For Safe Travel Outside Normal Tourist Spots, Rick Steves Recommends This Unique Type Of Tour

While tour guide, TV host, and travel writer Rick Steves is famous for teaching Americans the best way to explore Europe, he prefers to travel beyond the usual tourist hot spots visitors to Europe tend to choose, like Paris and London. On his blog, Rick Steves' Europe, the expert recommended seeking out what he dubbed "reality tours." These unique trips aren't like other tours which take you to the highlights of an iconic destination. Instead, these are often organized by nonprofit organizations and designed to give you a deeper, more authentic understanding of a part of the world that most never get to see. 

"Compared to independent travel their tours are safer, easier (the logistics have been worked out for you), and, since they offer connections to a network of people at your destination, they give you insider knowledge, greatly increasing your opportunities for learning," he explained.

According to Steves, the secret to being a good traveler is meeting more people, and these educational reality tours can help with that. Often, they are designed specifically to put you in touch with people who actually live at your destination, so that you can gain a greater understanding of what life is like there. That could mean meeting with community organizers, staying with a family instead of a hotel, or volunteering with a local organization to leave the place you're visiting better than you found it — and hopefully leave with a greater connection to the world around you.

Rick Steves prides himself on being a traveler, not a tourist embracing culture shock, as a way to grow as a person. Those who wish to follow that philosophy may instinctively recoil at the idea of a tour of any kind, preferring to blaze their own trail around the planet — but on his blog, Steves assures his fans that reality tours are very different from the kind of glossy touristy experiences they may be imagining. In an interview with the New York Times, Steves explained: "To me, there are two kinds of travel: There's escape travel, and there's reality travel. I want to go home a little bit different, a little less afraid, a little more thankful, a little better citizen of the planet."

He once took a 2-week reality tour of Central America, and was pleased to find that his fellow travelers were political activists and working professionals hoping to genuinely understand the region they were visiting. All tours are different, but on his blog, Steves shared that his included meeting with United Nations peacekeepers, union organizers, college professors, government representatives and community organizers, allowing him to come away with a far deeper understanding of the political landscape there — and back home.

There are many options for reality tours, but on his website, Rick Steves offers a few favorites to start with. Friendship Force has tours all over the world, which typically pair you with a local family that will allow you to spend your trip in their home and truly experience what life is like for the people who live there. Depending on what you choose, you could find yourself in Tunisia walking through the ruins of ancient Carthage [pictured] or eating dinner with a family in Latvia. 

If you travel with another of Steves' picks, Global Exchange, you can choose one of their existing tours (like their Celebrating Women in Arts, Architecture and Culture in Cuba tour) or work with them to develop a trip that suits your interests. You can choose from more than 40 countries, where they can pair you with local organizations and individual families that can help you meet the goals for your trip.

Steves says that a professional tour guide is a luxury that's always worth it on a trip, but you should definitely expect to pay between $1,000-$3,000, and potentially even more, to take one of these unique tours for yourself. You may also want to consider volunteer vacations, a kind of travel that focuses on sending volunteers to places in need around the world to do a specific task. While many of these cost similar amounts to other reality tours, you could do a little more of the planning yourself by finding your own working vacation through Workaway.info, which pairs you with locals willing to trade volunteer work for a place to stay.