Who we are
STC Escapes arranges tailor-made trips for three kinds of traveller: families going away across the generations, independent travellers who want a holiday that's genuinely well run, and anyone who'd rather someone else handled the logistics. What ties them together is that we know the places we send you. We know the guides, the hotels, and the roads that are worth the extra hour.
We're the sister company of STC Expeditions, which our founder Chris Sainsbury has spent twenty years building into a company that runs ethical expeditions for schools in places like Borneo, India, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Peru, Kenya, Nepal, Japan, Uganda and South Africa. The trips that work are the ones where someone on the ground has already thought about the thing that could go wrong, and that habit, built over two decades of school expeditions, is what now goes into our holidays. The only real difference is who's travelling, not how carefully the trip is put together.
That's the point of difference. In every country we offer, we work with experienced local agents who live and work there, the people who know which guide is right for a family with young children, which lodge is worth the extra night, and how a day should really be paced once you're there. Twenty years of those relationships are the reason a trip runs smoothly, and they're not something you can find on a booking site.
How travel is done matters to us too. We're a certified B Corp, which means we're held to standards on how we treat people and the planet, not just how we run trips. We also support two charities close to us: South West Hospiscare, here at home in the South West, and Trees for Life, for its work restoring the Caledonian Forest in the Scottish Highlands.