Secret Escapes Holidays
Not every great holiday announces itself. Some of the most memorable trips are built around places that do not appear on the standard shortlist — a converted farmhouse in the hills above a town everyone else queues to see, a coastal village three stops past the resort, a small island that has no international airport and all the better for it. These packages are for travellers who would rather discover than follow. Flights, accommodation and transfers are arranged in one ATOL protected and ABTA bonded booking.
There is nothing wrong with Santorini in principle. The caldera views are as extraordinary as advertised. But the sunsets are now watched by several hundred people at once, the better restaurants need booking months ahead and the cobblestone paths between the iconic white walls are genuinely difficult to navigate in July. The experience has not diminished — it has just become harder to have.
The same pattern plays out across the most photographed destinations in Europe and beyond. The thing that made a place worth visiting becomes the thing that makes visiting it difficult. Crowds are self-defeating in travel. The more a destination is known, the less it resembles the version that made it famous.
Secret escapes work on a different logic. They are not necessarily obscure — some are well known in their own country, or among a particular kind of traveller — but they have not yet been absorbed into the standard package holiday shortlist. That distinction matters.
The short answer: character that has not been smoothed away to suit the widest possible audience.
A village that still has a working harbour rather than a decorative one. A hotel that used to be something else — a monastery, a mill, a private estate — and still has the architecture to prove it. A market where the majority of customers are local. A coast road that is not lined with hotels for its entire length.
These things exist. They are not particularly hard to find if you know where to look, but they do require stepping off the path that the travel industry has laid out most clearly. That is exactly what these packages are designed to do — identify the places that reward the slightly less obvious choice and build a proper trip around them.
0204 505 9777