Grantourismo In The Media – Devising Your Own Grand Tour

We have a Grantourismo In The Media section, so we don’t usually blog if Grantourismo gets some coverage or we’re asked to write about our particular style of enriching and experiential, long-term travel we like to call ‘grand touring’.

But we thought we’d let you know about a couple of recent stories, as we’ve been getting such lovely comments about them via email and Twitter from travellers telling us how inspirational the stories have been. Thank you.

One story, an eight-page feature, Grantourismo: a Contemporary Grand Tour, is in the May issue of Sawasdee, Thai Airways in-flight magazine. We do a lot of writing for the publication and have written on everything from Hanoi’s art scene and Creative Cambodia to Bangkok’s best restaurants and Phnom Penh’s hottest district. The editor asked us to tell our story and explain what inspired our long-term travels – a journey that’s lasted 7.5 years so far!

In the piece, we showcase our last twelve months of travels, month-by-month, as well as provide plenty of practical tips for people considering embarking on their own grand tour, round-the-world trip or long term travels, which for many people is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. You’ll find some of those tips above but I’m also planning a more detailed post on grand tour planning.

I also write for The Guardian travel section in the UK and one of my editors there recently asked me to write about long slow holidays and settling into places for a while. I wrote about our experiences renting places in Italy, in Venice, Milan and Puglia, the birthplace of slow travel.

It was those long summer holidays that we used to take when we were living in the UAE, generally for two months at a time, that inspired us to take to the road in 2006 for a year – the year that never seemed to end and is still going! – and ultimately inspired us to start Grantourismo. You’ll find the link to that piece here: Staying in Italy – the Secrets to Enjoying Long Summer Holidays.

If you’d like to see the full Sawasdee story, leave a comment below and I’ll email you a PDF. If you have any questions relating to these pieces or planning long-term travel, pop those below too.

We were also chuffed to be included on Fathom’s 24 Favourite Travel Blogs and Websites. Fathom is one of our favourite travel sites, covering similar slow and local travel territory, from fab neighbourhoods to explore, such as Dogpatch in San Francisco, to local insights into places, such as this Paris guide for the first time visitor from one of our favourite bloggers, Lindsey Tramuta of Lost In Cheeseland.