Why Wales Outdoors Is An Award Winning 5 Star Business

Fully Qualified Guides

We are not only rather lovely people with interests, anecdotes and skills beyond our professional knowledge, but, we are also fully qualified to deliver the events that we offer, be they hikes or historical tours. Mountain Leader and Green Badge Tourist Guide are the badges we proudly wear.

Executive Transport

As of 2024 Wales Outdoors and Wales Guided Tours have gone all ‘Net Zero’. Yes, we have an 8 seater FULLY electric vehicle! It has a luxurious full leather interior which is a joy to travel in, and the addition of automatic sliding doors, huge luggage space, glass roof, tinted windows for privacy and with blinds for the sun. Of course the drive is smooth as it is electric and so automatic and on all tours we limit the speed to a maximum of 50 mph.

Small Group Tours

Guided hikes are limited to a maximum of 10 people per leader. Most of the time though guided hikes are delivered with a group size of six people and sometimes as low as two or three. We offer a premium service that is engaged and engaging, thoughtful and personal.

Guided tours are limited to seven guests. That is our maximum and that will not change. We pride ourselves on delivering entertaining, informative and personal tours to our guests. We believe larger groups are not just impersonal and difficult to manage but they also impact other users’ experiences of attractions and landscapes, and we don’t want to be spoiling other visitors days out.

We Don’t Work Weekends

Well, we do… But for private bookings where we can advise on timings and off the beaten track routes… Of course, if we listed events at weekends we’d be raking in the £££’s but there are a couple of overriding factors…

Client Experience - We don’t want to take clients to popular and therefore overcrowded locations. A warm sunny Sunday certainly increases traffic, making roads difficult, has all of the ice cream sold out and plays havoc with people’s tempers… And we don’t want to add to the chaos that the weekends bring to the most popular and so the most saleable locations. And for our hikes, we want our clients to have a sense of adventure rather than believing they are visiting a theme park, and that is very difficult to deliver at weekends and the walking locations that most want to visit.

Hot Spot Pressure - We are committed to caring for the environment and as such we do not want to add to the pressure at hot spots and so we choose to visit the very best of Wales ‘off peak’, so mid week and in small groups. We will not consider large group tours unless we can split the group down into smaller entities and we will not contract with large charity events which we see as a leading cause of damage to the experience of the mountain and countryside landscapes of Wales, after sheep, of course…

Quality Partnerships

We cherish our partnerships as we firmly believe that organic growth through meaningful relationships is the only sustainable route to success. We are happy to chat about partnering with you if you are in Wales or along the borders and have a complimentary business. Let’s work together.

And finally…

Bold and Outspoken!

We are certainly that! We pulled all social media posting, apart from LinkedIn (not an endorsement of LinkedIn) due to the shadowbanning, sexploitation and criminal activities of the big tech companies X, Facebook and Instagram. This is despite Wales Outdoors having more followers than any other outdoor activity company in Wales, apart from, and quite rightly, the national mountain centre for Wales, Plas y Brenin.

As a business, we are highly critical of malfeasance in the Welsh Government, particularly in the Welsh Gov tourism department, Visit Wales. We are also critical of local authorities’ tourism information provision and use all means available to force action. We were last successful in this in the Caerphilly CBC area, where we managed to have a link to the tourism website made visible to users of the town’s free Wi-Fi.

Wales Outdoors does not subscribe to the theory of anthropogenic climate change and Andy chats through some of the truths about this when appropriate conversations occur. However, Wales Outdoors wants to see the countryside thrive and so stands for removing animal farming from the mountains and hills of Wales. Andy has been talking about reforestation for decades and, you know, one day it may just happen…

Other campaigns have led to big wins, with Andy being the ideas guy and the instigator of the Brecon Beacons National Park Outdoor Activity Environmental Charter and also for the activity providers group, SWOAPG, which is based upon Andy’s peer group, the Outdoor Professionals Cooperative. Andy is currently battling with the BBNP and Natural Resources Wales over their poor management of the footpaths in the Brecon Beacons’ most popular hiking location, ‘Waterfall Country’, and in an attempt to shame them into action Wales Outdoors has offered up a £2000 donation as an incentive to begin restorative works to a closed footpath in the area.

This campaigning by Wales Outdoors and Andy Lamb often doesn’t win us powerful friends, but this is the right thing for us to do and it attracts to us others who are similarly concerned and want to see positive change.

You can book our walks and tours through the Wales Outdoors Website.

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