How Did Tour Become a Nasty Four-Letter Word?

PHOTO: A group learns about food on a Brendan Slow Food tour. (photo by David Cogswell)

Was it something I said?

Ever since I took on the tour operator beat in the mid 1990s, tour operators have been fleeing from the word “tour” as if it were the plague.

Back in the 1990s most tour operators called themselves tour operators. But already the fear had been cut loose and tour operators were rushing to abandon the word “tour,” replacing it with something else, “vacations,” “holidays,” “adventures” -- anything but that dreaded word “tour.”

This was strange to me because the word “tour” had always been a richly romantic and evocative term to me, bringing to mind images of travel to the most exotic places in the world that I had only read about or seen in movies. Touring sounded wonderful to me. It sounded like paradise.

I dreamed of touring, longed fervently to tour the world. It was one of my most heartfelt wishes to tour great places I had heard of all my life: Italy, Greece, London, Paris, Africa, ad infinitum. As a kid I gazed longingly at photos of classic Grand Touring cars with broad fenders, running boards and tall, ornate radiator grills.

The term “Gran Turismo,” or “GT",, evoked images of a luxurious and powerful automobile in which you could take off across the open road to places unknown. It was a term of prestige, and car makers could add a premium to the price of a car just by putting a fancy GT logo on it.

Rock and roll bands went on tour. Theatrical companies went on tour, if they were good enough to be able to take their show on the road. But suddenly almost no tour operator wanted anything to do with the word.

They couldn’t wait to get away from it, leave it behind and pretend they had never had anything to do with it, hoping people would soon forget that they had ever called themselves tour operators.

The favorite replacement for “tour” was “vacations.” I had nothing against the word “vacation,” but to me a vacation was a break from work. It was defined negatively, by what it was not. It was not working.

A vacation meant you had time off from your job. You had a week off. You might go somewhere or you might not. The important thing was you didn’t have to go to work.

Dictionary.com defines tour as “traveling from place to place” or “a long journey including the visiting of a number of places in sequence, especially with an organized group led by a guide.”

What is wrong with that? A “vacation” on the other hand is defined as “a period of suspension of work, study, or other activity, usually used for rest, recreation, or travel; recess or holiday."

That’s okay too. Who doesn’t love a break from work and routine? A vacation might include travel, but not necessarily. It’s more vague. When I hear the word “vacation” I invariably picture my body prone on a beach. That is a great thing. But it lacks the element of travel, of discovery.

So what is wrong with the word “tour”? Why did it earn such nearly universal disdain in the tour industry itself?

Tour operators will tell you that it goes back to the 1970s movie “If It’s Tuesday This Must Be Belgium,” which portrayed tours in slapstick fashion as regimented and so mechanical that the participants just followed instructions moment to moment and barely even knew what country they were in.

Who knows how many people even saw the movie, but even hearing the title gets the idea across. It refers to a kind of tour that really was too mechanical, too regimented, too detached. The image was a bunch of withering old people sitting dazed on a bus looking out the window, herded from place to place by a guide with an umbrella.

Make no mistake. There were such tours, and there still are such tours.

But for the most part the tour industry has evolved its practices to a much higher level. Today’s tour operators have updated the old template, the idea of getting a group of people together and traveling somewhere with a competent and knowledgeable guide who can take them beyond the surface of things, give them the insider’s view.

This basic template is ancient. It’s how Lewis and Clark traveled to the Northwest U.S. It’s essentially how caravans of nomadic people have always traveled. It’s a tremendously adaptable form.

Contiki, the tour operator for 18-35 year olds has adapted it to fit its demographic, turning the tour into a party, a group of young people living it up on the road and seeing the sights, with good guides to show them the way and help them avoid the dangers.

Now there are all sorts of specialty tours for people interested in practically anything, from cooking and wine to extreme sports to bird watching and wildlife viewing. The touring template is here to stay. But not the word.

Tour operators say their focus groups and market research studies have shown that people respond badly to the word. They associate it with regimentation, lack of freedom. Tour operators today have taken great pains to structure their itineraries to provide that element of flexibility and freedom that people today want.

They still provide the economies of scale in the cost of transportation and accommodation and they still provide guiding, more focused and expert than ever. But they also have figured out numerous ways to structure in free time for participants to do their own thing. And they have relaxed the schedules so it’s not so much like work.

Now after a decade or two of tour operators changing from “tours” to “vacations” they are finding the limits of the word “vacation” and it is starting to fall by the wayside too.

Just this week Collette, which started in 1918 as Collette Tours and changed in 2001 to Collette Vacations, has now changed its branding to just “Collette,” with a tagline “guided by travel,” in case anyone doesn’t know that the company is a tour operator.

Words change, and sometimes we lose words. The word “awesome” will never come back in our lifetimes. It used to mean something that inspires true awe. Now it’s just the latest in the pile of superlative adjectives, like “cool” and “groovy.” “Gay” will not go back to its old meaning in our lifetime. “Incredible” used to mean “unbelievable”. Now it’s just another superlative.

So the word “tour,” much as I treasure the concept, is lost. We still have a tour industry with tour operators who offer tours, but hardly any of them wants the name “tour” in their branding. So be it. Maybe it will come back some day. For now the word “tour” has taken a long vacation.

Follow me on Twitter @CogswellTravelP.