UK Tours with Flights from €1,106

Most UK trips orbit two places, and a good one gives you both. London is the obvious start: a city you could spend a week on alone, and a natural hub for everything else. Two or three days here covers Westminster, the Tower of London, the British Museum and a wander through Borough Market and the South Bank, before you point north. Expat Explore's 7-day "Great Britain", from around €1,803 land-only, is the classic version of exactly this, threading London into a loop that takes in the rest of the island.

Scotland is the other half of the story, and for many travellers it is the half they remember. Edinburgh earns a full day for the castle, the Royal Mile and the climb up Arthur's Seat, then the country opens out: the Highlands proper, Loch Ness, Glencoe, and the wild run out to the Isle of Skye. This is where the small-group specialists come into their own. Rabbie's Tours and Highland Experience Tours both run intimate 16-seat trips out of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Inverness, the kind where the driver-guide stops the minibus for a stag on the hillside.

If you have ten days or more, you can do justice to both ends. A London base for the south, then the sleeper or a short hop north to Edinburgh, and four or five days letting the Highlands unspool at their own pace. It is the trip the UK does best, and almost none of it requires leaving the country.

Beyond the cities, the English countryside is where a UK tour slows down and gets genuinely lovely. The Cotswolds are the postcard: honey-stone villages like Bourton-on-the-Water and Bibury, an hour or two west of London and easy to fold into a wider loop. Devon and Cornwall are the long-weekend favourites, all coastal paths, cream teas and fishing harbours. Rabbie's runs a 5-day Devon & Cornwall small-group trip out of London from around €888 land-only, which is about the best-value way to reach the far south-west without your own car.

The Lake District, up in the north-west, is fell-walking and Wordsworth country, with steamer trips on Windermere and Ullswater between the hikes. It rewards anyone who wants a few days on foot rather than in and out of a coach.

Then there is the spine of southern England that every first-timer wants to tick off. Bath is the most complete Georgian city in the country, its Roman baths and honey-coloured crescents an easy day from London or Bristol. Stonehenge sits out on Salisbury Plain nearby, and the two pair naturally on a single day trip. Most week-long coach itineraries from Trafalgar, Cosmos and On The Go Tours work this stretch in alongside Oxford, Stratford-upon-Avon and Windsor, so you rarely have to choose between them.

Wales is the part of Britain that first-timers most often skip, and the ones who include it tend to be glad they did. Snowdonia hands you the best mountain walking south of Scotland, the castles at Conwy and Caernarfon are among the finest in Europe, and the coast road through Pembrokeshire is a quiet pleasure. A handful of small-group operators build two or three Welsh nights into a wider Britain loop, usually on the way between the Cotswolds and the Lake District.

The other way to widen a UK trip is to add Ireland, and this is where the bundle earns its keep. Expat Explore's 13-day "Best of UK & Ireland", from around €3,330 land-only, pairs the British highlights with Dublin, the Ring of Kerry and the Cliffs of Moher, while shorter trips like the "Irish Explorer", from around €1,785, lean Ireland-first. These itineraries often start in one country and finish in the other, which is exactly where open-jaw flights pay off.

Fly into London or Edinburgh, finish in Dublin, and book a one-way home from there rather than backtracking across the Irish Sea. On a two-week combo that single change can save you the better part of a day and rarely costs more than the round trip. Bundle on Multiday.tours and you see the open-jaw flight price sitting beside the tour before you commit to either.

Classic coach tours carry the most travellers around Britain, and they make sense for a first visit. Trafalgar, Cosmos, Contiki and On The Go Tours all run 7 to 12-day itineraries covering London, the south of England, the Lake District and Edinburgh, at €2,000-€3,350 land-only. The appeal is that nothing is left to you: hotels booked, a tour manager on hand, and the long drives between far-flung sights handled while you watch the country roll past. Cosmos is the value pick of the group; Trafalgar charges more for smarter hotels and tighter groups.

Small-group trips of 12 to 16 people are the home turf of Expat Explore and the Scotland specialists. Expat Explore's "Great Britain", around €1,803 for 7 days, is the value all-rounder, with better local stops and more room to breathe than the big coaches allow. If Scotland is the reason you are coming, though, go to the specialists outright.

Rabbie's Tours and Highland Experience Tours build their whole business around the Highlands in small minibuses that reach the single-track roads the big coaches can't. Rabbie's runs everything from the 5-day Devon & Cornwall trip to multi-day Highland and Skye loops out of Edinburgh and Inverness, and travellers consistently rate them among the best-run tours in the country. For Scotland, this is the lane to be in.

A handful of airports do the heavy lifting for a UK tour. London is served by Heathrow (LHR), Gatwick (LGW) and Stansted (STN), Edinburgh (EDI) and Glasgow (GLA) anchor Scotland, and Manchester (MAN) is the sensible northern entry if your trip leans toward the Lakes or works north to south.

London is the single busiest transatlantic gateway in Europe, which is good news for North American travellers: more nonstop seats, more competition and more fare sales than any other arrival point on the continent. From the US East Coast (New York, Boston, Washington) it's a 7-8 hour overnight nonstop into Heathrow or Gatwick — British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, American, Delta, United and JetBlue all fly it — landing you in London in time for breakfast. Reckon on US$500-$900 round-trip in the shoulders and US$900-$1,400 at the summer peak. From the West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco) it's a 10-11 hour nonstop at US$700-$1,200, more at peak.

From Canada, Air Canada, WestJet and British Airways fly Toronto-London nonstop in about 7 hours, and Vancouver and Montreal direct too, at roughly C$700-$1,300 round-trip in the shoulders. From Australia it's the long haul — 22-24 hours from Sydney, Melbourne or Perth via a Gulf hub (Emirates through Dubai, Qatar through Doha, Etihad through Abu Dhabi) or an Asian one (Singapore Airlines, Cathay through Hong Kong), with London one of the most heavily served arrival points anywhere. Expect A$1,800-$2,600 in the shoulders and A$2,600-$3,600 over the December-January peak. Perth's nonstop to London (around 17 hours) is the one direct exception worth knowing.

From Ireland and Europe it's the short leg: from Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Madrid or Barcelona the budget carriers (Ryanair, easyJet, Vueling) run €40-€120 return in shoulder season, €150-€250 at peak, with full-service lines (Aer Lingus, British Airways, Lufthansa) at €120-€280, more in summer.

Wherever you start, give yourself a settling-in night — long-haul arrivals especially want a day to shake off the jet lag before the group days begin, and London earns an evening of its own anyway. Open-jaw routing is where the savings hide on the longer trips: a Britain loop that ends in Scotland lets you fly into London and home out of Edinburgh, while a UK & Ireland combo can fly into London and out of Dublin. Either way you skip a day of backtracking.

Bundle on Multiday.tours and you see the live Kiwi flight price from your own home airport sitting right beside the tour, in your own currency, so you can weigh the true cost of the whole trip before committing to either booking. These are approximate fares, not live schedules — the bundle prices your real flight.