Roads and Kingdoms League of TravelersReviews of roadsandkingdoms.com

Traveling with R &K was a great and rewarding experience! There is a unique chemistry that happens, even for skeptics of group travel when like-minded wanderers come together for a shared love of culture and food. The thoughtful and genuine love the hosts have for the locales visited is not to be underestimated. These are people, experts by experience who convey a natural warmth for the culture and places being visited that is truly contagious. My first trip was to Thailand, a place I've visited a handful of times over 20 years, but this time it was different. Different doors opened for us with R & K. Step thru, you'll have to go with them to see! I've been on 2 and have Piedmont booked for 2027. Why? The host of that trip Eugenio was a guest on a Japan R & K trip, and I totally fell for his enthusiasm and love for all things Italian. And it's not bad that I'm told he's incredibly connected to the smaller contributors who make everything we wanderers love about travel. I can hardly wait!

Although the access and experiences are incredible, and something we couldn’t replicate on our own, what really sets Roads & Kingdoms apart for us are the people. From Nathan and Matt to hosts/guides like Alejo, Rocio, Eugenio and Claudio, to Mike in traveler support, to photographer partners like Bea and Clay … R&K only works with the BEST people. And that shows up in the quality of the experiences they offer and the type of traveler they attract; we’ve made many dear friends in our 5 trips with Roads and Kingdoms and that has made our travels even more rewarding. You can count on meeting a lot of cool people and like-minded travellers on these trips. I so admire what Nathan and team have built, staying true to their values and treating people with kindness and respect. The travel experiences are incredible but don’t sleep on their annual magazine and web site, the anti ICE dinners etc. Everything they touch is well done and worth your time. We are currently in route for our 6th trip and have two more planned for next year. You just cannot replicate the experiences and the community that is the League of Travelers. You would do very well to check out a trip with them; we were hooked from day 1 in Sevilla and knew we’d found our family! I’ll never forget the fisherman we met in Spain, the truffle hunters and cheese makers in Piedmont, the artists and chefs in CDMX, the Jakob masters in Salamanca, the seafood on the beach in Asturias (gracias Elio, you are the best!!). And you never know who will be tagging along on your trip!

My husband Pete and I have been on two R&K trips so far. We have three more planned. I’m a widely traveled person and these are by far the best trips I’ve been on for two reasons. #1 R&K trips are really, really fun. Everyone has the best time – the guides have a way of bringing everyone in a relatively small group of 12 or fewer together almost instantly. #2. These trips show me the world through new eyes. All kinds of new experiences that I never even imagined. There is an emphasis on food and culture that is transporting. At least one of the guides has journalism experience of some sort, which I think is key. They design the trips after investigating a location in tandem with a local expert. No other group has access to the kinds of experiences that the R&K guides get access to and the accommodations are high end.

My wonderful wife drags me off to adventures. I complain every step of the way leading up to the adventure, and I always end up so glad we went. So it was with our first and second R&K trip. Our first trip was R&Ks first foray into China. We had spent some considerable time in China, but R&K proposed a trip unlike anything we had experienced. I was leery. We never before embarked on a vacation with a group of strangers. How was that going to work out? In a nutshell, fabulously well. In fact, several of us sort of decided together to sign up for an upcoming trip to another part of China. Other reviewers have summed up perfectly well what sort of trip one can expect. Our trip to China was twelve intrepid folks from various parts of the globe together with two terrific guides, one with local ties and the other with deep R&K experience. I do like good food and drink from street food to Michelin three-star experiences, but I am not a foodie or wine expert of any sort. I am a wide-eyed enjoyer. I wondered how I would like to travel with “serious folks.” No problem, and no pretenses. On the flight home from China my wife turned to me and said, “I just signed us up for the trip to Puglia next summer. I loved our week in Yunnan Province, but she got my response and of course again, I am glad she told me I was going. Puglia was an even smaller group of travelers, 5 of us in all. Again, great guides, great companionship and a great time. Our guides both had some serious food and wine expert chops, but again they did not intimidate. They reveled in seeing us enjoy everything. Of the four guides from our two trips to date, I feel as though I have four friends. I have surprised myself in how much I enjoy learning about the culture and history of a place through a “food tour.” The information actually sticks with me! My wife has us already signed on for four more trips, the first of which comes in less than two weeks. I will just say let the buyer beware in the sense that R&K trips seem to be addictive. We can’t stop signing up for them, and we are not alone in our addiction.

