I’ve been lucky, I’ve travelled a lot. Some of those trips have been on organised tours, the rest I organised independently.

• Tours take out the hassle factor. You rarely have to worry about organising anything yourself, (apart from your flights, and your tour operator will be happy to sort that out for you too). All you need to do, is turn up when and where you’re told.

• Tours provide someone you can turn to for help if anything goes wrong. Useful if you’ve just lost or had your phone stolen…

• You have someone on hand to answer all of your questions about wherever you are visiting, which can be insightful.

• Tours provide other people for you to travel with. Some of these people have become great friends of mine.

• Tours provide you with ready recommendations on things to see and do, and places to eat and drink.

• Tours can give you access to experiences you might not be able to have while travelling independently. For example, some activities are reserved solely for groups or are difficult, or too expensive to organise independently. I probably wouldn’t have gone nightclubbing in Kigali, Rwanda or in Namibia had we not been with tour guides who knew the area or had we not been travelling with a cool group of people, for example.

• You may also be encouraged to participate in activities that you might not ordinarily choose, or be bothered to do, if you were travelling alone. I would never have sky dived (as a result of group FOMO), or bungee jumped at Victorian Falls (a bet), had it not been for the group I was travelling with.

• Depending on the tour, you can find yourself in a capsule, travelling around, not having to interact with any local people yourself, or learning anything about the local culture.

• Tours are far more expensive than travelling independently.

• You won’t necessarily be able to hear everything your tour guide tells you, (or understand if they don’t speak good English), especially if you get stuck in the back of a big group.

• You are expected to tip your tour leader, drivers, and any local guides. This can add up significantly.

• If meals or accommodation are included in your tour, you rarely have any control over where you eat, or stay.

• You rarely have any control over your itinerary. You might want an extra day or hour or two somewhere, but it isn’t going to happen if you are on a tour.

• Occasionally, decisions about your itinerary are made by polling the group, bad news if you’re in the minority.

• You will often have to see or do things that don’t necessarily interest you, and can feel like a waste of time and money.

• You will spend a lot of time waiting on your bus – for tour group members who are constantly late, for your tour leader to sort things out, or your driver to wake up from his afternoon nap.

• A lot of time and money on tours is spent socialising and getting to know your fellow tour group members. This can be great if you really get on, but tedious if you don’t.

• Having even one idiot in a tour group, (and there is usually at least one), can test your patience, and spoil the experience for you. I had rocks thrown at my head in Uganda, thanks to one idiot who insisted on taking photos of militant locals who didn’t want their photo taken. Groups can be cliquey and political, rifts arise, and divisions form – it’s not the relaxing holiday that many hoped for.

• If you’re on a long tour, you may not have the same group of people with you for the whole time. This can be good if you don’t particularly like the group – people leave and new people join. The group dynamic however, often changes as a result which can be disruptive. You will also have to start the whole cycle of getting to know people again.

• It’s far cheaper. Even if you stay in the same hotels and take similar, or in some cases identical forms of transport, and engage in the same activities, you’ll often be paying a lot less in total.

• You have complete control over everything – what you do, where you stay, where and when you eat.

• You will have access to experiences which are not available to large groups of people.

• You have a lot more time and freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you feel like it.

• Tour guides can be overrated, especially if it’s their first tour, or if they are not from your destination country and have little experience of the area.

• You will meet more local people, learn a lot more about yourself, and the local country in which you are travelling. You will be free to surf the waves of serendipity, forge friendships with those you meet along the way, and will generally have a far richer experience than you would have done otherwise.

• Also, figuring out, and planning a journey yourself is a lot more fulfilling than paying someone to do it all for you.

• It’s more tiring.

• Some places are difficult or impossible to travel around independently. For example, tours are compulsory in Tibet, and travelling around parts of Africa can be dangerous or difficult without an organised tour, or your own transport.

• You don’t have tour guide to automatically turn to for help or advice, or support if something goes wrong.

• You’re not forced to do things that might be out of your comfort zone which can lead to some travellers spending the majority of their time in hostels, socialising only with other westerners.

• If you don’t speak the local language, and you can’t find many people with which you can communicate, you might have a lot of unanswered questions about the local culture. It’s times like these that I wish I had a tour guide.

So which is best, independent or group travel?