Why more of our walking holidays are starting at a platform, not a gate
There’s a moment, somewhere between stations, when the holiday begins. You’ve found your seat. The tea is warm. A woman across the aisle has a walking pole propped against her bag and catches your eye with a small, knowing smile. Outside the window, hedgerows give way to hills, cities soften into coastline, and you start to settle into the rhythm of the wheels. You haven’t even arrived yet, and already something in you is breathing differently. We say it is not just about the destination but the journey too!
This is what so many of you have been telling us. Not in those exact words, perhaps, but in the kinds of questions and comments we’ve been hearing more and more often over the past year.
“Is there a way to get there that doesn’t involve the airport?” “I’d love to do this trip, but I don’t want to fly.”
So we listened. And the more we listened, the more we realised that the conversation about train travel isn’t really about carbon, or logistics, or timetables, at least not only. It’s about what kind of holiday you want to have — and who you want to be on it.
Why rail keeps coming up
The women who travel with us are, on the whole, thoughtful women. You are often the ones in your households or friendship groups making the decisions about where to go, what to book, which hotel, which insurance, which gift to take. You are informed travellers. You have been on enough planes to know when flying is genuinely the best option, and when it feels more like a stress tax on the start of your holiday.
You are also, many of you, quietly worried about the world. Climate, conflict, the rising cost of everything. Not in a way that stops you travelling — travel is one of the things that keeps you hopeful — but in a way that makes you want your holidays to feel aligned with your values rather than at odds with them.
The numbers bear this out. In the last year, use of train and coach for European trips has risen to a record high among UK travellers. Around seven in ten British holidaymakers now say they want to know about the sustainability of a trip before they book, even when price is tight. Women over 45 are, by some distance, the fastest-growing group in solo and small-group travel, and the feedback from women-only travel directories is striking: almost every booking now comes from a woman in her fifties, sixties or beyond.
You are not the minority. You are the shift.
What the train does that the plane can’t
We’re not in the business of making anyone feel guilty about flying. Sometimes, for some trips, a flight is simply the right answer. You may not have the time and a flight allows you to have a holiday in the precious time you have. But where the train works — really works — something lovely happens that no airport can replicate.
You arrive already rested. There is no 4am alarm, no security queue, no liquids in a plastic bag, no shoes off, shoes on, bag up, bag down. You can walk around. You can read a whole chapter. You can talk to the woman next to you and discover, an hour in, that she’s on the same walk as you.
You travel from the heart of one place to the heart of another. London St Pancras to Paris Gare du Nord in less time than it takes to drive to many UK airports. Aviemore station, a gentle walk from the hotel, after a night on the Caledonian Sleeper. St Anton, a small town in Austria where your hotel is only 30 minutes away.
The landscape becomes part of the holiday. The soft pleat of the Bernese Alps through the window as you travel down from Zurich to Sarnen. The Norwegian forests unfurling as you rattle up to Lillehammer. The Mediterranean glinting somewhere off to your left as you ride from Barcelona to Falset to reach Priorat. By the time your walking boots touch the trail, you’ve already been in the place for hours.
And yes, the carbon. Train travel produces, on average, around five times less CO₂ per passenger than flying. On a route like London to Paris, the difference can be close to 90%. For a community of women who care where their money goes and what footprint their joy leaves behind, that isn’t a footnote. It’s a reason.
Holidays where the train really works
Here’s the thing we want to be honest about: not every holiday can, or should, be a train holiday. There are places in our programme — a remote Greek island, a valley deep in Ladakh, a corner of Iceland — where flying is the only sensible way to get there, and we won’t pretend otherwise.
But more of our holidays lend themselves to the train than most women realise. Over the last year, we’ve quietly been pulling together the ones that truly work beautifully by rail. Not because we’ve forced them to, but because the route, the timing, the onward transfer and the arrival all genuinely add up.
The Cairngorms, with the Caledonian Sleeper from Euston tucking you into a cabin in London and delivering you, blanket-wrapped and slightly marvelling, into the Highlands the next morning. Switzerland, where a simple hop from Zurich drops you into Wengen and the Bernese Alps open out in front of you. Norway, reached by train through Lillehammer and up into the mountains at Dalseter. Bangor in Wales to begin the Slate Trail. Strasbourg with its own historic station and a lovely journey down from Paris. Many trips overland through Italy, France and Spain for those with the time.
More are coming. We’re working now on the holidays we’d like to add to this collection for 2027, and we’ll be sharing them with you through the year.
Slow, but not frictionless
We’d be doing you a disservice if we pretended European rail was always simple. Booking across borders takes a bit of patience. Prices can surprise you — not always in your favour. Luggage needs thinking about if lifts are scarce at a changeover station, and strikes, like weather, happen. We’ll tell you when we think the train is worth the extra effort, and when it isn’t. Where helpful, we’ll point you toward trusted rail partners who can do the booking legwork for you, and we’ll keep writing the kind of plain-English arrival notes that make a first rail trip feel like a second one.
They are, where they work, a different kind of travelling — quieter, slower, more companionable, more connected to the places you’re passing through. For many of you, that sounds less like a compromise and more like exactly what you’ve been looking for.
Come as you are
Whatever your feelings about flying, driving, trains or ferries, our promise stays the same. A warm welcome. A safe, small group of women. A guide who knows the path, the weather and the good place for soup. Scenery you’ll carry home in your bones. And, increasingly, the option to arrive the way you’ve been dreaming of arriving — slowly, thoughtfully, already half on holiday before you step off the train.
If that sounds like your kind of journey, come and have a look at where we’re walking next. The platform is just the beginning.
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