I find group tours unbearable, so I recently booked a private guide instead. It's the only way I'll do tours now.

• As a tourist, I find large group tours uncomfortable, so I avoid them altogether.
• On a recent trip to Montreal, I tried something new and booked a private tour with ToursByLocals.

When I met Mélissa, the guide I had hired to take me on a food tour of Montreal, she was sitting in a deli, awaiting my arrival.

As she stood to greet me, she apologized, saying she was feeling under the weather that morning. Weirdly and selfishly, I was relieved; I'd arrived in Montreal the day before after a 12-hour train ride and was still exhausted with an unshakeable headache.

I booked my tour with Mélissa through ToursByLocals, a Canadian company that connects local guides with tourists looking for a more personalized way to explore. Before booking with ToursByLocals, I'd only been on large group tours and had grown to hate them, finding them awkward, exhausting, and impersonal.

With my nagging migraine and the day's gloomy, subpar weather, I worried I'd feel similarly about my private tour — but by the end, I'd decided it would be the only way I'd tour moving forward.

My tour was customizable, making it more enjoyable than group excursions

I reserved a walking tour of Montreal's Jewish culinary institutions, but as a vegetarian, I hadn't considered that several stops would include meat. When we'd get to one of the restaurants or delis where we were supposed to try smoked meat or a sandwich, we'd skip it — since we had no one else to account for, adjusting the itinerary as we went was easy.

While my dietary restrictions kept me from eating at some of the tour's typical spots, they also afforded me more time at iconic places I really enjoyed, like the city's rivaling bagel factories.

We spent a good amount of time at St-Viateur Bagel and Fairmount Bagel, learning how their bagels are made and what separates them from New York-style bagels (Montreal's bagels are boiled in water with honey, making them sweeter than New York's).

With Mélissa and I on the tour feeling less than spectacular, we could move at a slower, more relaxed pace than if we had to shuffle, say, 20 people through the whole tour.

It was more expensive than I liked, but I thought it was worth it

The tour I booked typically costs about $587 for one person. Insider paid a press rate of $271 for the tour.

I tend to travel on a budget, so booking a nearly $600 tour would be out of the question on a typical trip. Still, learning about Montreal's culinary scene from a local expert made my visit unforgettable.

Lisa Chen, the president of ToursByLocals, told Insider that customizable tours and bonding with local hosts justify the price for many of their customers, of which there are hundreds of thousands. Since launching in 2008, two million travelers have used the service.

"I think ultimately it comes down to the type of experience you're looking for," Chen said. "The way we talk about it is, 'Do you want to be a tourist, or do you want to be a traveler?'"

"This helps you really double down on being that traveler on having more of that immersive experience," she continued. "There is true value in having that traveler experience, as opposed to the tourist experience. There's a time and a place for both, but that's the value we bring."