07/04/2022
We saw this notice from Oscar Wilde Tours. We'd be delighted to get you in touch!!! Don and Steve at LGBT Vacation Planners.
Friends!
We have three events this weekend! On Sunday, Joshua Lubin-Levy will tell us about New York's Hudson Piers and their long history as a center for LGBTQ+ communities. And on Saturday, Professor Lear is giving two LGBTQ+ Secrets tours of the Metropolitan Museum for our friends at Out Professionals. There are only 5 tickets left (or fewer), so sign up now if you are in or near NYC!
Also, don't forget to check out our fall Italy and Greece tours. Several people have signed up already (including 2 for *both* tours—the "Gay Gods and Heroes package"), and we are getting lots of questions, so we thought it would be good to answer them for everyone on our mailing list—in case you are wondering too....
1. First of all, what happens if Covid surges or some other international situation interferes with travel? You do not need to worry about this. We will cancel the tours if travel seems inadvisable and return all deposits. We have the same worries as you. At the moment, travel to Italy and Greece looks good, so we are planning the trip. If you think it would be fun, book, to make sure you get a place. And know that we will be cautious for you.
2. How are our tours different from other group tours? Our tours are much more like travel than tourism. Most tours introduce you briefly to a city and its absolute most famous landmarks. And then they move on to the next place. We luxuriate in each location instead. Rome wasn't built in a day, and you can't discover its treasures in an afternoon, so we spend four days there and take you to a lot of different places in and near the city, including famous ones (the Colosseum, the Vatican Museum) and less famous but equally amazing ones, like gay Emperor Hadrian's city-sized villa in the nearby country town of Tivoli. And the same is true for Florence, Naples, and Athens. Our tours always provide a great introduction for a first-time traveler, and a fun way to revisit places for the n-th time traveler as well.
3. What is the food like? To put it simply, great. We are often told we should market our tours as gourmet tours. We include breakfast every day, for simplicity's sake, and a main-meal-sized meal (lunch or dinner) most days. The restaurants are very special ones, and the meals are varied and full of local specialties. We do not generally eat in places frequented by tour groups, but in Professor Lear's favorite restaurants throughout Italy and Greece.
4. What are our groups like? We take up to 14 people on our tours. We really don't have an age profile: we have had people from 19 to 90. We generally have a mix of singles and couples, often also small groups of friends traveling together. Probably the thing that strikes us most about our groups is how they quickly come to seem like a group of old friends. Professor Lear says he often comes downstairs to find the whole group having drinks together at a cafe near the hotel. Our groups are not just random assemblages of people, but people with an interest in common, so they unify easily.
We also want to say a word about the tours' prices. Our tours are fairly expensive—about the same as our friends' at HE Travel. Unfortunately we are a small company, and we can't get any economies of scale. But *everything* on our tours is carefully chosen. Our hotels are top-notch 4 star hotels right in the middle of the cities we visit; our restaurants fabulous; our guides all excellent; and of course Professor Lear is there overseeing everything and bringing LGBTQ+ history into focus. Also, please remember that if you are traveling alone and want to avoid paying for a private single, we try to match room-mates whoever possible. And it generally works out great. There are even a few room-mate pairs from our tours who have continued to travel together. So consider rooming!
And above all, consider coming to Italy and Greece with us—and let us know what other questions you have!
with all our best,
The Oscar Wilde Tours team
