Escorted Coach Holidays to Yorkshire
Yorkshire is a large county with its best things spread thinly. York's walls and Minster sit in the middle, Fountains Abbey and the Harrogate gardens lie to the west, Castle Howard and Malton to the north-east, and the coast is beyond all of it. Seeing that from the front seat of a coach, with someone else worrying about the park-and-ride and the lane through Ryedale, makes good sense.
Our Yorkshire tours run three to five days from a single hotel base in York, Harrogate or Leeds, with private coach travel throughout, breakfast and evening meals, and the listed excursions included.
Frequently Asked Questions About Our Coach Holidays to Yorkshire Tours
Joining arrangements vary between departures, so please ask us before you book. Open Group tours generally use a set of pick-up points, while a Private Group booking is usually built around wherever the club or society is based. Once we know where you live we can tell you exactly where and when the coach will collect you on your chosen departure.
More than a car holiday, less than a walking one. York is cobbled and largely pedestrianised, so coaches drop off at the edge of the centre; gardens such as Harlow Carr and the Himalayan Garden involve gravel paths and gentle slopes, and Fountains Abbey sits in a valley. Sites are approached as closely as regulations allow. Tell us about any difficulty getting about and we will be honest with you about a particular itinerary.
Not always. Several of our Yorkshire tours set aside a number of single rooms with no supplement at all, and where a supplement does apply it is stated on the tour page. Those free singles are limited in number and go early, so it pays to enquire in good time. Ask us which are still available on the departure you are considering.
Your hotel accommodation, breakfast and all evening meals, private coach travel throughout with an experienced driver, the excursions listed on the itinerary and Cancellation Protection. Porterage is included on several tours. Where a National Trust property features, do bring your membership card — the tour pages note this, and if you are unsure how a particular visit is handled, ask us.
It depends what you have come for. Gardens are at their fullest from mid-May into July, and the rhododendrons near Ripon peak in late spring. August brings heather across the North York Moors. The coast is at its best in high summer, though Whitby is atmospheric in any weather. York's Christmas market runs through late November and December.
Yes. Any of these itineraries can be run as a Private Group holiday for a gardening club, U3A branch, church group or a set of friends, with the coach and the hotel to yourselves. Prices on this site are based on 30 passengers, so the figure changes with the size of your party. Tell us roughly how many you are and when you would like to travel.
Yorkshire at coach pace
Distances here look modest on a map and take longer than you expect. The A1(M) runs straight up the middle of the county, but the roads that matter are narrow and walled — Ryedale, Wharfedale, the climb out of Whitby — and York's centre is closed to most traffic anyway.
That is the argument for travelling by coach. These holidays use private coach travel throughout with an experienced driver who knows where a full-size coach can and cannot be put down. You are set off as close to the gate as each site allows and collected from the same spot when you have finished looking.
Days are built around one or two proper visits rather than four snatched ones, which leaves time to sit down with a pot of tea before the return journey. Nobody navigates, nobody reverses out of a farm gateway, and nobody has to be the one who does not have a drink at dinner.
Where these tours are based
Each Yorkshire holiday settles into one hotel and travels out from it, so you unpack once and find your way around a single lounge and dining room.
- York — the Queens Hotel and the Fairfield Manor both appear in our programme. York rewards a walk of your own: the Shambles, the bar walls, the Minster, and riverside cruises on the Ouse.
- Harrogate — the Cedar Court Hotel is the base for our gardens and houses tours. The spa town's Valley Gardens and Betty's are on the doorstep, and Ripon, Fountains Abbey and RHS Harlow Carr are all a short run away.
- Leeds — the Best Western Milford Hotel sits handily for West Yorkshire's galleries, from the Hepworth in Wakefield to Salts Mill at Saltaire.
Half board is standard on these tours: breakfast and an evening meal each day, with porterage on several of them.
Houses, gardens and galleries
Yorkshire's great estates and gardens are the backbone of most of these holidays, and a good many of them are National Trust properties. Among the places our itineraries visit:
- Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal — Cistercian ruins in a wooded valley, with an eighteenth-century water garden laid out around them.
- Castle Howard — begun in 1699 to Vanbrugh's design, and dressed for Christmas on our festive tour.
- RHS Harlow Carr — the streamside planting at Harrogate, at its best in early summer.
- The Himalayan Garden and Sculpture Park — rhododendrons and azaleas near Ripon, timed for late spring colour.
- Salts Mill, Saltaire — Titus Salt's model village of 1853, the mill now holding a large collection of David Hockney's work.
- Yorkshire Sculpture Park — bronzes standing out in the fields of the old Bretton Hall estate.
Smaller places sit alongside them: Goddards, built for the Terry chocolate family, and East Riddlesden Hall near Keighley among them.
The coast, Malton and York at Christmas
Scarborough gives the county its seaside holiday, and it was among the first resorts in Britain to have one. Two bays with a castle headland between them, a working harbour, and Whitby along the coast with its abbey ruins on the cliff and its smokehouses down by the water.
Food is the reason for another of our tours. Malton has made itself the market town of Yorkshire cooking, and the itinerary pairs it with a vineyard in Ryedale, a Michelin-starred dinner at the Star Inn and, for the sweet-toothed, York's Chocolate Story.
Late November and December bring St Nicholas Fair to York, when wooden chalets fill the streets around the Minster and the shortest afternoons of the year are the ones worth being out in. Our festive break puts Castle Howard in its Christmas dressing alongside it.
