Let's be honest about what the last few months have felt like.
On 28 February 2026, coordinated strikes on Iran triggered the cancellation of more than 5,000 flights within 48 hours, with airspace across the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Iraq and Israel either closed or severely restricted. UK consumer spending on airlines fell by 7% in the first two weeks of March 2026 compared to the previous year. The UK GfK Consumer Confidence Index dropped to -21 in March — its lowest level in nearly a year — with GfK execs noting that "people simply do not feel the economy is robust enough to ride out the knock-on effects from the Middle East conflict." Nearly 70% of UK adults now cite rising travel costs as a primary concern, and one in seven adults reported actively delaying major financial decisions — including booking expensive international holidays — to build a savings buffer.
The instinct to pause is entirely human. We get it. The world has felt uncertain, the headlines have been relentless, and nobody wants to commit to something significant when everything feels a little bit like it might shift again next Tuesday.
But here is what we also know, from lived experience and hard-won wisdom: the worst thing uncertainty ever did for anyone was keep them at home.
Cast your mind back to the pandemic. Two years of being told that we absolutely could not go anywhere. What did that produce? Not contentment. Not a peaceful reckoning with the joys of the staycation. It produced a list. A long, specific, slightly embarrassing-in-its-detail list of everywhere we had always meant to go and hadn't, everything we had been quietly putting off, every trip we had filed under one day and left there. The inability to travel didn't diminish the desire. It crystallised it into something almost fierce.
The current moment — unsettling as it genuinely is — is doing something similar. And the destinations on Club Avandra's 2026 programme are, we would respectfully suggest, an extremely good answer to the question of what to do with that feeling.
Matera, carved into the rocks of Basilicata, ancient and otherworldly and unlike anywhere else in Europe. Galicia, wild and green and gloriously underrated, with food that will rearrange your understanding of what Spanish cuisine actually is. Malta, layered with history and drenched in light. Helsinki, cool and design-led and full of the kind of Nordic intelligence that makes you want to move there immediately. Palazzo Fiuggi, the Italian wellness retreat that represents what a spa should be when it's doing it properly.
None of these require you to navigate the airspace anxiety of the Middle East. All of them are, right now, bookable, accessible, and waiting. If anticipation is half the thrill of travel, even if you’re booking to travel several months down the line, you’re simply getting more excitement for your money!
Only 17% of UK travellers had booked their main 2026 holiday by December 2025, reinforcing a strong wait-and-see mentality. We understand the instinct. But later, as it turns out, is rarely better than now — especially when booking early with Club Avandra means locking in preferential rates, securing your place on an itinerary that won't be replicated, and giving yourself something genuinely magnificent to look forward to while the news cycle does whatever it's going to do next.
Because here is what Club Avandra actually offers, beyond the destinations themselves. It offers the insider access that most travellers spend years trying to accumulate and never quite manage. The private dinners, the behind-closed-doors experiences, the introductions to the women who actually make these places extraordinary — chefs, winemakers, artisans, founders, experts whose knowledge transforms a visit from tourism into something that feels genuinely personal. We have spent decades building these relationships. When you travel with us, we share every one of them.
It offers the confidence of expert planning at every step — not a packaged tour with its compromises and its lowest-common-denominator itinerary, but a precisely considered journey where the accommodation is exactly right, the experiences are curated with genuine care, and nothing has been included because it was convenient or cheap. Everything has been included because it is the best possible version of what that destination has to offer.
And it offers the company of like-minded women — which, if you have never experienced it, is considerably harder to describe than it sounds. There is a quality to travelling with a group of curious, adventurous, thoroughly excellent women who share your standards and your sense of humour and your refusal to settle for the merely adequate. The conversation that begins over dinner on the first evening and somehow never quite stops. The easy, unforced connection that forms when people who approach life similarly end up somewhere extraordinary together - and don’t quibble over the bill together. That is not a small thing. In uncertain times, it is actually quite a large one.
As global news cycles grow more intense, the emotional role of travel becomes more important — holidays are increasingly framed as a form of mental, emotional and physical recovery. We would only add that recovery is considerably more effective when it is done properly, in the right place, with the right people, with no compromises made on the itinerary or the bed you're sleeping in.
The world is uncertain. It has been before, and it will be again. The response that has never, in the entire history of human experience, made anyone feel better is staying home and waiting to see what happens.
Book the trip. Come with us. Matera, Galicia, Malta, Helsinki, Palazzo Fiuggi — and considerably more besides — are ready for you.
And frankly, you're ready for them.
Full programme and membership details at www.clubavandra.com
