Tours for the Thinking Person : When Pure Leisure Isn’t Enough-a Growing Number of Museum-Sponsored Trips Offer Vacations That End With a Sense of Accomplishment

Once upon a time, when the world was large and jumbo jets were new, it was enough to give most American travelers a timely flight, a panoramic view, a hearty meal and a warm bed.

But these days, that isn’t always enough. Driven by guilt or ambition or sophistication or simple boredom, thousands of tourists are instead looking for vacations that are journeys, idylls that are productive, adventures in which they will be not only tanned, but educated.

Nonprofit institutions across the country--and museums in particular--have built this idea into a multimillion-dollar business. The trips they sponsor aren’t particularly cheap. In fact, they often cost more than a package tour because of the added services provided. But on the best of these trips, travelers can step beyond the usual scenes to see the back rooms of museums and hear lectures from authorities on site at Stonehenge or in Amazonian jungles.

“This is the direction that travel is going,” says Ann Waigand, Virginia-based publisher of The Educated Traveler newsletter, and editor of an annual directory of museum-sponsored tours.

“My mother went to Europe for the first time when she was 50,” says Waigand. “I went to Europe the first time when I was 18. My daughter went the first time when she was 13 months old . . . If you look at demographics and how our society is changing, people are better educated and better traveled, and the general traveling experience just doesn’t cut it anymore.”

The Smithsonian Institution, uncontested champion sponsor of trips for thinkers, this year has scheduled more than 300 tours, with 7,000 travelers expected. And although this article concentrates on museum tours, scores of further travel possibilities are available through colleges, alumni associations, zoos and other nonprofit organizations in California and elsewhere. Academic Travel Abroad, a Washington, D.C.-based tour operator that specializes in arranging travel for nonprofit groups--including museums and other organizations--in 1992 led more than 60 different groups on about 175 tours worldwide.

“We have taken quite a few tours, and this was quite different from any other,” reports Joanne Rubin of San Diego, who with her husband traveled to northern Italy last May on a two-week tour sponsored by the San Diego Museum of Art. The itinerary emphasized art and architecture, and included Verona, where the museum’s education curator traveling with the group, Barney Malesky, had lived for a year as a student. And near Venice, the group’s Italian guide drew on a friendship to get the travelers into a privately owned villa designed in the 16th Century by the renowned architect Andrea Palladio.

“We couldn’t have done that alone,” says Rubin. “That was very special.”

Similar museum programs are run in California by the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, the San Diego Museum of Man, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, among others. (The Los Angeles County Museum of Art stopped sponsoring tours a few years ago because “they weren’t really that popular,” said marketing director Pamela Jenkinson. But many of the institution’s 11 affiliated volunteer groups continue to arrange group trips.)

The beginnings of the nonprofit travel business are hazy, but many veterans say college alumni groups may have been the forerunners of the movement in the years before World War II. Soon after the war came Fritz Kaufmann, a Vienna-born academic who as a teacher at the University of Vermont organized a 1947 student junket to see the Marshall Plan in action.

Adapting an old Dutch troop ship to postwar demands, Kaufmann took about 250 students to Europe for eight weeks of watching the Continent rebuild. Three years later, he founded the nonprofit Association for Academic Travel Abroad, which has since evolved into the for-profit Academic Travel Abroad.

By the 1960s, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City had built an annual travel program (the museum now maintains an entire department to handle tours, and sponsors more than 30 a year), as had the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. In Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Institution was experimenting with offerings that would grow into its current schedule, which brings in estimated gross revenues of $25 million a year.

As that $25-million figure suggests, nonprofit organizations have a lot to gain from the travel business. Well-handled, the programs raise an institution’s profile and offer an opportunity to build a sense of community and purpose among members. Once a traveler has crawled around the Galapagos with a curator, one museum travel planner notes, that traveler is far more likely to throw in $1,000 later to help underwrite that museum’s exhibit on island ecosystems.

There are more immediate benefits, too. Museum officials usually rely on tour operators to handle nuts and bolts of travel arrangements, and those operators often pay commissions of 5%-10% to the nonprofit groups that sponsor trips. Thus, a $2,000 trip to London’s theater district might earn its nonprofit sponsor $100 to $200 per participant. Other tour groups impose a mandatory fee or suggest a donation amount, with numbers again 5%-10% of the trip’s overall cost. And many groups require travelers to pay membership dues to the museum (often $20-$50 for a year) in order to join a tour.

