We’ve all done the other kind of tour. The one where you wake up in a different hotel every morning, never quite sure which town you’re in, living out of a half-packed suitcase, watching the best of a country slide past a coach window at fifty miles an hour.
When we started Celtic RnR Tours, we promised ourselves we’d build the opposite of that.
Unpack once
Our guests stay in a single, glorious hotel for the whole week. No 6 a.m. wake-up calls to make the next bus. No living out of a suitcase. You hang up your clothes, you find your favourite chair in the lobby, the staff learn your name — and every day you radiate out into the county and come home each evening.
“The idea of staying in one glorious 5-star hotel and unpacking only once, while being able to see so much of the surrounding areas, is a grand feature in itself.”
Go deep, not wide
A week is plenty of time to see a country badly. It’s also plenty of time to know one county well. We’d rather you came home able to say you understood County Kerry, or North Wales, or the Scottish Highlands — its towns, its history, its music, the way its light falls in the evening — than that you’d ticked nine countries off a list and remembered none of them.
That’s what we mean by getting under the skin of a place. History and genealogy talks from real experts. Driver-guides who were born down the road. Evenings of music in the local pub, not a hotel ballroom.
The free day matters
Every tour has a day with nothing on it. Sleep in. Rent a bicycle. Go back to the village you loved on day two. Sit on a bench and watch the cows. The unscheduled day is often the one people talk about most when they get home — because it was theirs.
Slow enough to breathe it in. Rich enough to remember forever. That’s the whole idea.
— Mike Healy, Celtic RnR Tours
