8 of the best accessible adventures to book right now

Everything is bigger in North America – and the further north you go, the more that becomes true. Audley Travel’s Alaska Cruise & Canadian Rockies by Train private tour offers a loose itinerary you can tailor to fit your needs, swapping a walking tour for, say, a boat cruise of the glacial Lake Minnewanka or taking in Canada’s Icefields Parkway from a sidecar. Certainly, little beats a journey on the Rocky Mountaineer train, whose domed windows reveal peaks and boundless forests as you arrow west from Jasper to Vancouver. From there a cruise picks its way along the Inside Passage, where calving glaciers and waters filled with humpbacks and orcas offer a wild highway into Alaska, where boat trips to the ice-sculpted fjords of Glacier Bay and the gold-rush town of Skagway expand your pupils and horizons.

More information: Audley Travel. Flexible dates; 15 nights from £6,995pp, including international flights.

Every ancient civilisation who gazed on the northern lights had a theory as to what they were; the only thing that links them all is a sense of awe. Limitless Travel’s Northern Lights in Iceland group tour puts these shimmering wonders in reach of everyone, with fully accessible stays and vehicles to back up trips exploring the classic Golden Circle route, taking in the geothermal Blue Lagoon, a 3,000-year-old volcano crater and Thingvellir National Park, where two tectonic plates meet and boardwalks snake into a natural amphitheatre home to the world’s oldest parliament. Based out of Reykjavik, the capital’s galleries and Viking history are on your doorstep, as is the Perlan nature museum, which offers context for the northern lights in its planetarium. At night, you’ll take in the real thing in a country whose dark skies are legendary.

More information: Limitless Travel. 6 Oct 2025; 4 nights from £2,699pp excluding international flights.

Safaris lend themselves well to accessible escapes, as travellers can often witness nature reddest in tooth and claw from the ease of a 4WD. But too often such transport isn’t wheelchair friendly. From a starting point in Durban, Limitless Travel’s South African Safari group tour takes in the ‘Big 5’ on game drives through the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi nature park on vehicles specially fitted with clamps for wheelchairs. As well as spying yawning hippos on cruises through the iSimangaliso wetlands, you can learn about how conservation projects have helped preserve the largest population of white rhino in the world, visit a wild cat rehabilitation centre and find out more about Zulu culture on a trip that puts the majesty of eastern South Africa on full view.

More information: Limitless Travel. 9 May, 26 Sep & 7 Nov 2025; 11 nights from £4,199pp, excluding international flights.

A country known for its 8,000m-plus peaks might not seem like the most accessible destination on first glance. Yet Responsible Travel’s Wheelchair Accessible Holiday in Nepal tour can be tailored to suit all kinds of mobility issues. It is specifically designed for wheelchair users, for whom Nepal’s trails aren’t an obvious choice. But with the usual hikes not accessible to most disabled visitors, the country has created a trail purposefully designed for those with mobility issues, taking in views of the hulking Machapuchare and Annapurna II peaks. It’s a chance to see the valley of Pokhara like never before. You can also take an Everest mountain flight, a rickshaw tour of Kathmandu and scour the temples of the capital, soaking up a land of impossible culture and beauty.

More information: Responsible Travel. Flexible dates; 7 days from £923pp, excluding international flights.

The Golden Route loosely follows the Edo-era Tokaido road that once connected Tokyo with Kyoto. It’s filled with scenes of old Japan, from the wooden machiya houses of Nara to the timeless sight of Mount Fuji. InsideJapan’s self-guided Wheelchair-Accessible Golden Route tour offers a route tailored to its guests’ mobility, as you speed through the country by bullet train. You might find yourself feeding the deer in Nara Park, pondering the instant-ramen museum in Osaka, soaking up a Japanese landscape garden in Tokyo or visiting the five-storey Toji Temple in Kyoto, which was first built in the eighth century to coincide with the capital moving to the city. There’s detailed transport instructions and also room to tailor the trip to match different abilities, including use of a wheelchair-accessible vehicle and bathroom hoists.

More information: InsideJapan. Flexible dates; 10 nights from £4,180pp, excluding international flights.

The chance to see some of the largest game herds in Africa is never to be passed up. NatureTrek’s eight-night Tailor-made Kenya for Disabled Travellers offers just that, with its safari vehicles capable of being adapted to different mobility needs. There are so many options. Explore the water holes of the Rift Valley where Lake Nakuru National Park offers rare glimpses of tree-climbing lions, a unique adaptation possibly done to escape biting insects, or witness the thriving white and black rhino populations – the park was home to the first rhino sanctuary in Kenya. One highlight is surely the world-renowned Masai Mara National Reserve, where visits during the Great Migration (July–October) put the life-and-death dramas of some 1.2 million wildebeest on show.

More information: NatureTrek. Flexible dates; 8 nights from £5,995pp, including international flights.

If Greece is the Cradle of Western Civilisation, the Peloponnese is close to its epicentre. From the ruins of Mycenae to the site of the first Olympic Games (Olympia), to an ancient theatre (Epidavros) where an annual festival puts on the great plays of antiquity, history is sketched liberally across this rugged peninsula, particularly in the north. Sunvil’s Tailor-made Northern Peloponnese sets up base in a family-run B&B in coastal Tolon that is equipped with a ramp, lift and helpful staff. From there, accessible taxis can be arranged to shuttle you between stops such as the beautiful port town of Nafplion, modern Greece’s first capital after the War of Independence, or the vast ruins of city-state Ancient Corinth, once home to 90,000 people.

More information: Sunvil. Flexible dates and length; 7 nights (28 Sep), for example, from £1,181pp, including international flights.

Holiday Architects’ Go Local in Jordan trip squeezes in a number of the country’s classic must-see sights: historical As-Salt, the Mars-like Wadi Rum, the buoyant waters of the Dead Sea. You can even explore the Nabataean ruins of Petra by golf buggy. Where it differs from most accessible tours is that it also offers a chance for more community-based encounters, as a private driver shuttles you between cookery classes at Amman’s Beit Sitti cooking school or a chance to extract honey alongside local beekeeper Yousef, or a morning at a women’s cooperative to learn about the work it does. All trips are tailor-made, so you can pick and tweak activities to meet your mobility needs while still getting a taste of the Jordan few other travellers see.

More information: Holiday Architects. Flexible dates (best Sep–May); 10 days from £3,670pp, including international flights.