Travel styles

It is the same map, and a different trip

Travel style is usually a marketing word. Here it means something specific: which of the four variables we move. Pace — how many nights per stop. Transfers — how many hours in a car or on a plane. Standard — what the hotels are. Content — how much of the day is guided, and how much is yours.

Everything else on a trip follows from those four. Tell us which of them matters most to you and the route more or less designs itself; tell us nothing and we will guess, usually wrongly, and spend two rounds of emails finding out.

Styles

Six ways we plan

Boat rowers in conical hats wait among turquoise sampans below towering limestone karsts in Ha Long Bay.

Comparison

What actually changes

Style	Nights per stop	Longest travel day	Guided time
Family	3 nights minimum	Under 4 hours, broken	Half-days, mornings
Honeymoon	3 – 4 nights	Under 5 hours	Two or three fixed points, the rest free
First time in Asia	2 – 3 nights	Up to 6 hours	Most mornings guided
Slow travel	4 nights or more	Whatever the train or boat takes	By request only
Food-led	3 nights	Under 5 hours	A market or class most days
On the water	3 – 5 nights	Boat days rather than road days	Boat crew plus one guide per island group

Honestly

Where each style usually goes wrong

Family trips fail on travel days rather than on content: a nine-hour transfer with a six-year-old ruins the two days on either side of it, and no temple is worth that. We cap family driving at about four hours and break it. Honeymoons fail on over-planning — a day with three fixed points in it is a schedule, not a holiday — so we book two or three things properly and leave the rest open. First trips fail on ambition: four countries in fourteen days is the single most common request we talk people out of, and the version with two countries is always the better fortnight.

Slow travel fails when the transport cannot keep up with the intention. It works beautifully on the Laos railway, on the Mekong slow boat and along the Vietnamese coast; it works badly in the Philippines, where the islands are far apart and the boats are weather-dependent. Food-led trips fail when everything is guided — the best meals on any of these routes are the ones you find at nine at night with no guide present, so we plan the markets and the classes and then get out of the way.

In practice

Mixed parties

Most real parties are not one style. Grandparents travelling with a five-year-old, two couples where one dives and one does not, a family where the teenager wants to be anywhere except a temple — these are the normal case rather than the exception, and the answer is almost never a compromise that suits nobody. It is to build the days so that the party splits for part of them: a guided morning for the people who want it and a pool for the people who do not, one boat day where half the group dives and the other half is on the beach, one dinner that everyone turns up to.