You won’t have to go far to hear someone putting down organised tours.

It’s almost de rigeur to write organised tourists off as camera-toting, Bermuda-shorts-wearing, loud, insensitive and ill-informed oafs. Many’s the independent traveller who’ll be more than happy to tell you, over a beer or two, that people on organised tours would be better off sitting at home watching it all on TV – after all, they only ever see the country through the windows of an air-conditioned bus, don’t they?

The litany of ills is endless: you never meet the locals on an organised tour, you’re not allowed to see the things you want to see, you never really get involved in a culture. Organised tours give you a pre-packaged, sanitised view of a country, with no room for serendipity. As if that isn’t reason enough to turn up your nose, there are the evil effects that organised tours have on the local economy: foreign-owned companies ship people in, drag them around then ship them home again, using the country’s resources without giving anything back to its people. Independent travel, in comparison, is a wonderland of cultural interactivity – nights spent with local families discussing village politics and eating like the real people do, days spent wandering at your own pace, finding things by accident, getting off the beaten track, and generally immersing yourself in the whole ‘travel experience’.

Fans of organised tours, naturally enough, say almost the opposite. If you take a tour, they suggest, you use your time efficiently and you draw upon the knowledge of local guides who can give you a great deal of historical and cultural insight into the country. Organised tours help the economy by employing people in hotels, restaurants and as guides. Independent travellers, on the other hand, spend half their time looking desperately for somewhere to lay their head or fill their belly, gawk at sights without having any real idea of their cultural significance and corrupt the virginal locals by inflicting themselves and their fleece jackets on regions which just aren’t ready for virile western culture.

So what’s a poor traveller to do? Here’s what we reckon – before you decide how to travel, you should sit down and have a good think about what sort of person you are and what you want to get out of your journey. If you don’t mind spending a lot of time alone, if you’ve got time up your sleeve, if you’re confident about introducing yourself to strangers, if you already know a fair bit about your destination, if you think you’ll cope all right with the frustrations of organising your own transport, accommodation and food, then independent travel will probably be incredibly satisfying. If you’re a shy, retiring type, if you’re travelling because you have a particular interest you’d like to learn more about, if you’d rather someone else did the dull bureaucratic stuff, if you’re going somewhere dangerous or want to learn a new skill, or if you’ve only got a couple of weeks, then an organised tour may be just the ticket.

Sure, there are plenty of awful organised tours, tours where you’ll be shuttled between piss-ups and more often than not wake up in your tour mate’s vomit, tours where you’ll only stop long enough to shoot a roll of film, tours where the only local you meet will be the bloke on reception at your hotel. But there are also plenty of great organised tours. There are theme tours, like those that give you an in-depth look at the architecture of northern Italy, or the wine-making regions of France, at the ecology of Madagascar, or development projects in Guatemala. There are adventure tours, ideal if you’re keen to develop your trekking, rafting or skiing skills, or want to see a particularly remote area, but don’t feel confident about doing it by yourself.

There are tours which will teach you something new: learning to paint in Florence, learning a Gaelic instrument in Ireland, learning to fish in Botswana, learning to surf in Australia. You can book yourself a luxury train trip through Rajasthan or a five-star fling in France, or you can sign on to rough it across Zimbabwe, pitching your own tent and cooking your own breakfast as you go. Maybe you want to find your Karelian roots, follow in the footsteps of Gustaf III, engage in bi-plane combat, rope a calf or make your own Hollywood blockbuster.

If you want to do it, there’s someone out there who wants to charge you for it.