Why You Travel in a Group
Two weeks ago we wrote about why you travel solo. Today we have a look at what group traveling offers for you.
Group travels, especially small group travels, like we offer them, are a great bridge between a personal journey and a group travel adventure, always with the option and no obligation to share the outcome of your personal insights with like-minded fellow travelers.
Let’s have a look what group traveling means.
Feel responsibility
Feeling responsible for a group of people is encouraging and great because it makes you feel important. You’re like a mom and dad, teacher and mentor for them. This also means that you are there for your people when things don’t go smooth or group dynamics happen, for example people who are naturally no strong characters being treated questionable by the majority of a group, or managing psychological patterns like in-group favoritism.
Boost your creativity
In our group travels we dive deep into the local and occasionally family culture of the countries we visit — always respecting the space and circumstances. There, adaptation processes within the group and outside play a crucial role because being immersed into an unknown (group) culture boosts your creativity. Learning a new language, for example, lets you think new and differently.
Master difficult situations
Experiencing other realities increases your stress resistance because when you’ve seen a difficult situation was mastered elegantly by someone, and you like the approach to overcome the difficulty, you will literally want that situation to come. You can become an excellent problem-solver. You also become more flexible (less rigid and fixed) in how to react and act when an idea is needed. Applying patterns you’ve seen before, especially out of your known cultural context, is a practical tool. The more patterns you aggregate to better equipped you are — on your way to become the person you like to represent the most.
See what’s under the surface
Deeply understanding more than one culture (especially the „why“ part) will increase your awareness of seeing underlying connections and relations of particular elements that you can associate with the knowledge you acquired before.
You’re a team
In sports you often encounter that one can do things better than the other, or two people being similarly capable of the same things. While in a group it takes some steps to actually form a team, ideally a team whose team members have complementary skills, and once built you won’t want to leave it again. That’s the team you really enjoy spending time because the complementary abilities will serve the shared journey well. If you don’t like cooking, your newly acquired friend of the group surely will. In return you will give the group a salsa lesson, as part of shared group-learning session.
No logistics bother you
Travel frustrations and annoyances are gone and replaced with options. We take care of all the organizational part, you simply enjoy — stress-free and full of inspiration to be totally into the learning of your personal journey within the group.
Plenty of a-ha moments
Having small revelations traveling on your own is both wonderful and charming. They help you in your personal journey of self-discovery, and build the ideal foundation for the bigger revelations that you experience in a group. They will affect not only your current moment but the whole life phase you’re in, or may even shift your complete life.
Instantly share
In company with great people finding off-the-beaten-track gems is a highlight you instantly want to share. And it’s something you could have found by yourself, but most likely wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much as in a group.
Group travels with ON BOARD
We will go into more detail in part 3. Right now we give you an idea of how our group travels work.
The trips have a structured itinerary, and there’s always time for independent exploration (if you choose so). Approach our local experts and mentors for a few tips, then head out solo or go with the flow of the group, and be amazed by where the day takes you.
Our travelers are usually a bit more female than male while ages range from 18 to 35 — exceptions included. Our small group is carefully selected through our application process to make sure we have diversity that ignites creativity, encourages you to interact in different manners and provokes your point of view.
They all have in common the general sense for being adventurous, open-minded, curious, friendly and exposing themselves willingly into the wild — like it’s written in our manifesto for the eternal travel-learner unwilling to rest. So, yes you are in a group but it won’t feel like that because what we create with our sense of community is an intimate family feeling.
We leave it open for you to know beforehand who exactly you’ll meet, but that’s all part of the fun and the first step in learning while traveling. You can’t and probably don’t want to always know before who will be the encounters of the day. Let the journey show you its way and be certain that ON BOARD takes care of good general structure — every day.
Small group travel, learning from local mentors and experts visiting their communities, diving deep into the realities of the country, falling in love with it (ideally), shared learning sessions applying alternative education concepts and your personal transformative, self-discovery learning journey is what an ON BOARD travel program comprises in general terms.
Taken into consideration how much value you get, we have a more than fair price tag right now (and will change in the future). With 66 to 100 USD per day (depending on the country) and our goal to make the travel adventure a learning experience that shapes and transforms you, we recommend to join at least for 14 days.
Also, joining for a longer time, both your flight ticket and program costs go down accordingly, while you become witness of your own personal transformation and the effect it has on the group, and vice versa — because through mirroring within the group is how you see who you are or have become, and that is invaluable, especially because the people saw who you were when you started the trip with them, and who you have become now.
You’re in good company
We believe in both our analytical sense and intuition finding the right people that inspire each other from the first second on. In mind-blowing, high-level conversations with each other you’ll become the version of yourself whose capabilities want to be expressed in many ways — sports, manual art crafts, theoretical writings, dancing wildly in the forest, hugging a tree to reflect your deep connection with nature, and many more. Your best self is currently waiting in line, let’s make it come to the front to receive the ticket to your best self.
To be continued in 2 weeks.
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(Originally published on the ON BOARD Blog)
