Trip Leader Decision Making During a Trip

We have just recently added this webpage, having just returned from a private family countryside car-drive short 3-day indulgent getaway today (Thursday 7th August 2025).

It was from the Australian Blue Mountains to the Australian Hunter Valley and back home.  We prefix ‘Australian’ to be clear because globally there are such same names in different countries.

Particularly, our optional return trip driving route home (back to Nature Trail Base, Katoomba) presented two distinctively/disparate and remotely apart unconnectable route choice options for delivery (and extending the original trip plan) from:

(A) Backtrack as planned the same way we arrived – so the planned safe and known route Motorway option, yet ‘perhaps’ perceived boring as blue sky conditions and group sentiments were encouraging for ‘more fun’ toward the end of the previous day – having blue skies and good times and all.

versus…

(B)  Take a Different Return Route – offering and tempting a more adventurous exploratory remote backroad network of suggested ‘added value’ so adding variety to the trip.  But allthough this alternative backroad option was likely ‘do-able’, it was unplanned and so presented unknown risks.

Actually, in hindsight so did the outbound alternative driving route options.  One chose the safer route on that occasion.

Yet, the mental strain was considerable last night of me dealing with me making a Captain’s Call value judgment choice to further please (yet take a potential catastrophic risk) versus just getting home by boring backtracking, so ‘in my head’ dulling the ‘experience’.

This then is a webpage dedicated to links to actual tour trip experiences (whilst mid-trip) when route options present enticing, fun, an extension of tour guest benefit, else just return home the way we came, else risk a unplanned regrettable disaster – closed roads,  impregnable weather situation, getting lost, breakdown, etc. and so regretting the ‘extra fun factor for all getting home safely, on-time and having do what was originally pre-planned by all tour guests.

I shall start by explaining my short 4 hour nightmare last night awakening this morning shuddering to the Plan ‘B’ adventurous alternative extension route for the return home in the following morning.   I share this to provide helpful wisdom to other trip leaders, from me being now an older tour operator at aged 61, to more risk adverse to 20 year old males thinking their bullet proof, from my touring and travel experiences, and my education in a Business Degree majoring in Strategic Management at Monash University 1993-2003.  The study lessons gain have proven invaluable.

Readers might guess I chose the safer known backtrack option and we all got home just fine and on-time.