On the consumer side, travelers have a chance at a more focused travel experience, better access to expert information and a sense of accomplishment. The last of those is a big draw, Ann Waigand notes, “for those of us who have a hard time with pure leisure .”

Travelers should not expect a big tax break out of their trips. Authorities say money spent on legitimately voluntary donations to nonprofit groups may be tax-deductible; other costs, such as the price of the tour itself, almost certainly aren’t.

Consumers should also recognize that not all institutional tours are worthwhile. Through the inexperience or inattention of their sponsors, some are little more than standard packages wrapped in academic colors. Trips arranged by small or inexperienced groups may be vulnerable to cancellation if the sponsors can’t find enough takers.

But an inquiring traveler can avoid those trips by asking a few questions about the arrangements.

“First, you want to know who’s doing the interpreting, who’s doing the lecturing, and who’s traveling with the group,” says J. Mara DelliPriscoli, a Montana-based consultant who organizes an annual Washington D.C. conference among nonprofit organizations that have travel programs.

Travelers should be sure that the breakdown between programmed and free time fits their preferences. (Prudence Clendenning, deputy manager of Smithsonian Study Tours and Seminars, acknowledges that “there’s not much free time at all” on most Smithsonian trips. Smithsonian travelers, she notes, tend to be affluent retirees and middle-aged professionals, and are attracted by the communal aspects of the trip.)

Travelers should also ask how much experience the institution has in tours, and in that part of the world. For those who want to dig deep, the next question would be about the experience, reputation and financial stability of the tour operator who is handling the logistics of the tour.

Instead of swinging through standard itineraries, smart tours ought to lead travelers on well-defined missions--understanding the cave paintings of France, for instance, or the astronomical implications of Stonehenge.

Well-planned tours have lower staff-to-traveler ratios than do standard tours; one guide for every 15 travelers is fairly common. On Joanne Rubin’s trip to northern Italy last May, a San Diego Museum of Art curator, a tour guide and a travel agent were on hand to serve a traveling group of fewer than 20. Rubin and her husband are already planning to join a tour arranged by the same museum for southern Italy in 1994.

10 Top Tours Ann H. Waigand has published The Educated Traveler newsletter since November, 1990, drawing on experience gained in years of work in the academic tour business. Though she recently pared the publication back from 10 issues yearly to six, she continues to compile an annual directory of museum tours, which she makes available only to subscribers. (Subscriptions, available at P.O. Box 220822, Chantilly, Va. 22022, telephone 800-648-5168, cost $39 a year.)

Waigand’s 1992 directory ran to 78 pages, even though it excluded such traditional sponsors of learning tours as university and alumni groups, zoos and various other nonprofits. The Times Travel section asked Waigand to compile a varied list of 10 top choices from her upcoming edition, and she forwarded the following sampling of 1993 trips.

(Tours are arranged in chronological order. Travelers should note that prices are per person, presuming double occupancy, and are subject to change. Some prices include virtually all meals and side trips; others don’t.)

Sailing the Caribbean

March 18-27, California Academy of Sciences (Golden Gate Park, San Francisco 94118; 415-750-7222). The Sea Cloud, a four-masted, 29-sail tall ship once owned by E.F. Hutton and Marjorie Merriweather Post, will sail to ports including St. Maarten, Anguilla, St. Kitts, Dominica, St. Lucia and Antigua. Lectures will focus on natural history. Cost: $4,950-$8,550, excluding air fare to St. Maarten.

Budapest Spring Festival

March 19-28, The Newark Museum (49 Washington St., Box 540, Newark, N.J. 07101; 201-596-6643). The trip includes performances of the operas “Madame Butterfly” and “Die Fledermaus,” the ballet “Romeo and Juliet” and performances by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra and the Hungarian Philharmonic Orchestra. Cost: $2,435, including air fare from New York.

A Mexican Journey

April 14-25, Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, Smithsonian Institution (2 E. 91st St., New York 10128-9990; 212-860-6930).

