Tour Companies

Once you select a guide, he/she may be able to help arrange your lodging, transportation, or other needs, so that you can avoid the added cost of booking through a travel agent. Alternately, you can start by selecting a travel agent to help you; or you can go directly to a tour company that has its own guides.

The primary reason for booking through a travel agent is convenience. Historically, travel agents have played an important role because few people knew where to see viewable bears, and the work of finding out and booking was prohibitive. Now, however, with the advent of this website and the book Bear Viewing in Alaska

, most of the work has been done for you. It has never been so easy to locate all the prime viewing areas in Alaska or any other state and to learn a lot about what you can see or photograph at each site, at each period of the year. So there isn’t much point in paying for the assistance of a travel agent. Indeed, travel agents don’t necessarily recommend the viewing sites you would enjoy most, but the sites used by tour companies that pay kickbacks to the travel agents. Likewise, one company I know pays hotel clerks $50 for every customer they directed to him. Some tour companies wine and dine travel agents, especially agents handling thousands of vacationers each month.

Suppose, then, that you bypass travel agents and go directly to a tour company -- perhaps one that advertises on the web. How do you identify the one that can serve you best?

Will you book with the first company that makes an attractive pitch? Or are you determined to comparison shop and maximum the bang for every buck you spend? If you want to comparison shop, begin by selecting your preferred viewing site based on information in Bear Viewing in Alaska

. Then use this website to identify guides

or tour companies serving that site

There are basically two kinds of tour company: primary vendors that take you to view bears vs. middlemen that merely book you with primary vendors. They may call them selves tour companies, but they really function more like agents. Don’t mistake one for the other. Primary vendors know pretty much what kind of viewing experience they can offer; middlemen are usually just sales personnel who operate from hearsay; or they simply tell you whatever it takes to get you to buy.

There are also two kinds of primary tour company: multiple-site and on-site.

A multiple-site company has the advantage of being able to use a boat or plane to take you wherever viewing happens to be best at that time, within say 50-100 miles from the home base. That’s all you need for a single-day visit. However, if you want to watch bears for 2 or more days, you either have to pay the transportation costs again each day; or you have to over-night at a lodge near the viewing site.

The small number of tour companies based near a prime viewing site are known as on-site companies. These can be a good choice during the seasonal peak of local viewing, but a disappointment otherwise, since few lodges transport viewers to alternative sites when the local site is poor. That is, most on-site companies are also one-site companies. For details on seasonal dates for each viewing site, consult the book Bear Viewing in Alaska

Ship-based companies like Katmai Coastal Bear Tours

combine both advantages -- taking you to any of a wide variety of peak viewing opportunities, as well as providing convenient on-board overnight accommodations and fine dining close to a prime viewing site.

To read viewer comments about tour companies,

or to add your own comments,

go to BVA’s Blog site by clicking on

Once at the blog site homepage, click on the tab (top of page)

for Tour Companies.

Once you reach that page,

if the listing for a particular vendor is not visible,

you can check for it using the search window.