From New Scotland to Old with UnTours
The Lagagarbh Cottage in Glencoe.
What a Slow Family Trip Reminded Me About the Tourism We're Building
I spend my working life helping tourism businesses and destinations travel a little lighter on the world. So when it came time to take my own family away this past summer, I felt the quiet weight of my own advice. If I ask the destinations and operators I work with to slow down, centre communities and travel with care, the least I can do is live my own summer vacation that way.
And I love where we landed. I'm from Nova Scotia — New Scotland — a place whose name, fiddle tunes and Gaelic place-names all lean east across the Atlantic toward Scotland. We even take pride in our own tartan.
Taking my two teenagers to Central Scotland felt less like a trip and more like visiting a relative we'd never met. And, actually, we did meet a realtive while there; my husband’s Aunt. His family, including his mother, come from Aberdeenshire and Collieston.
There was really only one company I wanted to travel with to do it properly: UnTours, a long-time client and friend, a fellow B Corp, and one of the most quietly radical businesses in travel.
Local Historian, David giving us a guided tour of Dunblane Cathedral during our orientation and welcome session.
So what actually is an UnTour?
If you've never heard of one, an UnTour is independent travel with support when you need it — minus the coach, the clipboard, and the itinerary that marches you past a place instead of into it. Their tagline says it perfectly: UnPack Once.
Instead of hopping hotels, you settle into one locally-owned home as your base and let a single region reveal itself slowly. Ours was a cottage tucked into the grounds of Kilbryde Castle near Dunblane, with Stirling, Doune and Bridge of Allan all within a few minutes’ drive. The Highlands, Edinburgh and Glasgow were all within easy reach, too.
From there, everything an UnTour includes started to make sense:
A local host — your UnGuide. Ours, Moe, met us at the door with a warm hello, an orientation (including a guided tour of the Dunblane Cathedral and the Leighton Library) to the area and a welcome session. She stayed reachable all week for the small questions that make a place feel like you belong, even for a little while.
A welcome stash of groceries, so nobody's left looking for a shop after a long travel day. This was a treat! Oatcakes, cheese, fruit, eggs, milk, bread, wine, etc. It’s everything you need to feel instantly settled. (A tip from Moe about the local butcher's meat pies fed us more than one cozy night in.)
Transportation to get around. We had a rental car for the week, but depending on where you land, you might get rail or metro passes. In Venice you get access to the vaporetto (boats, of course).
An included local experience. In Central Scotland, that was a guided walking tour of Edinburgh's Old Town with Invisible Cities, a social enterprise that trains people who've experienced homelessness to lead tours of their own cities—complete with brunch and open return train tickets to your homebase. It became the highlight of the week; I wrote about the people behind it over on the UnTours blog, in Who Gets to Tell the Story of a City?
A researched guide app, pre-trip planning support and ongoing local help — day trips to Glasgow, Glencoe, Loch Lomond and beyond, mapped by people who actually know the ground. There’s a vetted list of everything you need from sites to restaurants and cafes to shops.
What you're really buying isn't a package. It's permission to travel the way a place is meant to be travelled: at its own pace, on its own terms. And I might go further to say, you get a built-in community so you never feel like you’re alone — from our UnGuide Moe, to the historians in Dunblane, to the locals (we met quite a few!), to the team at Invisible Cities. It’s the people who welcomed us that we’ll remember most.
I’ve since messaged Moe to proudly share we found bottles of IRN BRU (Scotland’s national soft drink) at our supermarket in Nova Scotia :)
Our UnGuide Moe overlooking Victoria Street.
Why this company is different — all the way down
Here's what matters to me professionally, and why UnTours has my lasting love and respect.
UnTours was founded in 1975 by Hal and Norma Taussig, who pioneered the apartment-based holiday long before "slow travel" was a phrase anyone used. Fifty years on, they're still doing the same unhurried thing, only now the rest of the industry is catching up to what they understood from the start.
They are also the world's first Certified B Corporation — not an early adopter, the first. Hal helped inspire the very movement that gave the rest of us B Corps a framework to follow. (Swell Impact became a B Corp in 2024; UnTours got there before B Corps existed.)
And the ownership model still stops me in my tracks. UnTours is owned by the UnTours Foundation, and 100% of the company's profits flow into it, to be reinvested in mission-aligned businesses tackling poverty, injustice and the climate crisis around the world — well over $11 million to 414 investments (and counting) to date. Hal famously wasn't interested in getting rich; his final act was to give the whole company away to the foundation so the model would outlive him.
And it isn't theoretical. Invisible Cities, the very social enterprise that led our Edinburgh walk, is one of the businesses the Foundation has backed, which means our afternoon in the Old Town was quite literally the model closing its own loop: profits from UnTours flowing into the fund, the fund seeding enterprises like this one, and us standing in the middle of it. Hundreds of investees around the world, from microloans to fellow B Corps, tell the same story. This is what "travel as a force for good" looks like when it's more than a slogan — a decades-long track record of profit reinvested into people and places, over and over again.
UnTours travels to more than 30 destinations across Europe and Latin America — and beyond, by way of small-ship cruises — and every one of them supports this model. But what was especially rare was seeing its magic woven together in Central Scotland, where an included experience was itself a Foundation investee. For us, it was the highlight.
From left: Our UnGuide, Moe; Zakia, Sonny and Gayle, Invisible Cities; Me (Lesley).
Travelling as a guest, not a consumer
The other reason I chose this trip is that slow travel is, plainly, the more responsible way to move through the world. One direct flight and then a week rooted in a single community means a lighter footprint than a fortnight of hopping around — and I'll be honest, as someone who thinks about carbon for a living, the transatlantic flight is the part I don't get to hand-wave away. Slow travel doesn't erase that, but it does make the rest of the trip count for more, and it keeps far more of your spending in local hands.
Back home, I acknowledge my privilege as a guest in Mi'kma'ki, the traditional territory of the Mi'kmaq. Being a good guest somewhere that isn't yours is a discipline I try to carry with me, and Central Scotland asked the same of us: be open hearted, pull over safely, take the quiet paths, leave the landscape better than you found it, and let the people who live there tell you what their place actually means. On the Invisible Cities walk, we watched guides hand the story of Edinburgh back to the women history overlooked and the people the city had walked straight past. That's what responsible tourism looks like when it's working — not a certificate on a wall, but whose voice gets to narrate a place.
Kilbryde Castle and grounds. UnTours offers a castle suite stay and a cottage stay on this property.
What I brought home
The days that stayed with us weren't the iconic ones. They were slow mornings in the cottage, an afternoon lost to the peaks of Glencoe, and the small community that made a new place feel like it had a place for us in it. My teenagers softened, asked better questions, and started to quietly become travellers rather than tourists. (If you're curious about the family side of it — how slow travel actually works with a 13- and 16-year-old in tow — I shared the teen-tested version on the UnTours blog in Traveling Central Scotland with Teens.
That's exactly the transformation I hope for on behalf of the brands we work with at Swell Impact: tourism that's genuinely good for the environments and communities it depends on, told in a way that's honest and human. UnTours has been living proof of it for fifty years, and experiencing it from the inside, with my own family, was a gift.
So, thank you to Moe and the whole UnTours Team for a week we'll be talking about for a long time. We told Moe we'd be back. We meant it.
Swell Impact helps tourism brands and destinations build sustainability strategies they can actually sustain, and communicate their impact authentically. UnTours is a client and fellow B Corp; UnTours generously provided accommodations, UnGuide support, and included activities.
