Touring the neighboring areas while in Hong Kong

Hi hhwong,

Welcome to Expat-Blog

Thank you

Maximilien
Expat-blog Team

Those tour groups are terrible.  Go to the Great Wall with a tour group and you'll spend 2 hours at the wall and the rest of the day at the bamboo museum, the tea museum, the silk museum and whatever trinket shop that calls itself a museum and pays off the tour company to send people to them.  They are no more than shopping tours.

This is a common drawback of joining a guided tours, as the tour guides get a hefty commission for whatever the group has spent..

A good tour company usually lists the daily schedule in details before you join, so you know ahead where you are going, and what kind of meals they serve, what type of hotel you would be in etc.

Another type of tour is "unguided", which means you pay for the hotel and airline tickets as a package.  In this case, you need to make all other travel arrangements, and yes, it would be nice if you know the local language as well.

I think guided tour are usually for people with some language barrier with the place that you are visiting. Unless I am visiting some country with high crime rate or it's very difficult to get around. Guided tours always the last on my list. The whole travel experience counts.
Just carry a translator