Frequently Asked Questions

If your holiday includes a flight, we will inform you the details of your baggage allowance with your final itinerary. If you need the details before then, please ask us. However, whether travelling by air or by train, the question you should ask yourself is “how much can I carry?” The answer to this is usually very much less than your baggage allowance. Most of our holidays involve touring and there will be occasions when there is no alternative to carrying your own suitcases. In this context, please also remember that, for couples travelling together, two small suitcases are always easier to handle than one big one.

There are restrictions but not as severe. Each adult can take up to two medium sized items (85 cms at their maximum length) plus one small item of hand luggage. That’s a lot more than you would want to carry!

Not usually and this is not because we are mean or uncaring! Many of the smaller hotels we use don’t provide a baggage handling service and, in any case, we have consistently found that our customers prefer to handle their own. The problem with hotel baggage handling is that, invariably, the suitcases arrive at your room after you do and, much worse, you are required to pack your bags and leave them outside your room long before you are ready to leave.

Once again, a straight answer “no” sounds very uncaring but the practicalities of the situation make this impossible. He, or very likely she, has a multitude of duties such as checking what platform the train departs from, finding reserved seats on trains, collecting keys at hotel reception and so on, not to mention the size of the group.

Yes, provided that we know in advance. There is a space on the booking form for diet requests.

This varies from holiday to holiday but, in the case of escorted holidays, these are detailed in the brochure and on the web site. Customers on unescorted holidays are advised at quotation stage.

Customers have such widely differing tastes on what they want to eat and where they want to eat it. For some, an evening meal in a well-appointed restaurant with wine and all the trimmings is an important part of their holiday experience. Others prefer “plain and simple”. We believe that an element of choice is important. However, it is useful to note that evening meals are usually provided where there might otherwise be a difficulty, e.g. planned late arrivals at hotels, centres where there is little or no choice of restaurants or centres where there might be a serious language difficulty.

For escorted holidays in our programme, we would normally use medium sized 3-star hotels but there can be variations to this norm for many reasons. At one extreme, some of our long-haul holidays use four or even five star where we feel that these offer the best value available. At the other extreme, we feature several destinations well off the beaten track and therefore must take hotels which are “best available”. However, we would always take care to ensure that such places are clean and safe, and we always include en-suite facilities as standard. For unescorted holidays, the standard of accommodation can be specified by the customer at quotation stage and our only proviso here is that we would refuse to agree to use accommodation which we felt did not satisfy minimum standards.

Not without making this absolutely clear in our literature and never without checking it out first. Having said that, good homestay or farmhouse accommodation is an attractive proposition, especially when it is accompanied by home grown organically produced food and good home cooking. We use such accommodation to great effect in Romania, but it has been very carefully vetted and has been adequately converted for tourist use by the addition of en-suite bathrooms.

We hesitate to say “yes, always” because, if the hotel is opposite the station or closer than the distance from station to the bus pickup, the answer is clearly “no”. However, as a good rule of thumb, we would never on an escorted holiday expect any customer to struggle with luggage to the hotel. Where distances are relatively short and most customers elect to walk, tour leaders are instructed to look after those who would find this difficult. Transfers are not provided for unescorted customers except by prior arrangement.

Yes of course. We have our own preferred hotels in many locations but if you have a specific request we can look into it for you.