Believe it or not, gay travel companies don’t just spin a globe or play drinking games to select the destinations for their vacations. Careful deliberation, name-calling and hair-pulling goes into the selection of every trip.
At Brand g – and this is true to some extent for all gay cruise and tour companies – the criteria for choosing trips is based on a number of factors:
- Input From Guests
In annual surveys and occasional social media posts, we ask guests where they would like to see us go. We also maintain an “influencer” group of past guests who we poll for their opinions on proposed trips. (If you’re a past guest who would like to join the group, just let us know.) These give us a valuable window into the ever-changing interests of our travelers.
- Costs
Brand g strives to offer top value in our 4.5 and 5-star all-inclusive vacations, and luckily, our bargaining power as a company has increased dramatically over the past 14 years, as we’ve gone from offering one vacation a year to 26 for 2026. Add to this the fact that we’re not in this business to get rich – travel is our passion, and we’re content to make less-than-glamorous livings – and we’re able to give you what we hope you’ll feel is a lot of luxury for your travel dollar.
But, with that said, like all travel companies, big and small, we’re still affected by outside factors, like:
- Fluctuations in exchange rates. The Euro and The British pound, for example, have fluctuated fairly widely based on economic changes in Europe (and Brexit). Drops in rates can allow us to lower prices or offer additional all-inclusive elements (like unlimited adult beverages or special excursion options that would have previously increased the overall fare too significantly). Increases in rates are, for obvious reasons, more problematic – but not within any tour operators’ control.
- New local tour operators. When new local hosts enter a destination and competition heats up, prices can drop. Although we never employ brand new host companies (we require substantial, A+ track records from our local operators – companies like Abercrombie & Kent, to use one example – we certainly take advantage of the opportunity for lower local costs.
- On the flip side, there are destinations that will always be pricey, like Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands, Rwanda (to see the gorillas), etc., where tourism is severely restricted in an effort to preserve the natural environment. We absolutely support their commitment to ecology; but it does result in higher costs for travelers, and there’s nothing any travel supplier can do to change that.
World Events
Obviously, the ever-changing geopolitical climate can create hot spots where we’ll choose not to go. Myanmar (formerly Burma) is a good example: the unstable political situation there makes it too risky to travel to this quite wondrous Asian country, at least for now.
With that said: the U.S. State Department issues travel advisories for countries around the world; and these days, most countries have one. So, you have to parse the language. Low-level travel advisories basically just mean, “something could happen somewhere, at some time”. It hardly means the country is in the midst of a civil war. To give you some perspective, for citizens of many other countries around the world, the U.S. has a travel advisory.
There are rare exceptions to higher-level travel advisories. In 2017, for example, while we were in South Africa, neighboring Zimbabwe – which has a higher-level advisory – had a coup. We were scheduled to travel to Zimbabwe the next day. Brand g was in constant contact with the State Department, but there was really nothing to worry about, since we were traveling to Victoria Falls, hundreds of miles from the capital where the (bloodless) coup occurred. The trip, of course, went off without a hitch – you’d never even have known anything was going on.
- The Need for a Balanced Selection of Destinations and Travel Styles
We don’t want to be a company of purely European river cruises, or of solely exotic land tours. Each year, we try to find a balance between the countries we visit and the types of vacations we offer. Some will be river cruises with a one or two-night pre-cruise hotel component (primarily in Europe); some will be exotic land tours (in various locales around the world, from Japan to Nepal to Africa); some will be luxury ocean cruises; others will be combos of a river cruise and substantial land tour, like our trips to India, the Amazon/Macchu Picchu, and Vietnam/Cambodia, which provide a way of seeing a large swath of a country without constantly changing hotels. We’ve all seen those 7-night, 5-city tours, and that’s a level of torture that should be banned by the Geneva Convention.
- The Need for a Variety of Trip Lengths
We offer shorter, week-long cruises for those whose vacation time is limited, and longer 12 and 13-day trips to exotic locales for those with more time to spare. Occasionally, we’ll also offer either extensions (a 5-day trip to Jordan following our Egypt land tour, or a four-day trip to Ha Long Bay and Hanoi following our Vietnam & Cambodia trip, for example, which can only be booked in concert with the main trip) or completely separate trips that are scheduled back to back, for those who want to take advantage of seeing a nearby country when you’ve flown so far to get there. (Let’s face it, business class air is expensive.)
- The Need for New Experiences
Due to their popularity, a handful of our vacations are offered every year. But we also strive to offer six to eight new destinations or travel experiences each year. This variety makes it easier for our well-traveled guests to find a vacation that satisfies their wanderlust, thus causing them to swear their undying allegiance to Brand g and keep pictures of us under their pillows.
If you need a photo, just let us know.