It is difficult to quantify, let alone summarize, the multivalent sumptuousness that is a Roads & Kingdoms trip. To say it is gastronomic is to minimize the profoundly human. To say it is exotic is to overlook the deeply chthonic terroir of the experience. You will dine at Michelin star chef’s tables and impromptu family meals, tour converted monasteries and visionary organic farms, be invited to private casitas and an undisclosed cheese cave, taste food pushing culinary boundaries and resurrecting gastronomic history. You will sleep in converted castles, restored haciendas and boutique hotels. Everyone you meet will welcome you like family and you will make friends that will become family. Through it all you will be led by guides and hosts whose passion for the people and places is the umami of the whole experience. As remarkably true as all that is, Roads & Kingdoms trips are celebrations of craft. They are introductions to the unsung creative obsessives producing craftsmanship in what they’re passionate about. In a world of artifice and simulacra, Roads & Kingdoms reorient your center of gravity towards excellence. Tony showed us a beautiful world, Nathan and co. gave us a seat at the table.

Over the past years, my wife and I had developed the notion that we had become pretty proficient at "do-it-yourself" travel planning. That impression dissolved when we took a first trip with Roads and Kingdoms in spring of 2024. Trips by R&K occupy a niche that would never be accessible to a mere casual traveler. These trips are developed using deep local connections that highlight and celebrate regional foodways. It is true that these are food focused tours, but that focus is a springboard to experiencing history, culture, and the broader community that you are visiting. These trips involve so much more than just eating great meals. A typical day may include shopping and eating your way through local outdoor markets, a visit with a small scale beverage producer (think handmade, family produced mezcal, pisco, or pulque for instance) that will likely include lunch in the family's patio or kitchen. The day may be ended with dinner that might be prepared in the home kitchen of a celebrated local chef and her family eaten al fresco or seated around her kitchen island or possibly in an otherwise closed to the public Michelin 3 star that R&K has developed a relationship with. What anchors all of these trips (and what R&K excels at bringing to the table) is presenting local agriculture, regional culture, and the community relationships that R&K has nurtured to provide these one of a kind experiences. If you've ever seen yourself tagging along on one of Bourdain's "No Reservations" episodes, this is how you make it happen, but the episode lasts for a whole week. I have traveled with R&K four times to four different continents since 2024 and have three trips pending in the next year. If I could make it 6 stars I would.

Having been on 4 trips with R&K in the last 2 years, I can attest to the care and consideration that goes into planning a deep dive into local food and culture and how for the traveler that translates into “living in the moment". A major feature of these trips is the relationships the guides and tour hosts have formed (over years!) with locals, not just chefs, but farmers, winemakers, cheese custodians, anyone and everyone that is not only important to the place you’re in, but speaks to who lives there and wants to sustain these food pathways. But it’s not just food and drink (although there is definitely plenty of that), think bigger and you’ll find yourself meeting families welcoming you inside their home and treating you like royalty or even better, family as you help prepare the meal or you’re making cider with another family and then they feed you or you tour a local market with a local chef and get samples of things you’ve never had before-this list could go on and on. At the end of the trip, you’ll know you have been fully immersed into that place and you’ll want to experience that again and again.

Very impressed with the integrity and individualized client care of this agency! We first met the founder/CEO of Roads and Kingdoms, Nathan Thornburgh, at a charity fundraiser, where we won the grand prize auction for a foodie trip for two to Puglia, Italy. When a sudden illness forced us to cancel and our travel insurance company balked at reimbursing our costs, Nathan personally intervened with the insurer and persuaded them to honor our claim. He didn’t have to take the time in his super busy schedule to do this, but Nathan willingly lavished the same client attention he had shown throughout the rest of the process. Lots of responsiveness to our questions and efforts to accommodate our needs from the start. R and K clearly goes to great lengths to ensure a superb and bespoke client experience. With two deeply knowledgeable guides (eg a New York Times food writer) assigned to the small group tour, connected logistically by a group what’s app chat set up before the tour so attendees can get to know each other and be in real time contact during the tour, there was a lot of flexibility and on the spot tailoring of the agenda. The low client/guide ratio means very personal attention for a carefully curated agenda of local wineries, cheese makers, sausage makers, pottery artisans, specialty restaurants and secluded beaches. We are already looking at their array of top tier global tours for our next trip, confident we are in the good hands of a team who truly care about the client experience, and demonstrably go above and beyond to achieve that!