Adventure Tours: Fastest Growing Travel Segment

Adventure travel is the fastest growing segment of the travel industry, accounting for 15 percent of the $3.8 trillion dollars spent worldwide on travel, according to the Adventure Travel Society. In the United States alone, an estimated 200 million people engaged in some form of adventure travel in the past year. The Adventure Travel Society indicated that the most popular forms of adventure travel include: wildlife viewing (25%), fitness walking (22%), camping (15%), fishing (8%), hiking (4%), river running (4%), backpacking (3%) horse packing (3%), and miscellaneous activities composing the remaining 12%.

Although the mainstream travel industry has taken many steps to address the growing adventure travel phenomenon, few outfits are gay owned and operated and exclusively offer adventure tours and travel packages to the gay community. One such travel service provider, who travel professionals consider a pioneer in the business of gay small group adventure tours, is Dan Ware, president of Chicago based Toto Tours.

Toto Tours takes its name from Dorothy's dog in the Wizard of Oz and reflects Ware's ardent desire that gay travelers find personal enrichment through gay travel, similar to the fictional characters in "Oz", who sought courage, heart and knowledge. In an effort to keep pace with adventure travelers' growing interests, Toto Tours is offering through its 2003 calendar eighteen adventure tours to exotic destinations around the globe.

Although Ware is world renowned for taking gay travelers to new physical heights, he is equally well known for elevating travelers to new spiritual and emotional heights. Echoing this sentiment is Myles Laphen, who had an unforgettable experience on a Toto Tours sailing adventure aboard a classic 120 foot schooner in the British Virgin Islands. "Every day was a delightful surprise, from sleeping on the deck underneath starlit skies lulled by the tranquil Caribbean waves, helping to hoist the sails on a cloudless, sun-kissed morning and diving off the boat to swim in the crystal blue water." Laphen said he "recommends the experience, especially to those stressed from their everyday lives. It allows you to reinvent yourself." said the thirty-three year old Bloomfield Hills, Michigan photographer.

Many 'Toto Travelers' enjoy their adventure tours to alluring locales, year after year. One such traveler is Michel Cloutier a thirty-nine year old self-described "outdoors man" who has been on multiple Toto adventure tours. Cloutier especially enjoyed the horseback tour through the beautiful meadows and high mountain ridges of Banff National Park, on his 'Toto designed' wild west adventure. "The scenery in the Canadian Rockies is astounding, better than anything I could have ever anticipated," said Cloutier, a microbiologist and college professor from St. Louis, Missouri. He gained many lasting memories and friendships but says, " he will never forget, the extraordinary feeling of belonging and interacting with the other tour participants.

"Adventure travelers wish to encounter unique sights and diverse cultures and to achieve a first-hand understanding of the world and their respective place in it. As a result, they might re-envision how they lead their own lives", said Dan Ware. For more than a decade, Dan Ware at Toto Tours has consistently taken members of the gay community over the proverbial rainbow on adventure fantasies and safely returned them home, forever changed and filled with memories that will last a lifetime.