Context Travel is Rapidly Revolutionizing the World of Sightseeing Tours in Major Cities

I have now received such good comments on the remarkable walking tours conducted by Context Travel that I need to concentrate on it in this separate treatment.

Context Travel is deliberately snobbish in its appeal -- but only in an intellectual sense. It operates walking tours conducted by what it calls "expert level docents" who are occasionally PhDs and almost always M.A.s. It frankly states that its tours are for intellectually curious people. They do not consist of the memorized, joke-ridden spiels of self-appointed experts in the life of a particular city, but are conducted by recognized experts in various aspects of those cities. And they are not canned lectures, but are geared to the knowledge already possessed by members of each tour group (limited to six persons on each tour). When my daughter recently signed on for a Context tour in the parks of Paris, it was conducted by an administrative official of the Louvre whose offices are in the Louvre. When she signed on for a "children's tour" of the Vatican with her then-12-year-old and 8-year-old daughters, it was conducted by an art-history doctoral student in a university of Rome.

This past weekend, in the Sunday travel section of The New York Times, Context Travel was cited for its operation of an unusual tour of Parisian restaurants and cooking schools, featuring new trends (which include the application of "molecular gastronomy" in top establishments of the French capital). In New York, one of several Context tours features the art galleries of the Chelsea district. Another is called "Birth of the Cocktail," and deals with the development of those drinks. Context tours are available in four U.S. cities (New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.), in 15 European cities (all the major capitals and touristic favorites), and in Beijing and Shanghai.

Context's tours are not cheap -- they seem to average about $65 per person -- but they last for three to four hours, which is much longer than the duration of the standard walking tour conducted by an amateur historians. They are scheduled for particular dates, but require that you make advance reservations. And to do that, you really need to spend a half-hour navigating their website and examining their offerings. You go to www.contexttravel.com, and the rewards of doing so will be major ones -- a claim I can make because of the many enthusiastic comments I've received, from people I trust, about this unusual travel facility.