Group tours specialist G Adventures has launched a competition for agents to win a place on a fam trip so they can experience one of its closer-to-home tours developed during the pandemic.

The winner of the Can I Travel? Yes You FAM competition will join its group Highlights of Portugal on 5 September, travelling from Lisbon to Porto.

Brian Young, MD of the touring specialist which is best known for trips to exotic destinations, said the company had decided that instead of launching UK holidays during the pandemic it would offer more active European tours.

It added hiking trips to place such as Ibiza, Madeira and Crete, all of which have been popular, he said. For the winter, it will continue to offer tours to closer-to-home destinations such as Tenerife and Iceland.

G Adventures has managed to take clients from around the world on 250 tours since last September, and it has more than 500 coming up in the next few months, 300 of which are available to UK agents to book.

“We are in a good position to get people travelling again, albeit closer to home,” he said. “My message to agents is touring is here!”

“As the vaccination rates increase throughout the world, more destinations will open up to touring, but we’ll still continue to offer our new tours in Europe, we didn’t just develop them for the pandemic.”

In addition to tours in new locations, G Adventures has added a collection of Travel with Confidence Plus trips that provide more social distancing, such as leaving empty seats on coaches, and a collection of private Book Your Bubble tours for those less comfortable travelling in groups.

It has also introduced a more flexible booking policy so customers can postpone their trips if they don’t feel comfortable travelling.

G Adventures was forced to make redundancies at the start of the pandemic but with business picking up it’s now looking to expand its calls centre and operations team, said Mr Young. “I think we will get back up to the size we were,” he added.