A travel house in Edinburgh since 2016
Nine journeys
A year. Each one planned for eleven months, capped at eight travellers, and run in one of five regions we can get you out of inside a day. Everything else, politely, is somebody else's business.
See all 7 journeysCurrently planning, for 2027
Aysén•Shiretoko•The Anti-Atlas
The house, in numbers
- 9Departures a year
- 8Travellers, at most
- 5Regions, no more
- 240Days out, books close
- 84Journeys since 2016
- 0%Commission taken
How the house works
Small on purpose
Planned by three people
Ines, Rafael and Miru each plan the regions they have lived or worked in. Nobody hands your journey to a desk, and the person who plans it is the one who picks up the phone.
Every bed slept in
Every room on every journey has been slept in by someone here within twenty months. Not inspected at eleven in the morning — slept in, with a note about the water pressure.
A desk at three in the morning
Neve runs operations from Fettes Row and carries the out-of-hours phone for every day a party is travelling. Median answer time last season: forty seconds.
The catalogue
Seven routes,
nine departures
Two of them run twice a season, because the snow and the light only come once. Prices are per person, and they are the whole price.
Four rules
What we will not book
We lose about one enquiry in six to these. Every year somebody offers to pay extra. The answer has not changed since 2018.
- 01
No captive animals
No elephant rides, no dolphin pens, no sanctuary that breeds. On our journeys the animal decides how close you get.
- 02
No bed we have not slept in
Which is why we work in five regions and not fifty, and why some islands have exactly one place we will book.
- 03
No helicopter for the view
We will charter one to lift a twisted ankle off a glacier approach. We will not charter one to look down at it.
- 04
No back-to-back single nights
Two nights minimum, everywhere. A one-night stop is transit with nicer sheets.
From the journal
Written at the desk
The four things we will not book
No captive animals, no bed we have not slept in, no helicopter for the view, no one-night stops. Every year somebody offers to pay extra. Every year the answer is the same.
Ines Cadoret2 min
Eleven months is not a marketing number
Why our books close 240 days before a departure, what we do with the time, and the one journey where we have tried to shorten it.
Dougal Sim2 min
What a fixer actually does
Ndapewa Shituula has run the Skeleton Coast for us since 2018. A day in the Hoanib, and the four phone calls that happened before breakfast.
Rafael Oduya2 min
Books close 240 days out
Next year's calendar, not this one's
A £1,900 planning fee holds the dates and is credited in full if you travel. The first call is forty minutes, with the planner for that region.