Expert-led Exploring Tours

Starting with our Exploring Crete and Exploring Sicily tours many years ago, we introduced a new and original type of travel experience and we have spent years establishing and honing their characteristics. Our ‘Exploring Tours’ are now a distinctive and much-praised speciality available in Croatia, Greece, Italy, Turkey and the UK. Based on our long experience in the field, they are designed to be the best-prepared cultural tours available.

We provide expert knowledge: our guides, be they academic scholars or local experts, have spent years travelling, researching, living and working in the regions we present. Our ‘Exploring Tours’ are the result of huge amounts of careful preparation and attention to detail, founded in intimate knowledge of a region: they are normally the result not just of years of fashioning, but of decades of engagement with an area.

They are characterised by our tour experts’ love for the regions travelled and their passionate ambition to present our guests with the best, the most interesting, the most insightful, the most authentic experience of an area, its history, its nature and its tradition, but also its contemporary life, brought together in a lively and approachable narrative. We apply a holistic view of land and culture, bringing landscape, historic sites, gastronomic experiences and much more together in a connected narrative and a series of
hands-on (or feet-on) experiences of the region and its ancient sites.

On our ‘Exploring Tours’, our guests enjoy the most careful selection of accommodations in fine city hotels, historic buildings, agritouristic properties, traditional village inns and so on, chosen not for the convenience of the tour operator, but to offer the most insightful, authentic and memorable experience in the region travelled. Likewise, they get many opportunities to sample the best and most authentic local cuisine at carefully-chosen restaurants, based on local produce – another key way to experience a region, along with carefully-selected wine tastings.

A key ingredient that goes into these trips is bold outside the box thinking: always favouring the best experience – the most interesting story, the best dishes, the most beautiful and informative site tours, the most characteristic accommodation – over commercial convenience. Our
‘Exploring Tours’ are perfect as a profound introduction for a visitor who has never been to the
region, but they are also a superb next step for the connoisseur, the person familiar with an area from previous travels.

Our ‘Exploring Tours’ aim to be the best-prepared combination of the geography, nature,
culture, archaeology, history, gastronomy, tradition of a place, accompanied and told by experts
who know the region intimately. We normally schedule these trips at the perfect travel seasons,
when the weather conditions are ideal to fully enjoy the region in question. In Croatia, Greece, Italy and Turkey, that means we favour the Mediterranean’s brilliant spring (April/May), when landscapes are strewn with wild flowers, or the luscious late summer/early autumn (September/October), when the summer heat and the summer crowds have been and gone and a balmy calm prevails for many golden weeks. In the UK, we use the summer months (June, July and August).

Join us for one of these unique experiences, of knowing exactly where you are in time and space and context, and of experiencing and enjoying it to the utmost. Exploring in the true sense of the word: that’s what we do at Peter Sommer Travels.