Luxury travel – what does it mean?


If you stick ‘luxury travel’ into google, you’ll find names like Cox and Kings, Abercrombie and Kent and Elegant Resorts filling the first pages with 5 star hotels and first class flights. Click through to ‘images’ and you’ll find two dominant colours and pictures that are almost as toe curling as the touched up front covers of glossy fashion magazines.

It got us thinking – Isn’t everyone’s idea of luxury travel different?

Well ours certainly is. When asked, James’ top three words were freedom, space (lack of crowds) and new experiences …. and mine, freedom, inspiring and adventure. Same-same.

We talked about this. As we’re condensing all our possessions, trying to ‘double-function’ everything we plan to take on our Winterized motorhome road trip, it seems that the general perception of luxury travel means no compromise – take everything. Bigger hotels suites, extra luggage allowance, more of everything. Ugh.

Having everything done for you every now and again is a nice treat but that’s largely dependent on someone knowing exactly what flicks your switch and I’m not sure that’s as straight forward as luxury tour operators make it out to be. You’re experiencing their idea of what luxury should be – you will like this because it’s the most expensive hotel in town or the best chef (according to whom?).

If you plug in ‘motorhome travel’, now that’s a different ball game altogether – look at these pictures! Breath-taking views, multi coloured skies and endless roads to who knows where.

motorhome adventures

Words change their meanings over time and the dictionary definition of ‘a state of great comfort or elegance, especially when involving great expense’ seems a little antiquated to me. Our Elddis motorhome is comfy, no doubt, and a fancy new home on wheels is far from inexpensive – elegant, we’ll that too is personal but I’d say practical over beautiful. Give me a French supermarket (LOVE A FRENCH SUPERMARKET), knee deep snow, a cosy bar and some local bureaucracy any day. That’s my idea of luxury.

So it seems the only reason we define travel in categories like this is to make it easier for Google to sort and segment things. We all know Google is far smarter than that so I look forward to the day when I punch in luxury travel ideas and it sends me to an Antarctic expedition on skidoos powered by penguin poop.

winterized motorhoming

Hannah

Gobby, opinionated, professional ski bum. Co-founder of the Winterised Project.

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