We’ve been talking a lot about what The Other Tour means to us and what we want to do with it as we move into the future.
The vast majority of tourists come to this city, spend a few days here, visit the main attractions, and leave without actually seeing what separates Istanbul from its Constantinople days and what really makes today’s Istanbul quite another story.
The Other Tour exists to tell that story. 500 tours later our goal, our vision, has developed into something more profound.
What we have created, and what we want to foster, is this concept that attracts interesting, open minded people from around the world and brings them together for 14+ hours. In a way, The Other Tour is a brain storming session that uses Istanbul as it’s setting!
We encourage open talk. We want smart, well educated, free-minded people, willing to think outside of the box and consider different perspectives. We want people who question and challenge us.
We want people who are open to discussing the world’s problems and eager to find solutions.
We want to challenge assumptions (both our own as well as participant’s) and we want to do it in an atmosphere where everybody is comfortable.
This tour, as more than 400 TripAdvisor review can attest to, is fun. So we don’t want that previous paragraph to throw you off. People spend all day laughing and joking and hugging. And as about a dozen other reviews emphasize how edgy our approach can sometimes be for conservative guests.
Come with an open mind and the same sort of energy and you, ‘the other’ participants, as well as the guides themselves are guaranteed to have an awesome time!
What we have come to realize is that no matter how different from one another people may seem to be in the morning, as the day progresses everybody is able to find a common ground.
By the end of the day we are truly ONE group. People are able to overlook the little things and they let themselves make the best of the precious little time that they have with all of these great people. We love that!
Wow, I didn’t know the company had expectations from their clients but I love it. Now that I’ve done many tours with Fethi and his team, I totally understand that people should know what kind of a wonderful treat they are about to receive and of course, they better come open-minded!
Yeah man, this is from the good old days of 2012-2013 when we had 15-20 people groups everyday! And most clients were booking the tour just because it was ranked highly on TripAdvisor. They didn’t know about the finer details of our offerings – so we had to prepare blog posts like this so that we could share it with our guests in advance.