Kensington Tours

Kensington Tours has built a global reputation as a provider of custom luxury travel experiences, operating private-guided journeys to more than 100 countries across all inhabited continents. The company is owned by Navigatr Group, a Toronto-based travel investment firm, which has consolidated a portfolio of travel brands while allowing Kensington to maintain its own independent design and operations. The core value proposition is straightforward: clients specify their preferences, passions, and constraints, and Kensington's team builds a complete itinerary tailored to a single group or family, with private guides rather than scheduled group departures with strangers.

The company's geographic footprint spans traditional luxury destinations and off-the-beaten-path regions alike. Signature regions include Antarctica and Arctic polar expeditions, multiple itineraries throughout Africa (Kenya, Tanzania), South America (Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and the Galapagos), Western Europe (France, Italy, Greece, Ireland), Northern Europe (Norway), Asia (China, Japan), Australia, and seasonal variations on each. The breadth means that Kensington can design journeys that connect multiple regions efficiently, such as a three-part expedition combining Northern Europe, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia, or an extended exploration of Egypt and Jordan with overland components. This scale also means the company maintains local partnerships and guide networks in each region, allowing for private access and specialized knowledge rather than standardized tours that move through the same sites in the same sequence as competitors.

Customization is the operating model. Unlike companies that offer a pre-set menu of fixed itineraries with dates you book into, Kensington starts with a conversation about what matters to you: the length of the trip, the season that works best, the activities or regions that appeal most, any dietary or physical needs, a budget range, and whether you want fast-paced active exploration or slower-paced cultural immersion. From that brief, the team proposes a custom itinerary with specific hotels (selected by Kensington's staff for quality and character, not price-cutting), activities, guides, and logistics. Because the trip is built for you rather than plucked from a shelf, changes can be made through the planning process. Clients are assigned a dedicated trip manager who handles bookings, arrangements, payments, and stays in touch before and during the journey itself.

The experience on the ground involves private guides rather than shared group guides. This is a meaningful distinction: a private guide is hired exclusively for your group for the duration of the trip, rather than rotating through a group tour operator's staff member who may be handling three other groups simultaneously. The guides are selected for expertise in the specific region and knowledge of the places you are visiting, whether that is Ancient Egypt, the Great Migration in Kenya, or the mountain passes of Patagonia. Ground transportation is arranged as private as well, meaning a driver and vehicle dedicated to your group rather than a shared shuttle. All meals are reserved under your party's name at selected restaurants, rather than pre-booked as part of a group package.

Pricing is by custom proposal, not a published menu. As a result, there is no fixed per-person cost; the company's own website describes ranges rather than fixed amounts. Kensington's sales have grown to over $750 million across its portfolio, which gives a sense of the market it operates in and the nature of the clientele, though individual trip costs vary considerably based on the region, the season, group size, length, and the caliber of accommodations and services. Most custom journeys operate at the luxury end of the travel market, meaning five-star or carefully vetted locally-owned lodge accommodations, private transportation, and expert specialized guides rather than budget trekking or packaged group tours. A one-week journey to Europe or one region of Asia might start in one price range, while a month-long Around-the-World expedition or a multi-week polar expedition would sit much higher. The company does not publish a typical deposit, cancellation policy, or lead time on its public site, which is normal for custom travel operators; those details are worked out in the proposal conversation.

Kensington's operations have evolved under Navigatr ownership while maintaining the brand's independence. Navigatr also owns Travel Edge, a partner travel agency network, and recently acquired Ensemble Travel Group, a larger travel advisor collective. The advantage for Kensington is access to a deeper network of travel professionals and resources, but the day-to-day design and operation of custom itineraries remains within Kensington's own team. This structure allows Kensington to retain its focus on high-touch custom design while drawing on the parent company's operational and financial backing. The company positions itself as an award-winning operator, though specific award details are not prominently displayed on the public site.

What distinguishes Kensington in the field is the combination of reach and customization. A company could operate to 100+ countries but offer only standardized departures, which creates a competitor with wide reach but no real customization; another company could excel at bespoke design but operate only in one region, which creates a specialist rather than a global designer. Kensington's bet is that sufficient demand exists for truly custom journeys across global destinations, and that clients will pay for the convenience of a single provider managing the complexity of multi-region trips rather than stitching together different specialists for different legs.

The company's customer-facing process is designed to feel consultative rather than transactional. The trip manager role is emphasized as a personal relationship; you are not calling a call center, but reaching a specific person who knows your trip and your preferences. This aligns with the broader positioning of Kensington as a relationship-driven firm rather than a transaction-driven one. The company maintains a public blog with travel inspiration, destination highlights, and travel planning tips, which serves both as a marketing tool and as a signal of the kinds of trips and experiences Kensington's team is thinking about.

For a traveler in the US market who wants to design a genuinely custom journey to multiple regions without assembling their own guide contacts and logistics, Kensington offers a consolidated solution. The tradeoff is that because each itinerary is built from scratch, the process is slower than booking a fixed departure, and the lack of published pricing means you have to go through the proposal stage to understand what something will cost. For those comfortable with that timeline and comfortable exploring a proposal, Kensington's depth of regional partnerships and customization capability makes it a solid choice, particularly for trips longer than one week or combining more than one region where having a single familiar provider managing the seams adds meaningful value.