Sometimes, we hear people say ‘it sounds like a lot of travel’ when they hear about some of our escorted coach holidays, and this greatly puzzles us! We pride ourselves on keeping daily coach travel to a minimum to avoid long days, and even then we break them up with regular stops to use cafes, stretch our legs, use a proper toilet and get a drink. So you’re never ‘just sat there’ for hours and hours.
The aim for us isn’t just to get you somewhere, it’s to enjoy the journey as well, to see the amazing landscapes that people never see from 35,000 feet as they fly to a destination, completely missing the country below and so much of what it has to offer beyond the end destination.
Another way to look at it is you get to trade the hours of travelling to the airport, passing through security, border control, waiting to board, the cramped seating, blocked ears from the descent, then passport control, baggage claim, customs and finally getting transport to your hotel – a whole day at each end of a trip that you could have spent looking out of the window at the lovely countryside instead.
One other thing worth knowing about coach holidays to Europe: coaches have been passing through a dedicated channel at Dover for over a year now, completing border checks quickly and bypassing the queues of cars in our own dedicated lane.
On the way to southern Spain to see Seville, the Alhambra and other Spanish wonders (register your interest in our Seville, Córdoba, Ronda and the Alhambra tour), we cross vast gorges and rivers in France, the Pyrenees as we pass into Spain, then traverse the central Spanish mountain ranges and great plains, past historic sites from the Napoleonic Peninsula War, and that’s before we even arrive at the special places we set out to see.
Overnight on these journeys, we stay in lovely hotels with the freedom to eat in, or go out and explore and enjoy the unexpected, like the stunning cathedral in Burgos, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Another fine example is the journey to Colditz Castle (register your interest in our Corso and Colditz tour), where we quickly cross the Netherlands and former West Germany to reach the incredible former East Germany, where there seems to be a castle every five miles across the gently rolling countryside. Once into the east, we soon reach the venues for this tour, including the stunning Spangenberg Castle, formerly a POW camp and now a stunning wedding venue, where we enjoy an exclusive, unique tour.
Colditz itself is a puzzlingly quiet place, rarely visited by groups or individuals but stunningly beautiful, making it a very pleasant area to explore, and the castle itself presents its history in an incredible way.
Often these European coach tours don’t take much longer than the journey for our Royal Scotland tour, or the trip to the perennially popular Isles of Scilly, or the Channel Isles – it’s just a question of perception.
So the next time you see a trip and think it’s a lot of travel, maybe remember the time and inconvenience you find at airports, question what you’re actually missing by not travelling, and weigh up what you’ll gain if you go.
Those who come away with amazing memories come back to us time and again for other long journeys on our escorted coach holidays, so they clearly agree these trips offer great value.
Fancy seeing where the journey could take you? Browse all our upcoming tours and register your interest today – spaces are limited and some tours fill quickly.
