Slow Travel is the Best Travel

The Slow Travel movement offers travelers the chance to enjoy a destination in full. The Slow Travel website provides detailed feedback on hotels, restaurants and more

Traveling back to the UK from our winter home in Arizona, we were waiting to board the British Airways flight at Phoenix Airport when the lady sitting next to me started to chat. She and her husband were going to London and then Venice, and we started swapping travel information. She encouraged me to look at the Slow Travel website and tell more people about it. I did, and I will!

Slow Travel defines itself like this: 'Slow Travel is independent travel where you enjoy a deeper level of experience by staying in one place longer and seeing the things that are close to you. It is an easier, simpler and slower way of traveling.'

Slow Travel encourages travelers to spend at least a week in one place, and so get to know the area better. It isn't about seeing the whole of Europe, or even the whole of Britain, or just England, in seven days. It isn't about travel where 'If it's Tuesday it must be Belgium.'

The Slow Travel website also encourages you to book 6-12 months ahead, to use the internet to plan your trips thoroughly, to think in one-week segments and, for each of those weeks, make your home in a foreign country. Slow Travel encourages you to take one-week vacation rentals, and in that way get to know the local community and local area. Slow Travel isn't a vacation rental company, and does carry hotel reviews on its website – but it thinks that week-long vacation rentals result in more rewarding trips.

The hotel reviews are posted on the website alongside restaurant reviews and other information provided by the slow travelers themselves. They're real reviews, posted by people who have gone somewhere, paid for it, and wanted to share their experience – for good or bad.

The Slow Travel movement, like the Slow Food movement, has a fondness for Italy, and other Mediterranean countries like France and Spain where slow travel is a way of life. In fact, places where slow everything is a way of life. But the Slow Travel website also covers the UK and Ireland, North America, Switzerland and increasingly in other countries around the world.

One of the best features of the Slow Travel website is the section on detailed trip reports. This is the nitty-gritty of other people's travels: New York, Mexico, Seattle, Florence, Venice. I read someone's account of a recent trip to Paris and it gave me some excellent restaurant recommendations for my own trip there next month. I'm updating a guidebook, the AA Explorer Guide to France, so some of those recommendations may end up in the book. That's the way travel should be – fellow travelers passing on tips, and good places getting the praise they deserve.

I've quickly become a Slow Travel fan. And all because of a chance encounter at Phoenix Airport. I didn't even get the couple's names. But I bet they enjoyed Venice.

Check out the Slow Travel website yourself by clicking here.