Book Club 25: The Venice Hotel by Tess Woods

This special episode is the audio of the live-streamed May 2026 meeting of the Thoughtful Travellers Book Club, chatting about "The Venice Hotel", a novel with very thoughtful travel themes, with author Tess Woods - https://amzn.to/4ug8Cou   If you'd like to join the Thoughtful Travellers Book Clu…

391 Enviable Travel Jobs

It's easy to be a little envious of anyone who gets to travel to interesting places as part of their work, but when the work itself is also truly fascinating, then I think it's fair that we can all be rather jealous! Nonetheless I loved chatting with these four guests about the experiences their ca…

390 How to be a Good Volunteer Abroad

The world of volunteer tourism is a tricky one. Getting the balance right between enabling people to volunteer in another country, and meeting the needs of the places they volunteer at, isn't easy, and the guests in this episode have many thoughts about what can go wrong and what are better ways to…

389 How Travel Transforms Our Thinking

The more I travel (and the older I get!), the more I realise how little I know, and how wrong I've been about so many things! In this episode, I chat with three guests about various ways their travel experiences have transformed their thinking and perspective, and the general consensus is that ever…

388 Iceland: Chats with Locals

Iceland is a place many travellers dream of visiting; if, like me, you've been lucky enough to see Iceland, you probably desperately want to return. In this Chats with Locals episode, I talk with three Icelanders about their country: why they like living there, what Icelanders are really like, and …

387 Ten Years of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast

A decade ago to the day - 25th March 2016 - I launched the first episodes of The Thoughtful Travel Podcast. Somehow, I have just kept interviewing great people about their thoughts on travel, put together episodes almost every week, and magically, I've now been running this podcast for a full ten y…

386 It Could’ve Been Much Worse: Surviving Travel Dramas

Some travellers have a much keener sense of adventure and embracing physical risk on their travels, and others just stumble into a travel drama they didn't anticipate; we have all kinds on this episode about things going wrong! First up, Tudor Morgan, a veteran of many Antarctic stays and current …

385 Women in History and Travel - International Women’s Day 2026

It's International Women's Day again and I've got a different focus this year: some of the ways history and travel is not the same for women! When we travel, especially on our own, we can be confronted with cultural differences and people's opinions in a starker way than others, and I loved hearin…

Book Club 24: Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent

This special episode is the audio of the live-streamed February 2026 meeting of the Thoughtful Travellers Book Club, chatting with author Hannah Kent about her book "Always Home, Always Homesick" - https://amzn.to/3Kxcb7M   If you'd like to join the Thoughtful Travellers Book Club, sign up for our…

384 Travel With All Your Senses

We often focus on the visual when we travel ... after all, travellers go sightseeing, not "sound-hearing" or "taste-tasting"! But when we look back on our travel memories, it's often a smell, taste, sound or feel that actually has the most long-lasting impact.  In this episode we hear from three t…