Flight free holidays

What do our cycling (and wine tasting) trips in Bordeaux, walks along the Northern Way of the Camino de Santiago, and cultural tours of Romania, all have in common? These are just a few of our tailor made trips that can include your train travel to get there.

On a tailor made tour, you have a much greater degree of flexibility on when your trip starts and finishes, as it is designed to your preferences. That makes it much easier for you to travel by rail, since you can arrange everything in line with the train schedules. When your schedule is your own, you can also opt for less-expensive days and times, helping to bring down the overall cost of your holiday, as well as its carbon footprint.

Many of our small group holidays can be offered with train travel included. So, if you’d rather not fly, you don’t need to go to the hassle of checking the various timetables and working out the best route to reach your holiday on schedule. We do all that for you and then provide you with the tickets. These trips have fixed start and end dates. But when the train travel is included in the holiday, you can be confident of arriving to meet your guide and group on time, and nice and relaxed, too.

If you’re travelling from London to Chamonix for a Mont Blanc walking trip, the journey by train can take as little as nine hours, but you might add on a night in Paris since you’ll be passing through. You also go via Paris when travelling to Innsbruck to reach our walking adventures in the Dolomites, and you can opt for a route that takes you over the stunning Arlberg Pass. Small group trips with train travel included offer so many advantages over the plane, if you can spare a little more time to take your time.

You can use the train to get to your holiday, and potentially back, as well. Or you can put the train at the heart of your holiday. Think of them as road trips, without the road. With our train holidays you can tour Ireland’s wonderfully scenic Wild Atlantic Way by rail, staying in small, independent hotels that are located conveniently close to stations. You’ll meet up with local guides along the way who might take you seaweed foraging in Kerry, or on a walking tour of Ennis.

You can also venture into the Balkans, or through the Baltic states, by rail. When you alight in different cities you’ll meet up with guides who love showing people around their communities, so while you may only be briefly passing through, you still get plenty of cultural insight. The advantage of our train holidays is that you can conveniently and inexpensively see several neighbouring countries on one trip. You can relax on the train as it whisks you from place to place, your itinerary carefully plotted out for you, instead of pacing around a departure lounge waiting for your flight to board.

As part of our commitments to low carbon travel, many of our holidays offer a small discount if you can prove you arrived by train. Not everyone is confident in making the arrangements to get to their holiday by rail, but our local experts can help. They can offer reliable advice on timetables and suitable routes to ensure you arrive in the right place at the right time. In some cases, they can actually book your tickets for you, for complete peace of mind. And if your holiday includes any free days, we can also help with suggestions on fun things to do in the surrounding area without a car.