Deconstructing a point-to-point hiking tour
/[update 8/13/2022: I heard back from the luggage transfer service I mention below and they quoted me a total of £60, substantially less than I guessed from their website]
A popular way to explore the United Kingdom among outdoor enthusiasts and lunatics alike is the hiking tour. The UK is positively saturated with public walking paths and rights-of-way across private property, so the possibilities are almost literally endless. For part of my recent holiday in England and Scotland, we booked a prepackaged 5-day point-to-point hiking tour in the Lake District.
What’s a hiking tour?
There are a number of companies that sell prepackaged tours; the one we happened to book was the “Lake District Short Break” through Macs Adventure. This 5-day tour consisted of 4 nights at 3 different bed-and-breakfasts (the first 2 nights were spent at the same B&B), and 3 days of hiking. The first hike day we made a loop arriving back at our B&B in the evening, and the second two hikes took us to two new towns. On the two days we moved, Macs Adventure arranged to pick up our suitcases in the morning and deliver them at the next town by the time we arrived (this is not particularly impressive, since the towns are only 20 or 30 minutes apart by car, despite being 5 or 6 hours apart by foot). We paid a total of $1290, although it seems the price has gone up since then to $1420 for two adults.
The tour we took is not bookable as a solo traveler (this will become important shortly).
Deconstructing the hiking tour
That’s the trip sold as a single package. But it doesn’t take a genius to see that the package consists of a few discrete parts, which makes it easy to break down the actual value of the package:
4 nights lodging
4 breakfasts for two
2 luggage transfers
walking directions / GPS-supported map (built into Macs Adventures’ fairly cumbersome app)
Two nights in the cheapest room at the Brantfell House costs £192 ($233), a night at the Old Water View £120 ($145), and a night at The Beeches £90 ($109), although I was unable to verify that final number with a sample booking.
It seems that all three properties include breakfast with all their rates, so let’s assign that a value of $0 for now.
Macs Adventures obviously doesn’t handle luggage transfers themselves; they sell tours all over the world and aren’t going to own a fleet of minivans in every country. In our case, they contracted our luggage transfers out to Brigantes Walking Holidays and Baggage Couriers. They don’t have prices listed for our exact itinerary, but it appears their minimum charge is around £80 per person, or £160 ($194) for two (I put in a quote request for our exact route and will update this post when or if they get back to me).
Finally, while walking directions are free from a variety of websites and apps, it is nice that Macs curates specific routes for each day, and the downloadable maps (for offline use) and GPS integration are worth something too, so let’s assign that a generous $25 in value.
So the total value provided by Macs Adventures, should you book the component parts separately, is about $706, which is actually somewhat more than the per-person cost of the trip ($645). Of course, that brings us back to the point I highlighted above: this trip can’t be booked for solo travelers, so we paid $1290, or $584 more than the trip would have cost à la carte.
Obviously that’s not to say Macs Adventures made $584 in profit; presumably they negotiate bulk rates with their hoteliers and luggage transfer services, so their per-trip profit is somewhat higher than that.
Other alternatives
Above I broke down how to recreate an existing point-to-point package tour to save money, but there are a few obvious alternatives it’s worth briefly mentioning.
First, we needed a baggage transfer service because we were spending a week in the UK before and after our tour, but if you’re a serious hiker and that’s all you plan to do on your holiday, you can simply pack a backpack with everything you need, and indeed many of the people we passed on the trails had the heavy duty backpacks you’d expect to see on the John Muir or Appalachian trails. In Ambleside I even found a laundromat to wash my first week of clothes, so packing light doesn’t have to mean wearing soiled clothes or washing them in the sink every night.
Alternatively, instead of a point-to-point hiking tour where you check out of one room and into another every day, you can avoid the need for luggage transfers by setting up a base of operations in a town with a variety of nearby trails. And remember, you don’t need to walk all day: on our first walking day we took a ferry to our starting point and then walked back to our B&B. Likewise, there’s no shame in walking out from your B&B and taking a bus or taxi back.
Conclusion
This was our first hiking tour, and it was plugged into the middle of an already-complicated itinerary, so I was grateful that we were able to pay someone to arrange everything for us, and it turned out to be a wonderful time, albeit with a few hiccups we would have encountered either way.
Having said that, we’ll almost certainly never book a packaged tour like this again, since all the tour company did in this case was stitch together pieces that could easily be booked on their own. There are exceptions, like tourist attractions that can only be visited as part of a package tour, but in most cases the savings are significant enough that it’s worth recreating almost any tour simply by breaking it down into its component parts.
