The luxury cruise and the railway revival promised that the journey could matter as much as the destination. A new wave of curated driving journeys goes a step further, trading the view from the deck for the freedom of the road. HunterMoss makes the case with its 2027 calendar, led by a first route from the Basque Country to Bordeaux.
Luxury travel has spent much of the past decade falling back in love with the journey itself. The great cruise lines returned, reimagined for a generation that wanted suites rather than cabins and slow passages between lesser-known ports. The railways followed, with restored carriages and revived sleeper routes turning the act of travelling into the holiday in its own right. Both rest on the same appealing idea: that arriving slowly, and watching a landscape unfold along the way, is richer than simply touching down.
Both, though, share a quiet limitation. However beautiful the view from a ship’s deck or a carriage window, the traveller remains a passenger. The route is fixed, the timetable belongs to someone else, and the country passing by stays just out of reach. You see the vineyard; you do not stop in it. You glimpse the harbour town; you do not linger over lunch as the afternoon slips away.
This is the gap that a new generation of curated driving journeys is moving into. A road can be paused. A detour to a hilltop village, an unplanned hour at a roadside cellar, a longer table than the itinerary allowed: the experience bends to the traveller rather than the other way around. Driving restores something the deck and the carriage cannot, which is agency, and with it a more intimate sense of a place. For travellers who increasingly value immersion and flexibility above all else, that shift matters.
HunterMoss has built its name on precisely this premise. The experiential travel company designs slow-paced journeys with only a few hours behind the wheel each day, for intimate groups who want to feel a destination rather than tick it off. The car, often something rare and beautiful, is never the point of the trip. In the company’s own framing, it is a symbol of freedom and access, and a fresh lens through which to experience a place, its food and wine, its roads and its people.
For 2027, HunterMoss introduces a new calendar of journeys led by its first route from the Spanish Basque Country to Bordeaux. It begins in San Sebastian, where the Bay of Biscay meets one of the most celebrated tables in Europe, a city of pintxos counters and crisp, local txakoli. From there the route winds north, crossing into France through the pine forests of the Landes before arriving in the great wine country of Bordeaux, with its eighteenth-century grandeur and the storied chateaux of the Medoc and Saint-Emilion close at hand.
Along the way the driving is deliberately gentle, a few unhurried hours each day with time to stop, taste and stay a while. [The X-night journey departs in [month] 2027, from [price] per person.]It is a route built less around mileage than around the table, the cellar and the coast, and the freedom to follow them at one’s own pace.
It is also travel aimed squarely at the guest who has outgrown the formulaic five-star holiday, for whom another faultless but interchangeable resort no longer holds much appeal. After the cruise and the carriage, the open road offers something they have been quietly looking for: a luxury measured not in thread count or square footage, but in access, spontaneity and a real connection to the places they pass through. On the evidence of HunterMoss’s 2027 calendar, the driving journey may prove to be luxury travel’s next chapter.
For more information and prices, visit www.huntermoss.com