Luxury holidays

It might seem like a contradiction, but our luxury wildlife holidays often involve a degree of roughing it. That’s because they focus less on the glamourous trappings and more on unique experiences, such as tracking animals that see so few humans they have little fear of them. Our luxury trips also employ enormously experienced and knowledgeable guides, who know the best viewpoints, and can explain in-depth the types of behaviours you will witness.

Or how about bear-watching in Romania’s Fagaras Mountains, on a holiday that helps fund conservation initiatives? You’ll be staying in a remote hide reached with an uphill hike where you’ll be greeted with a glass of champagne, and in the evenings your guide will whip up a candlelit, gourmet meal using organic local ingredients and accompanying it with excellent Romanian wines. You’ll enjoy running water and hot showers, too – which to be honest can feel very luxurious if you’re familiar with wildlife hides.

Similarly, our finest luxury wildlife tours in Africa are typically those that prioritise immersing you in pristine wilderness areas. They bring you closer to nature with expertly guided walking safaris, white-tablecloth meals in the bush, and sleep-outs on purpose-built viewing decks. In Kenya, they will often stay on community-owned conservancies that support Maasai people to maintain their traditional agricultural practises, while you enjoy a much more private wildlife viewing experience.

Our luxury cruises favour small ships that carry no more than 250 passengers, and often far fewer. In the Galapagos Islands, for instance, you can explore the archipelago in the company of just a handful of other guests – ensuring your visit has less of an impact on the islands’ amazing wildlife. You can also cruise from Split to Dubrovnik on a ship with no more than 40 passengers – traditional Croatian meals are cooked aboard using locally sourced ingredients. Our luxury cruises here use newer vessels with engines that consume less fuel, and give off fewer emissions.

Of course, luxury doesn’t always mean cabins the size of a generous hotel room, onboard fitness centre, hot tubs on deck, and five-star cuisine. Luxury can also translate to escaping the busier cruise routes for destinations less visited, and the thrill of an expedition. Most travellers in Japan stick predominantly to the main cities, but our luxury cruise holidays here can show you fascinating new sides to the country, as well as enabling areas that don’t see a great many visitors to benefit from tourism.

And in places like Melanesia, or Raja Ampat in Indonesia, the luxury comes from the feeling of exclusivity as you roam biodiverse islands, stepping ashore to visit tiny communities where you can browse the work of local artisans in the markets, helping to sustain traditional crafts.

Of their South America holiday, one of our travellers remarked that: “All the arrangements worked like clockwork, and we had some unforgettable experiences.” That, in a premium leather-bound nutshell, is the essence of our luxury tailor made tours. They are all about the freedom to personalise the trip exactly to your own tastes and interests, and arranged by professional tour organisers with years of experience.

So, you might be able to take your accommodation up a notch, from a little pension to a villa perhaps, or a hotel with a pool to a hotel with a fully fitted-out spa. You might decide that you’re not content with just a few days in a particularly beautiful beach resort, and extend that to a week. Or if you’re celebrating something, like a milestone birthday, or your own honeymoon perhaps, then you can set aside time for special moments that the necessarily fixed itinerary of a small group tour doesn’t allow for.

Countries that are used to tourism are more likely to have luxury options available. In Africa, for instance, you can find lodges and camps across Botswana, South Africa and Kenya that feature all the ‘bells and whistles’ – a hot tub on your veranda, a private candlelit dinner in the bush. But go to Rwanda or Lesotho, for instance, and luxury is less about glamour and more about providing a good degree of comfort. Air conditioning and a small balcony may constitute luxury in a town where tourist-grade hotels are few and far between.

In places like Mongolia, Albania or Kazakhstan there are few luxury holidays because travellers in these places are rarely seeking ‘luxury’. Rather, they want the thrill of being close to nature, of flinging open the tent flaps onto endless blue skies, of cultural encounters with local people – luxury in these countries doesn’t mean an expansive wine cellar or a pillow menu, it means a new adventure every day.