Ever since we started out 26 years ago, we have been trying to ensure that despite all the rigorous planning, both logistical and academic, our tours achieve an informal, relaxed ambience, and that we remain open to the joy of travel – serendipity.

Taking advantage of serendipity is harder than it sounds!  It takes particularly good and fluid planning to be able to incorporate the “unplannable” – but we very much want to be able to take advantage of an invitation to a new excavation, say, or a village carnival, or the local wine festival, this is almost always only possible when a tour manager is there to rearrange everything to make it possible.

We have rather unconventional requirements of our tour managers. One is that we don’t usually employ people who work in this capacity for anyone else. We want things to be done in our informal Andante way.

Not all our tour managers have done the trips before – in fact one of the reasons they enjoy working with us is because they are also interested in new people and new places.

Not all of them speak the language – although most of them do (and, if not, either the guide or the local guide will of course).
They will have basic first aid training, but they are not medical experts either.

So who are they?

Our tour managers are often professional translators or archaeologists, but they lead all manner of different lives and bring very diverse skills to the tour.  A few of our guide-lecturers and some of our office staff also act as tour managers. No matter what their background, they will all be interesting, helpful, competent, efficient travelling companions who are there to anticipate problems and sort things out in the most unobtrusive way possible.

We train all our tour managers ourselves – sending them on a training tour with an established mentor – and there are biennial meetings in Salisbury for all of them, from far and wide, to discuss the job of managing an Andante tour.

So you see we take this serendipity, and this light-hearted attitude very seriously.  We want to inject personality into our holidays and make it less like a tour and more like travelling with an archaeologist and a group of friends.