Founded by Paul and Linda Trill in 2010, utilising their own extensive experience of car touring in their beloved Jaguar, the original ethos continues today; taking you to quiet backwaters, scenic routes and lesser-known drives and destinations.

 

Backwater Classic Car Tours, now a trading name of Albatross Motoring Limited, is part of the Albatross Group Limited, operating since 1985. As such, we have a wealth of experience in marketing, promoting and organising specialist touring holidays worldwide.

​

The founders Paul and Linda remain actively involved, including hosting some of the tours each year, whilst contributing towards the touring ideas and production of our tried and tested Road Book format.

​

It’s important to know the company that you are dealing with can be trusted to protect your money until after your holiday is complete. As members of ABTOT, the Association of Bonded Travel Organisers Trust Limited, we provide financial protection under the Package Travel Regulations 2018.

​

Open/Multi Marque Tours

We offer a handful of tours in each year's programme which any make/marque can join. If you’ve not been on our tours before, please do not hesitate to phone us for more information on how our tours work; we’d be delighted for you to join us.

 

Club & Group Tours

In addition to our open tours, we offer club/closed tours. These are for XK & E-Type club members only. With this said, we are always keen to discuss working with new car clubs, so please do pick up the phone if you’d like to discuss Backwater arranging your next car club tour.

​

How our tours work

Our tours are fun, relaxed and non-competitive.

​

All of our tours are fully hosted, unless stated on the tour inclusions, ensuring you are booking with the comfort knowing that one of our tour hosts will be on hand at your hotel throughout your stay

​

Our hotels are handpicked for their car parking, locality and, in most cases (unless more convenient to use a modern hotel), their character.

​

To book a tour, a 20% non-refundable deposit is payable. (10% at the time of booking, and a further 10% 6 months prior), with a balance payment not required until 10 weeks prior, and we can hold you a place without a deposit for up to 2 weeks, subject to availability. Once a deposit is paid, all bookings are subject to our terms & booking conditions.

​

For UK tours we provide Tulip route books with turn-by-turn instructions. For non-UK destinations we will provide pre-loaded routes into Satellite Navigation Systems and/or provide you a link to load the routes into your own Sat Navs or smart phones. If you haven’t worked with Tulip’s before; fear-not, they aren’t as scary as they look, and our hosts are happy to talk you through them in your pre-tour briefing, once you have checked in at your tour hotel.

​

We don’t have a dress code – smart casual attire for the evenings is perfectly acceptable – if we have a need for special dress for a specific occasion, we will ensure we notify you in advance.

​

To summarise; if you want to share some incredible driving routes with the comfort of travelling with a group of like-minded enthusiasts, and in the knowledge that you have onsite tour hosts throughout your stay, then give us a call or book online.

​

If you’ve been with us before, we hope you’ll join us again – as many of you kindly do. If you haven’t experienced any of our Backwater Classic Car Tours yet, then we’d love you to join us on one… it’s always much more than just a drive.

​