With the emphasis on interpreting culture through design, travelers visit Mexico City, Cuernavaca, Taxco, Cocoyoc, Oaxaca, San Cristobal de las Casas, San Juan Chamula, Zinacantan and Tuxtula Gutierrez, focusing on architecture, crafts, folk art and archeology. Cost: $2,950, excluding air fare to Mexico City.

Mediterranean Heritage

May 4-17, Art Institute of Chicago (Michigan Avenue at Adams Street, Chicago 60603; 312-443-3917) with the National Trust for Historic Preservation

and the Alumnae and Alumni of Vassar College.

Cruising aboard Renaissance Cruises’ 114-passenger Renaissance VI, travelers see historic spots in the western Mediterranean, including Rome, Sorrento, Pompeii, Paestum, Trapani, Cagliari, Ajaccio, Viareggio, Monte Carlo and Nice. Leaders include Christine Havelock, retired art professor at Vassar College; Celia Marriott, associate director of museum education at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Homan Potterton, director of the National Gallery in Dublin. Cost: $5,295-$8,995. Includes air fare from New York to Italy.

Montana by Canoe

June 26-July 4, Accessible Adventures/Smithsonian Study Tours and Seminars (Smithsonian Associates, 1100 Jefferson Dr., S . W . , Room 3045, Washington, D.C. 20560; 202-357-4700).

A wilderness trip along a Missouri River route explored by Lewis and Clark in 1805. Seats in the 17-foot canoes have been modified to accommodate disabled travelers. The canoes will encounter no white water. A naturalist from the Smithsonian will interpret the plants and animals of the High Plains. Cost: Not yet set, but expected to be about $1,100, excluding air fare to Great Falls, Mont.

Beyond the North Cape

June 30-July 16, American Museum of Natural History (Central Park at 79th St., New York 10024; 212-769-5700). Aboard the Polaris, travelers skirt the coast of Norway, from Spitsbergen to Bergen, including the Arctic town of Longyearbyen, the Svalbard Archipelago, Bear Island, Fugloya (Bird Island), Tromso, Lofoten and Rost Islands, along the Fjord Coast, Molde, Romsdal, Geirgangerfjord, Bergen. Cost: $6,150-$9,650, excluding air fare to Norway.

To Japan and Beyond

July 6-19, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University (26 Oxford St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138; 617-495-2463). On this voyage to Japan, the Kuril Islands and the Russian Far East, participants see Sapporo and Otaru and sail aboard the 96-passenger cruise ship Explorer to the volcanic island of Rishiri, Rebun Islands, Sakhalin Island, the Kuril Islands, and perhaps one of the islands owned by Russia but claimed by Japan. Tour leader: naturalist and marine ecologist Judy Perkins. Cost: $5,990- $10,175, excluding air fare to Japan.

The Arts of Bali and Java

July 7-23, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (401 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco 94102; 415-252-4191). Itinerary includes Ubud, Candi Dasa, pre-Hindu Tenganan, east Bali, with gatherings featuring prominent Indonesian artists, private dance performances, plays and puppet shows, mask-making and batik demonstrations. Trip also includes an ongoing workshop on illustrating a travel journal with artist Richard Lang. Cost: $4,050, which includes air fare from San Francisco to Indonesia and a $450 museum donation.

Irish Castles and Gardens

Aug. 24-Sept. 4, Santa Barbara Museum of Art (1130 State St., Santa Barbara 93101; 805-963-4364, ext. 335). The tour of castles, gardens and private collections stops in the thatched-roof village of Adare, as well as Waterford, Killarney and Dublin, where the director of the National Gallery is expected to lead a tour of his institution. Also, author and designer Dame Sybil Connolly will host tea. Leaders will be art historian Jean Neilson and a Santa Barbara museum staff member. Cost: not yet set, but expected to be about $4,000, including air fare from the West Coast.

Treasures of Turkey

Sept. 18-Oct. 6, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (900 Exposition Blvd., Los Angeles 90007; 213-744-3350) with the Denver Museum of Natural History. Tour includes Istanbul, Cappadocia, Konya, Pamukkale, Antalya, Kas, Bodrum, Kusadasi and a two-day yachting excursion along the Gokova coast. Educational theme is designed to follow Turkey’s metamorphosis from an Eastern empire into a more westernized country. Cost: $3,395, excluding air fare to Istanbul.