Private & bespoke tours from your hotel
Luxury Private Tours —
luxury, redefined
Not just a German badge on the bonnet and a fancy French word for the driver
Private & bespoke tours from your hotel
Not just a German badge on the bonnet and a fancy French word for the driver
Private tours
£459from, per group
Bespoke
£459half day · £942 full day
Collection
Your hoteland back again
Group
Max 7just your party
Guide
Localstorytellers who live here
Dogs
Welcomeby prior arrangement
Rated Excellent by our guests on TripAdvisor, Viator and Google
£459per group, up to seven guests
Enquire about your day Tell us your hotel and your datesExclusively yours. Your own local guide and vehicle for the whole day, with no other party.
You have chosen the hotel with care. The room looks out over the water, dinner is booked, and for a few days the city can wait. What nobody has told you yet is where to begin.
The Lake District is England's largest national park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It holds England's highest mountain and its longest lake, the valleys that made Wordsworth a poet and Beatrix Potter a farmer, and some of the finest scenery in Britain. Very little of it can be seen from a hotel terrace. The best of it hides down lanes you wouldn't choose, behind names you've never heard, and in stories no signpost tells you.
That is where we come in. We create private tours where you experience the Lake District as it should be done: the place, the scenery, the heritage, the literature, the essence of it. The day is just for you, on the date you want, and shaped the way you want. Fulfilment, contentment, happiness.
Lake District Tours is an independent tour company based in Kendal, and our guides are local people. Private tours are from £459 per group for up to seven guests, collected from your hotel in Windermere, Bowness, Ambleside, Grasmere, Kendal or Oxenholme, and from Keswick on full-day tours.
“We’re so glad we weren’t driving.” Our guests often tell us so.
The mountain roads are narrow and steep. Your driver watches the road, so you can watch the views.
Experienced, qualified drivers who know every pass and bend, in every kind of weather.
No route to plan, no tickets to buy, nowhere to park. Every detail is considered so you can simply relax into the day.
There is more than one kind of luxury, and we are happy to do either properly.
The door held open, the cap doffed, a little formality and everything done just so. If that is the luxury you enjoy, say so and it is yours, with pleasure.
Luxury re-defined, suited to modern lifestyles and refined tastes. It isn't what you are driven in. It is how the day feels, and what you take home from it.
Personal hosting and thoughtful, unhurried days. Relaxed, curated time, where you linger where it is worth lingering.
Met before you mention them: a word about the weather before you set out, the quiet corner for lunch, the photograph you would otherwise have missed.
Tickets arranged ahead. Stops timed so the queue is shorter. And where a story needs a book to bring it alive, the book comes with us.
Fresh air, big skies and still water, a world away from busy city life. And enough to think about that the evening's conversation takes care of itself.
The luxury isn't the car. It's the person beside you, and what they know.Exclusive, personal, reliable — and local
A driver takes you to places. A guide shows you what is there. Our guides live here, and between them they bring backgrounds in libraries and archives, geology and astronomy, gardens and social history — and a lifetime of knowing which view is best in which light.
Every valley has a story, and the best of them are not on any signpost. Your guide tells them on the day — and knows when to let the view do the talking.
Few places have given more to English literature. Wordsworth wrote much of his finest poetry at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, and the daffodils that became the poem grew beside Ullswater. Read a poem at school, and you already know this place.
She bought Hill Top with the proceeds of her first little books, and drew the village around it into the pages. Our guides bring the books, so the pictures meet the places that made them.
At Haworth the Brontë sisters wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Brontë Country is a day from the Lake District, not York, with every stop part of their story.
Coleridge and Southey made their homes at Keswick, De Quincey took on Dove Cottage after Wordsworth, Keats walked through, and Ruskin spent his last years above Coniston.
Arthur Ransome sailed his children's adventures on a lake that is part Windermere, part Coniston. Written here, read everywhere.
Choose any of our tours and we will run it for your party alone, on the date you choose, with collection from your hotel and return to it at the end of the day. Ten lakes in a day with a cruise included, which no other tour in the Lakes offers. A stroll into Beatrix Potter's world with the books in hand. Wordsworth's Dove Cottage and the graves at Grasmere. Across the Pennines to Haworth and the Brontë Parsonage.
It is the same well-made day our guests love. The difference is that the vehicle, the guide and the day are exclusively yours. Well-behaved dogs, and children under seven, by arrangement.
From £459 per group up to 7 guests
See the private toursAny of our tours can be added to, or adapted as part of, a bespoke tour — tailor-made for each individual booking.
About bespoke toursBespoke is where imagination comes in. Every bespoke tour is tailor-made for each individual booking. From fells to forests, curated around you.
Perhaps there is a poet you have read since school, a garden you have wanted to see for years, or a place you promised yourself you would stand in one day. Perhaps it is Hadrian's Wall, the Arts & Crafts churches of the north, the Yorkshire Dales, or the birds on the marshes at the edge of Morecambe Bay. Perhaps it is a birthday, an anniversary or a proposal that deserves a better backdrop than a restaurant.
Tell us what you are curious about and we will build the day around it. Bespoke is freedom — for the individual, the explorer and the people celebrating something. If you have always wanted to go somewhere, this is how you get there, and the satisfaction of having done it stays with you long after the hotel bill.
Unique, imaginative, celebratory, yours. A few of the things we can build in.
A rug on the grass above the water, a proper picnic, and nobody else in sight.
A gentle path along the shore, level underfoot, with the fells reflected in still water.
A table by the fire, or out in the sun, in a traditional Lakes pub where the locals know the landlord by name.
The viewpoints that stop conversation, reached at the hour when the light is kindest.
The lanes, bridges and quiet valleys that never make the guidebooks, known only to people who live here.
Ancient stones, tiny fellside churches and holy wells — places people have gone to be still for thousands of years.
Because the day is designed rather than chosen, we can put the right places in the right order, at the hours they are at their best, and fit it around the evening you have a table booked. You see the whole plan before you travel.
Tell us where you are staying, who is coming and what you love, and we will design the day around it.
£459 half day · £942 full day per group · £95 planning fee, redeemed against your tour
Find out about bespoke toursRated Excellent by our guests on TripAdvisor, Viator and Google, where you can read every review, unedited.
Every tour is led by one of a small team of local guides — Tim, Gillian, Sandra and Steve — who live in Cumbria and drive these roads in every season. The team rotates, so we can't promise a particular guide, but whoever you get will know the Lakes in rain, snow and low sun. We are based in Kendal, our vehicles are licensed for private hire, and we are fully insured.
Written by Gillian in . Lake District Tours is an independent tour company, not affiliated with any hotel.
Photographs: interim Wikimedia Commons images (CC BY-SA) from our tour pages, credited there. Placeholder photography — to be replaced with our own.
