i take tours with my wife all the time but usually abroad with a chinese group, last year bali for 7500 for a week including plane, hotel, meals.

but local tours in china are a problem , sometimes the deals they cut with hotels and restaurants are not so good in quality and the foreigner is the first to complain , so some domestic tour groups will not allow a foreigner, so you have to ask first , the better the tour 5star hotels , the better your chance of being allowed to go, also some budget hotels for the tour may not allow foreigners anyway,

taking an expensive tour ends up costing as much as traveling on our own.

i would recommend the river boat cruise out of guillen though , had a great time for 5 days with meals for about 2500 each.

It is ALWAYS better to travel by yourself .

Look up Couchsurfing (if you are adventurous enough).

Just came back from Vietnam, spent a month there,

tour groups will never go where I went and see what I saw.

I'd rather go by myself and see what I want, spend as long as I want. Tours run on schedules. For me, maybe it was a more expensive option. I booked a private tour to Beijing and Xi'an with a tour guide and car with driver. They had to wait for me and go where I wanted.

  By yourself, it's more of an adventure. And tour guides always go where their commissions guide 'them' NOT where the best sites often lie. In Huangshan for instance me and the wife noticed that the best part of the mountain (the Grand Canyon) was bypassed by the tour guides. Why? It's too much of a trek was my guess. I travelled around the world by myself. Would never have met and hung out with half the folks I did if i'd gone with someone else, and some of the best things that happened were as a result of unplanned trips i'd made at the spur of the moment.

I WOULDN'T TRAVEL WITH AN IDIOT LIKE YOU.... EVEN IF I NEED TO GET OFF THE GROUP, I WOULD.