Tailor-made holiday with Original Travel

The Secret Series

We’ve made it our mission to tackle the scourge of ‘overtourism’, where too many tourists descend on too few destinations, in the process risking what made these precious places so special in the first place. The good news is that we have the antidote: finding, and promoting, alternative destinations with just as much wow factor, but that fly under the radar. Introducing the Secret Series, a portfolio of hidden gems in some of the world’s classic destinations, but which receive a fraction of the tourism traffic.

Kintsugi Travel

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer to create a piece considered even more beautiful than the original. It’s a lovely concept, and one we believe also applies to travel. Before covid, travel was certainly beautiful, but with increasingly fragile fault lines caused by the twin scourges of Instagram-fuelled overtourism and exponentially expanding flight routes. Since the wrecking ball of the pandemic, we want to be the gold lacquer piecing travel back together better than before. That’s why you’ll hear us talking more and more about positive impact innovations such as Undertourism, Flight-Free Travel, Community-Based Tourism, Indigenous Tourism and Philantourism. In short, we believe travel can, and should, be a force for good, benefitting visitor and destination alike.

Plan a Gratification

After years of taking travel for granted and then losing our right to roam entirely during the pandemic, a ‘Gratification’ is all about pleasing yourself with a holiday you’ve always wanted to take. No more waiting for ‘one day’ – now is the time to visit that place you’ve always wanted to visit, take the trip you’ve always wanted to take and finally pluck up the courage to try something new. In the words of Mark Twain (or someone else, as it turns out): ‘Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do’. So what are you waiting for? Start planning your ‘gratification’ now…

Travel Less, Travel Better

Over the past two years or so we've all come to understand what really matters. There are the profoundly important things like family, the small things like hugs, and the genuinely life affirming things like travel. Absence has made all our hearts grow fonder, and has slowly but surely turned wanderlust into wandermust, but it's inevitable that travel looks and feels different than it did 'before'. If we're entirely honest, in an era of overtourism and endless flight routes, that's no bad thing, and it's the reason that we're championing a new concept we call 'Travel Less, Travel Better'.