Tailor-made touring holidays
Published 23 September 2026
Rewarding and illuminating bespoke touring holidays
Touring holidays are having a moment. They are, by most accounts, one of the fastest-growing areas of luxury travel — and they are also, more or less exactly, what Expressions Holidays has specialised in since 1989. So it is worth answering the question directly: how does a tailor-made touring holiday actually work, and what makes it worth choosing over a single-base stay or an off-the-shelf coach tour?
A tailor-made touring holiday is a journey built around movement between several places, rather than a single hotel booking. Each stop, each route between stops, and each night's length of stay is chosen specifically for the traveller taking the trip — not fitted around a fixed coach timetable or a standard package. It can be self-drive, fly-drive, rail-drive, or entirely by rail, and it can cover one region or several countries. What makes it work is not the movement itself but the thinking that goes into where you stop, for how long, and why.
Marcelle Hoff, owner of Expressions, says 'A touring holiday only rewards the traveller if the time at each stop is right. Too many nights in a place with little to hold you is as much a failure of design as too few nights somewhere that deserved a week. That's where Expressions steps in and designs your tour to suit your interests'.
What a tailor-made touring holiday is — and what it is not
A touring holiday links several destinations into one continuous itinerary, rather than basing a client in a single hotel for the whole trip. That much is shared with a coach tour. What is not shared is the design: a coach tour is built to a fixed route and a fixed timetable that suits a bus load of travellers with different interests and different tolerances for early starts. A tailor-made touring holiday is built around one travelling party.
That means the route, the pace, the properties, and the experiences at each stop are chosen for the people taking the trip — their interests, their appetite for driving or travelling each day, the occasions they want marked, and the places they already know and want to go deeper into, or have never seen and want to discover properly.
Self-drive: touring in your own car
The simplest form of European touring for clients who live within reach of the continent is self-drive in their own vehicle, typically travelling out via the Channel Tunnel or a cross-Channel ferry. It suits clients who are comfortable with a longer first and last day of driving in exchange for complete flexibility once on the road — no hire car paperwork, no unfamiliar vehicle, and the ability to change plans on a whim.
We design the route, book every property, and brief the client on road types, toll systems, parking arrangements and anything specific to the countries crossed, so the only decision left on the day is how long to linger.
Fly-drive: touring with a hire car from the airport
Fly-drive is the most common way we arrange European touring holidays. Clients fly to a starting point, collect a hire car, and follow a designed route before dropping the car at a different airport or returning it to the start. It removes the long drive to and from the UK entirely, so more of the trip is spent in the places that matter.
We handle the hire car specification, insurance, one-way drop-off arrangements where relevant, and the sequencing of the route so that driving distances between stops are proportionate to what is on offer at each end — never a long day's drive for one night's stay.
Rail-drive: combining trains and hire cars
Rail-drive touring uses trains for the longer or more scenic stretches — the Glacier Express through the Swiss Alps, a high-speed line between Italian cities — and a hire car for the sections where a train cannot reach, such as a rural stretch of Tuscany or a valley in the Norwegian fjords. It suits clients who want the ease and the views of rail travel without giving up access to the small towns and countryside that only a car reaches.
This is one of the more involved itineraries to design well, since car collection points, luggage transfers and rail timings all have to align. It is also one of the most rewarding when it does, particularly across Switzerland and Italy.
Touring entirely by rail
For clients who would rather not drive at all, a touring holiday can be built entirely around trains, with private transfers covering the short distances between a station and a hotel. Switzerland, where the rail network reaches deep into the mountains and the trains are part of the scenery rather than a means of avoiding it, is particularly well suited to this. So is an itinerary that links several Italian or French cities without a car at any point.
We plan the connections, reserve seats where reservation matters, and build in the transfer arrangements at each end, so the logistics are invisible and the experience is simply one good journey after another.
Benfits: range, without diluting any of it and time allocated to what each place deserves
The most obvious benefit of a touring holiday is range — the chance to experience several distinct places and kinds of experience in one trip, rather than choosing between them. A fortnight might take in a city for its art and its restaurants, a stretch of coast or countryside for its landscape and its pace, and a wine region for what only a slow visit to a cellar can teach you.
The risk with range, done badly, is a trip that skims everything and settles into nothing. The point of designing the route specifically for the client is to avoid that — range achieved through selection, not through cramming in every place a guidebook mentions.
The benefit that matters more than range, in our experience, is pace — and it is the harder one to get right without a specialist involved. A hill town with one exceptional church and a good restaurant needs a night, not three. A region with several days' worth of wine estates, market towns and walking deserves the time a single overnight stop would waste.
We calibrate the nights at each stop to what is actually there for that particular client to do, not to a standard length of stay. That is the difference between a touring holiday that feels rushed in the middle and slow at the edges, and one where every stop earns its place in the itinerary.
How we design a tailor-made touring holiday
We start with a conversation about what the client wants from the trip — the interests to build around, the pace they are comfortable with, whether driving is part of the appeal or something to minimise, and any occasions to mark along the way. From there we propose a route, a mode of travel, and a set of properties, and refine all three until the shape of the trip is right before a single booking is made.
Every touring holiday we arrange is built from scratch. The itineraries on our touring holidays page show the kinds of trips we design across France, Italy, Switzerland, Norway and further afield, but each one is a starting point for a conversation, not a fixed product.
However the route is travelled — by car, by hire car, by train, or by some combination of the three — the design principles are the same: a route built around the client, and a pace set by what each place has to offer rather than by a fixed schedule.
Explore our full range of touring holidays.
To begin planning, call us on 01392 441245 Monday to Friday 9am to 5.30pm, Saturday 10am to 2pm, or email info@expressionsholidays.co.uk. If you would prefer to browse first, the links below go directly to the most relevant holiday pages.
