Vacation Specials

Globus Choice Excursions: Your Trip, Your Way 

Globus Choice Excursions give you a choice between two hand-selected, included excursions each Choice Day — trading the group schedule for moments that feel tailor-made. It’s an industry first at this scale, now on nearly 80% of Globus tours across Europe and North America. 

Why “Choice” Changes Everything 

Guided touring has always solved the hardest parts of travel: the planning, the logistics, the guesswork. But it’s also meant following one itinerary, one pace, one set of experiences — even when your idea of a perfect afternoon looks nothing like the person’s next to you on the coach. 

Globus Choice Excursions rethink that. On designated Choice days, instead of a single included activity, you’re offered two. Both are included in your tour price. Both are curated by Globus’s destination experts. You select your excursion in advance, so it’s reserved and ready before you even step off the plane — do you want to slow down, or stir things up? Go inward, or get out on the water? There’s no upcharge for choosing, no fine print steering you toward the “basic” option and away from the “upgrade.” It’s simply two great ways to spend your day, and you pick which one is yours. 

That might sound like a small shift, but it changes the entire feel of a guided tour. Instead of forty travelers doing the same thing at the same time, a Choice Excursion naturally splits the group into smaller clusters, each pursuing what genuinely interests them. You come back together for dinner with different stories to tell — which, if you’ve ever traveled in a group before, is half the fun. 

 What a Choice Day Actually Looks Like 

Take the Pacific Coast Adventure and California Redwoods tour as an example. Along its route, this tour’s Choice Day falls in San Francisco — a city built on hills, fog, and reinvention — where you’ll pick between two very different ways to experience it. 

Option one: Little Italy. This excursion is a walking food tour through North Beach, San Francisco’s historic Little Italy, where waves of Italian immigrants left their mark on the neighborhood’s bakeries, cafés, and delis. You’ll wander in and out of local spots to sample the flavors that built the area’s reputation, all while soaking up the murals and century-old architecture that line its streets. It’s unhurried, flavorful, and rooted in the city’s immigrant history — the kind of afternoon where you leave understanding not just what San Francisco tastes like, but who shaped it. Buon appetito! 

Option two: Bike the Bridge. If you’d rather see the city from two wheels, this excursion puts you on a guided bike ride across the Golden Gate Bridge itself, from San Francisco to Sausalito. You’ll pedal over one of the most photographed bridges in the world, take in the bay views and the fog rolling off the Pacific, then spend some leisure time exploring Sausalito’s small-town waterfront shops and cafés before riding back into the city. It’s a different vantage point on the region: breezier, more active, and a great way to feel the scale of the bridge instead of just looking at it. 

Neither choice is the “right” one. A traveler who wants to slow down, taste their way through a neighborhood, and learn its history will love the food tour. Someone who’d rather get moving, feel the wind off the bay, and cross an icon under their own power will lean toward the bike ride. Globus built both, and built them well, because it recognizes that both travelers are on the same tour for different reasons. 

The Choice Excursion Shows Up Across the Map 

San Francisco is just one example of how this plays out. On any given Globus tour that includes the feature, there’s one Choice Excursion built into the itinerary — a single morning or afternoon, somewhere along the route, where the group schedule opens up into two included options. Which city it falls in, and which two excursions it offers, changes tour by tour, shaped around the destination. 

Included, Not Upsold 

It’s worth underlining what Choice Excursions are not: they’re not an add-on menu of paid upgrades. Both options on any given Choice Day are already part of your tour cost. You’re not comparing a “premium” experience against a watered-down freebie — you’re comparing two genuinely different, genuinely worthwhile ways to spend your time, each one designed with the same care. 

That distinction matters. A lot of travel companies dangle “optional excursions” that cost extra on top of an already-paid tour, which can turn a relaxing vacation into a series of small financial decisions. Globus Choice Excursions remove that friction. The decision in front of you is about interest, not budget. 

Making the Most of Choice Days 

If you’re booking a Globus tour with Choice Excursions built in, it’s worth taking a look at your itinerary to see which day(s) includes them and start thinking early about what draws you — history and craft, or scenery and motion; culture indoors, or the outdoors. And if you’re traveling with a companion whose interests run differently than yours, that’s part of the appeal too: you can each choose the excursion that speaks to you, then reconvene to compare notes over dinner. 

At the end of the day, that’s really what Globus Choice Excursions are about — giving you room, within a well-planned, expertly guided journey, to make the trip a little more yours. And on select Globus Europe tours, you can extend that room even further with a free extra night, giving you more time to make the destination your own