That's a lot of experience!
Can you share your favorite tour companies?
We don't use many tour groups other than for bus tours and for those we use Caravan Tours. We have toured the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Zion with them several times with a group of friends and again on our own. You typically need to plan a year or two in advance to get lodging in the parks and the tour provides good rooms, right on the rim of the Grand Canyon and in the lodge in Zyon.
For cruises and other trips, DGF is a part time Travel Agent so we do our own planning and booking, usually with a TA discount. Of the four 7 day cruises we took last year, two were completely free, the third one free for DGF and steeply discounted for me as a training seminar and the fourth one we actually paid full price minus her TA discount of 10%.
DGF used to use a travel agency in Florida to book our travel and the travel of many friends and family. The agency owner finally told her she books so much she should just become an agent so she did. She doesn't work with outside customers, only us, family and friends traveling with us. We get discounts for travel and she earns just enough commission to booger up her taxes with a schedule C each year and make it more interesting to keep her income in line for maximum ACA subsidies which I work through every year. We get access to FAM trips for travel agents and Seminar at Sea trips with discounts up to 70%.
We are enrolled in the Travel Rewards program for each cruise line so we get a lot of free perks at our level. We favor Norwegian Cruise Lines as the itineraries and travel rewards are more to our liking but Royal Caribbean is a close second. We cruised many years usually in a suite on the SS Norway until the boiler exploded in port and it was eventually scrapped. Suites always double your reward nights. Did Carnival once on a free 5 day as a training reward and won't be back. Costa and others are fine but NCL meets our needs better.
Cruising actually was the reason we started diving 20 years ago. We had cruised so often in the Caribbean that we were getting tired of visiting the same ports. I got a wild hair to learn to dive, which we both did, and we started diving at most ports. It was suddenly a whole new ball game. From there we started destination trips just for diving which led to us forming friendships in Bonaire. That's why we go there for 5 weeks every year to meet up with friends.
Most of our cruises we travel with a rotating group of friends from our Atlanta area and other people we have met on previous cruises. Several are from Jackson, Mississippi and even a couple from Wallasey, UK. We have met up with our friends from Wallesy in Las Vegas before and will meet them in Liverpool on our upcoming UK cruise. Just an aside, although Wallasey is just across the Mersey river from Liverpool, we found during a shipboard Beatles trivia contest that our friends knew absolutely nothing about the Beatles. And we thought we had it in the bag with two ringers.
Holy crap! I can ramble on.