Alegria on the Douro River in Portugal.
LATTE attending Virtuoso Travel Week as a guest of Virtuoso.
