Private Tours

Bespoke Private Tours Built Around Your Group

Not every trip fits neatly into a set departure date, and that is exactly what our bespoke private tours are for. If you are a group of friends, a family marking a reunion, or old travelling companions who want to explore together again, get in touch and we can tailor an itinerary precisely to your needs. Because Esplora is a small company, a private tour is built by the same guides and historians who lead our scheduled small group departures, rather than handed to a call centre, so you get the same depth of local knowledge and the same honest advice about what will and will not suit your group. A private tour can also work out surprisingly cost effective for a larger group travelling together, since costs that would otherwise fall on one or two people get shared across everyone, while still giving you the comfort of knowing that everyone travelling shares the same interests, from Byzantine history to regional wine.

Recent Bespoke Private Tours: Food, Wine and Family Groups

Our bespoke private tours range widely in shape. One recent itinerary took a group of twenty travelling from America on a two-week food and wine journey between the Veneto and Tuscany: five nights based at a family-run hotel in the Prosecco hills near Vittorio Veneto, then on to a Chianti Classico estate near Siena for cellar visits, a cooking class and truffle hunting in season, with Asolo’s Veneto villas and Vernaccia wine country worked in along the way once the group told us Venice and Florence were not what they were after. We have also built several private tours through Sicily and Puglia for guests who wanted the two regions’ food and wine rather than their history: a route from Sicily’s Etna wineries, by land through Matera, to Puglia’s trulli country and olive groves, with variations depending on whether a group prefers to fly or drive between the two. In every case, the itinerary was built from what the group actually wanted, not from a template, right down to which sites came off the plan because they did not fit the group’s real interests.

How We Build Your Bespoke Private Tour

We start by listening properly to what your group wants, not by pitching what we already have on the shelf. That might mean more wine and less archaeology, more walking and fewer museums, or a specific family connection to a particular town or region. From there we draw on real hotels, guides and ground operators we already trust, propose a day-by-day route and an honest, itemised price, and refine it with you until it fits, adjusting the balance of history, food and pace as many times as it takes. Groups typically range from a handful of friends to twenty or so guests, and because you already know and like your fellow travellers, a bespoke private tour often has an ease to it that no scheduled departure can quite match, right down to which sites make the final cut.