What Comes After the Villa?

For decades, the format of the good holiday has been stable. You occupy a beautiful villa, somewhere coastal, glamorous, or maybe on the shores of a stunning European lake. The property may even have a name that requires a little explaining at dinner. 

You book it for a fortnight, fill it with people you like, and you settle in. 

The appeal was obvious. After a year of being pulled in all directions, inhabiting a beautiful new space and making it “your own” made for an easy sell. 

These days though, some travellers have grown tired of what was once seen as the dream holiday. What they are turning to instead is an older idea than the villa itself.

The problem with the villa holiday

It is not that the villa stopped being lovely, just that the world around it has changed.

The private villa experience has been so thoroughly optimised that it now arrives pre-packaged from top to bottom. The chef is booked, and the provisioning list was finalised months ago. There is a concierge who will produce anything: a tennis coach, a boat, even a table at the restaurant with the month-long waitlist. Everything is perfect, yet oddly businesslike. There is no reason to leave the property, which may be ideal for some, but not all.

There is also the matter of what actually happens in a house across two weeks. Day one is inspiring. Day four is relaxing. Day nine, someone suggests a drive to the next town along and it feels like an expedition. By day eleven, the group has established a routine indistinguishable from the one at home, except warmer and with more rosé. Therein lies the problem — you have not really gone anywhere. You have relocated your living room.

The tour as an alternative

The alternative is not new. It is, in fact, likely far older than the villa. It is the journey: a tour organised around a line rather than a point, where you sleep somewhere different every night or two and the change of scene is the substance of the holiday.

Tours used to carry stodgy associations with coaches and river boats. Either that or a logistical ordeal involving a deluge of browser tabs and planning spreadsheets. 

Now there is a middle. A properly constructed journey across, for example, the Italian Alps into South Tyrol and down toward Lake Garda. This kind of tour involves a selection of hotels, each chosen because it is the best available in its destination, and each personally inspected. It involves a route that has been tested, not simply plotted on a maps app. It involves someone whose job it is to know that certain roads close at dusk in September and that the restaurant everyone recommends is shut on Tuesdays.

Who is doing luxury tours well

Some operators have built their reputations on a particular mode of travel. HunterMoss, which has been running luxury tours since 2008, organises its signature supercar tours around driving. The routes themselves are the fabric of the itinerary, which can be either the whole point or beside it, depending on your interest in cars. Others build around food, or architecture, or a single stretch of coastline they know better than anyone.

The common thread is that the tour has a compelling identity. It is going somewhere for a reason, in a particular order, and the order matters.

The case for the journey over the single point

There is an old observation that we remember journeys and forget stays, and like most well-worn observations it is roughly half true. What is true is that a fortnight in a villa tends to compress in memory into a hazy impression, while the journey retains its structure. The second morning, ascending the alpine pass at sunrise. The detour to the town you had never heard of but were captivated by. The dinner that overran long into the night. 

None of this makes booking the villa a mistake. It makes it a choice, and one worth examining before the deposit goes down on the same house for a fourth summer.