About us

Tourdust is a tour operator with a fresh approach. We specialise in adventurous holidays for independent minded couples, families and friends. We develop innovative technology and partner closely with fantastic local guides and hotels to offer a high quality & great value holiday.

At Tourdust, our approach is to offer the best of both worlds, combining down-to-earth adventures led by experienced local guides with carefully selected boutique hotels for post adventure indulgence. One day you can be in the Atlas Mountains, sipping mint tea with your mountain guide after a great day’s trekking, the next resting your weary limbs in a sumptuous traditional riad in the heart of the Marrakech Medina.

Thoughtfully designed adventures: Multi-day adventures are the corner-stone of all our itineraries, and we like to encourage our guests to push their comfort zones just a bit.  Our multiday treks are based on private departures - flexible, privately guided treks with superb local guides. This is a far superior product to the larger fixed date group trips of our competitors. Our kayaking holidays are all based on small group trips on fixed dates.

Genuinely Local Travel Experiences:
We work with a selection of accommodation and local guides who are rooted in their communities giving a more genuine and personal experience. We want our customers to come back home feeling that they’ve got a little under the skin of a place. 

Hand-Picked Character Accommodation:
Our approach to accommodation is very much rooted in the local place. If you are trekking in the mountains, then the essence of the experience is in the camping or the simple village accommodation. If you are in Marrakech, you are missing a trick if you don't stay in one of the delightful small boutique riads in the medina. We inspect and select the accommodation we regularly use, and always prefer smaller character hotels and guest-houses with warm and welcoming hosts.

Expert Advice and First Hand Knowledge:
We take a specialist approach to everything we do. We walk the trails and pore over maps evaluating different routes to make sure we can recommend the best adventure for each customer. We inspect hundreds of hotels and carefully pick the best and most reliable local guides. Each trip we organise is a deeply individual and genuinely local experience.

Areas of expertise:

- Morocco, Ethiopia and Kenya.
- Kayaking Holidays in the Mediteranean countries of Croatia, Greece and Turkey
- Multi-day treks in the Atlas Mountains, Simien Mountains, Mount Kenya, Kilimanjaro and Inca Trail
- Adventurous holidays for families. Many of our family holidays have been tested out by our team's own children.

Testimonials: 

We publish frank feedback from our customers throughout our site. You can see reviews against a particular country or even a particular itinerary. We've pulled out a couple of them here, which we feel capture the essence of what we do. Several of our customers have also left reviews for us on third party sites (see ReviewCentre and this independent blog)

The people:

We are a small team of specialists, and through innovative technology manage to do more with a small team than most do with much larger teams. We have all travelled extensively and have our own areas of expertise:

Ben Colclough - Africa Trekking & Ethiopia Specialist.
Ben has climbed most of the big African peaks, sailed the Atlantic & backpacked overland from Russia to Vietnam. He has an exhaustive first-hand knowledge of Ethiopia and has developed most of our African trekking routes. Before making a living out of travelling, Ben was a marketing Director at American Express and ran a precision turned parts engineering business.

Anna Colclough - Family, Morocco & Peru Specialist
If Ben brings the adventure expertise, Anna brings the innate understanding of what makes a hotel special. She has an exquisite sense of what makes for a perfect itinerary, and inspects and selects the majority of our accommodation choices. No-one knows the riads of the Marrakech medina quite like Anna. Prior to starting Tourdust, Anna was employed as operations manager and social media marketer at Market Sentinel and Account manager at Unilever.

Rebecca Mason - Morocco & Kayaking Specialist
Becks spent 6 years in the British Army where responsibilities included organising large expeditions with the attention to detail that the Army is prided on. She has also completed a degree in Adventure Travel. She now travels regularly to Morocco and is developing significant expertise on the Atlas Mountains trekking routes.

James Croft - Developer
James is the superb Ruby on Rails developer responsible for the fine underpinnings that keep Tourdust fast, easy to use and complete. James is perhaps the best travelled developer in the known world. He spent 6 months travelling around South and Central America exploring an intimidating array of countries (Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Mexico) and has also travelled extensively in South East Asia, China, Pakistan and India.

Peter Sweetman - Chief Technical Officer
eter held some rather senior technology positions at BP and ensures we make sensible and robust technology decisions. Peter has travelled extensively in Libya, Ethiopia, Fiji, Chile, Australia, Ecuador and China and is an enthusiastic diver.

Alex, Milly and Juliet Colclough - Junior Product Testers
Our range of family itineraries has been designed firmly with them in mind and they take great enthusiasm in testing out our family trips, having already enjoyed Tourdust trips out to the Sahara, the Atlas Mountains, South Africa and beyond.