Asked often, answered honestly

Comfortable, not athletic. Most journeys involve four to six hours of walking on good paths, with plenty of pauses — if you can happily walk 10 km in a day at home, you can walk any of our gentle or moderate itineraries. Every journey page lists typical daily distances, and we’re honest about the hard parts: if a day involves 600 m of ascent, it says so. If you’re unsure, call us and we’ll talk it through properly.

Around a third of our travelers come solo, and our groups of eight to ten are small enough that nobody stays a stranger past the first dinner. We don’t charge a compulsory single supplement on most departures — solo travelers pay a supplement only when a departure is fully booked with private rooms, and it’s always shown before you book.

Nearly everything once you arrive: all accommodation, all meals unless a free evening is noted, wine with dinner, every activity and tasting on the itinerary, local transfers, and your Verdara guide throughout. What’s excluded is listed plainly on each journey page — typically flights, travel insurance, and personal spending. There are no hidden extras and nothing to pay locally.

You reserve with a £400 per-person deposit, fully refundable for 14 days while you confirm flights. The balance is due 90 days before departure. We take payment by card or bank transfer, and every booking is financially protected — your money is held in trust until your journey is complete.

Life happens, and our terms are written for humans. Cancel more than 90 days out and you lose only the deposit — which you can instead move to any other departure within two years, free, once. Inside 90 days, refunds step down as our commitments to hosts become fixed; the full schedule is in our terms. We strongly recommend insurance that covers cancellation from the day you book.

Partly flexibility — our travelers come from many countries and often build a journey into longer trips — and partly honesty about carbon. Excluding flights lets us support you to arrive by rail where that’s realistic (and to a surprising number of our destinations, it is; ask us for the rail notes we keep for each journey).

Eight travelers on most journeys, ten at most in the Alps and the Azores. It’s the size that fits around one dinner table, inside one small boat, and into one host’s kitchen without changing the feel of the room — which is the entire point of how we travel.

Yes — any journey can run privately for families, friends, or couples, on your dates, subject to our hosts’ availability. Private departures start from four travelers (two in low season) and cost typically 15–25% above the group price. Tell us what you have in mind through the planning form and we’ll build it with you.

Carefully, and in advance. Because our meals are cooked by hosts rather than hotels, we confirm every requirement with every kitchen before you travel — vegetarian and vegan travelers eat as well as everyone else with us, and allergies are treated as non-negotiable safety information, not preferences.

Small groups, family-run accommodation, hosts paid properly and directly, overland travel wherever practical, and 1% of every booking into a conservation fund our travelers can trace. No offset theatre, no green badges we invented ourselves. The full detail — including what we haven’t solved yet — is on our Sustainability page.

Yes — comprehensive travel insurance including medical cover and repatriation is a condition of travelling with us, and we ask for your policy details before departure. We also recommend cancellation cover from the day you book. We can point you to specialist providers, though we don’t sell insurance ourselves.

We plan for it rather than around it. Every journey carries alternative routes and indoor days designed with our hosts, and guides adjust daily — a gale on Skye might become a morning in the crofthouse learning to bake, and somehow those become the days people write to us about. Safety calls are always the guide’s, and always conservative.