4 Holiday Ideas for Adventurous Travellers

Plenty of people see holidays as a chance to relax. An opportunity to take a step back from the frantic pace of everyday life. Which means that many holiday itineraries are filled with nothing but slow starts, leisurely meals, and lots of time to rest and unwind.

But say you’ve got a more adventurous soul. You might see holidays as an opportunity to travel across the world, discovering new experiences and pushing yourself in situations that you’d never encounter when you were at home. 

If adventure and excitement sound right up your street when it comes to travel, here are four holiday ideas that will inspire and encourage you to book your next adventurous trip.

Multi-Day Hikes

Starting off our suggestions with a moderate level of adventurousness, multi-day hikes can be a great way to bring more excitement and challenge to your holiday. Instead of just enjoying a walk that takes you out and back for the duration of a day, these kinds of hikes take much longer to complete and require you to carry all of your belongings with you as you stop off along the route to rest and refuel.

Multi-day hiking holidays can range from stunning explorations of UK mountain ranges and walking trails to wilder and more rugged journeys across remote landscapes in other parts of the world. You can tailor your holiday depending on how much of a challenge you fancy, choosing to tackle a long but established trail or spend a shorter amount of time exploring a jungle or a set of peaks.

You can also choose between planning a self-guided multi-day hike or joining a guided tour, which is a much better idea if you’re travelling somewhere more remote where an experienced guide will ensure your safety. The level of adventure can also be dialled up and down depending on your accommodation choices; you might spend your nights in a tent you’ve pitched yourself, or might bookend your days of hiking with luxurious B&Bs to rest and recover.

Activity Holidays

A great option for adventurous travellers who don’t want to spend too much time planning every detail of their trip themselves is to find an activity holiday that fits the bill. Activities holidays are organised experiences where your itinerary consists of a range of different things to do, all carefully planned by the tour operator to create a fun, jam-packed experience.

An activity holiday can be a brilliant way to try lots of new things, build on existing skills or just push yourself out of your comfort zone a little whilst also enjoying being on holiday. These kinds of trips tend to be themed, whether that’s around the activities or the destinations you’re in, so you can choose one that is catered to your interests and the level of challenge you want to face. 

When it comes to your options with different activity holidays, you’ve got a huge range of different experiences to choose from. Learn survival skills in a forest or the mountains in the UK, enjoy activity holidays to Italy where outdoor pursuits are interspersed by exceptional food, try a wide range of snow sports in the French or Swiss Alps, or explore the terrain in Patagonia on everything from horseback to your own two feet.

Conservation Experiences

If you’re looking for adventure when you travel but also want to make a positive difference to the environment you’re visiting, a holiday that involves conservation activities can be a brilliant option. Whether you’re helping to restore landscapes or helping to reintroduce a species back into the wild, it’s a great way to feel like you’re making a positive difference to the place that you’re visiting.

A conservation experience is a bit like a working holiday, so you can expect to be kept pretty busy with a variety of different tasks whilst you’re away. The opportunities available range from days of manual labour to spending time conducting research, so there are options depending on how you’d like to contribute.

These kinds of travel experiences are perfect if you’d rather give back to a destination or you’re someone who is passionate about conservation and sustainability and wants to use their holidays to contribute. Often, conservation opportunities can take you to places that traditional travel opportunities would never reach and give you chances to see rare wildlife in a unique way, making them ideal if you’re looking for something a bit different.

Multi-Centre Trips

Our final suggestion for travellers seeking adventure is to book a twin or multi-centre holiday that takes you to a range of different destinations as part of your trip. If you’re the kind of person who wants to use their holidays to see as much of the world as possible, and enjoy the contrasts between locations, then this approach to travel is a brilliant idea.

Multi-centre trips tend to involve locations in the same country or at least close by, with an itinerary that will include several days in each. Most organised tours or suggested itineraries will include places that each offer a different experience, giving you a comprehensive view of a country or allowing you to appreciate a wide range of experiences.

Classic examples of multi-centre trips include visiting a city in the USA, like New York, followed by a trip to the Caribbean, exploring Sri Lanka and then relaxing in the Maldives, or island hopping on organised activity holidays in Croatia. It can be a great approach to exploring destinations like South America, southeast Asia and Europe, giving you a wider breadth of opportunities and turning your holiday into more of an adventure.

Adventure means different things to different people. You might feel most adventurous when you’re pushing yourself physically or mentally, when you’re visiting somewhere totally new, or when you’re contributing to a greater effort to make change. Whatever kind of adventure you’re looking for, we hope that this list has helped to inspire you to book an exciting holiday experience.