Travel XS review: Tailor-made tours of India

My husband and I are independent travelers most of the time. We don’t like group travel, and we do our travel planning ourselves. (For full transparency, I generally do the planning; my husband just goes along with what I’ve planned!) A few times, though, we’ve used bespoke travel agencies. The first time was in China back in 2010, when we used an agency to arrange all the transportation, transfers and hotels. Three years ago, we spent a wonderful week in Lebanon with Tourleb, and in 2023 I took a bespoke tour with Audley Travel in Greece.

The truth is: if I could afford it, I’d go through bespoke travel agencies for all my travel. I could just say what I want to see and leave the details to them. In each location, I could be as independent as I want, but I wouldn’t have to spend so much time choosing hotels, booking transportation, and so on.

Disclosure: I was sponsored for the hotel stays and tours mentioned here by Travel XS, an Indian boutique tour agency that offers bespoke tours in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. They have no influence, however, over what I write.

And another disclosure: This article contains affiliate links. Making a purchase through an affiliate link will mean a small commission for this website. This will not affect your price.

That’s why, when Travel XS, hearing that I was already planning a trip in India, offered a sample of their offerings, I jumped at the chance.

In this case, they did not arrange a whole tour for us. I had already booked all our train journeys, so the itinerary was set in stone – train reservations in first or second class in India are hard to come by!

Instead, they offered to sponsor us in a way that would give us a taste of what they offer on a typical tailor-made tour. They arranged two different hotel stays in two different cities in our itinerary – three nights each – and four different tours in four different cities. Three of these were purely walking tours, while one involved driving and then walking. In return, I promised to write this review of Travel XS.

Boutique hotels

The way my contact at Travel XS explained it, the point here was to show us the kinds of hotels they book their clients into. These are not chain hotels and they’re not international. Instead, they’re hotels that evoke the spirit of the place where they are located and are locally-owned and operated. If these two hotels are anything to go by, Travel XS chooses accommodations well!

Jasmin Home in Jaisalmer

We loved the hotel they booked for us in Jaisalmer. When we arrived and first saw it, I thought it must be a historical haveli. A haveli is a traditional Rajasthani architecture where the house or mansion is built around one or more courtyards. These courtyards serve to direct the breeze down through the whole house, as well as to limit direct sunlight. This was important in the heat of the desert climate of Rajasthan. They’re also beautifully decorated with intricate stonework. Read more about the havelis of Jaisalmer in my separate article.

It surprised me to learn that the hotel is new, but built in the spirit of the historical haveli. It had the courtyard/lightwell in the center, with the rooms around it on each floor and a restaurant on the roof. Our room was charming, with couches built into the bay windows along one side in the traditional way, and lots of stonework detailing. And it had all the conveniences of a high-end hotel room: plugs and lights on both sides of the bed, a good shower with proper water pressure, a tea kettle, TV, air conditioner, and so on.

The owner of the haveli was welcoming and extremely kind. It turned out that he was the one who designed the building as well, so he was to thank for all of the authentic details.

Book the Jasmin Home here.

Amritara Manak Haveli in Jodhpur

Unlike Jasmin Home, this hotel is in a historical haveli about 120 years old. It’s been restored, but it’s a bit less polished around the edges. The floors aren’t perfect, and the stonework shows damage in places. But the atmosphere is lovely and authentic: a mansion with its rooms around two courtyards. The courtyards demonstrate really clearly the intention of these deep lightwells: above, beautifully carved balconies and walls; below, a blessedly cool place to sit that stays almost constantly in the shade.

Our room was quite large, with original stonework detailing. It had windows on both sides: onto the street and onto an inner courtyard. This gave a much clearer idea of what living in a haveli might have been like back in the 19th or early 20th century. The ability to leave windows open on both sides meant there was plenty of air moving through.

At the same time, the room had been modernized, so there were ceiling fans, air conditioning and a modern private bathroom.

Unfortunately, in 21st-century India, noise pollution is a thing. We did not sleep well because of a multi-day wedding nearby that went later than actually allowed. We had this problem in other cities too, but they usually closed down by about midnight. This one went until 3:30 in the morning and it was deafening. Of course, none of this was the fault of the hotel. Their staff was just as unfailingly helpful and kind as the staff at Jasmin Home.

Book the Amritara Manak Haveli Hotel here.

Walking tours

Travel XS does not run the tours themselves. Instead, they curate tours from local companies, and, if these four tours are any indication, they choose what they call their “local heroes” well.

Walking tour of the bazaar in Agra

Agra is best known for the Taj Mahal, though there are other sights to see. Our tour guide, Shakeel, had no intention to take us to any of the usual sights, which was good, because we’d already seen them. Instead, he showed us the “bazaar,” his word for a local shopping area.

The neighborhood he took us to – quite near the Agra train station – was crammed with shops and very busy in the early evening when we started the tour. Many of them are wholesale, and bikes, carts, tuk-tuks and small trucks filled the streets carrying huge cargos of wholesale goods. Pedestrians, including us, wove our way through the vehicles, shopping at the retail stores or food stalls.

The heart of this bazaar area is very old, and Shakeel told us the age of many of the shop buildings, as well as some small temples. Some of these older buildings, with shops on the ground floor and homes above, had beautiful elegantly-carved balconies, but these balconies were in poor condition.

It was fascinating to get a glimpse into the local culture through Shakeel’s explanations of what we saw. It was to some extent a case of sensory overload with so many products and so much history and so much activity all at the same time. But this was an area we never would have explored without this tour. Shakeel made me feel comfortable and safe too, especially when we crossed streets, which is a skill in itself.

Cultural tour of Jaipur

Jaipur has an interesting history, and our guide for this tour – I didn’t catch his name, but it was something like Marwal – seemed to know everything about it. He told us, for example, the whole history of Jaipur and its unusual city planning. It turned out to be a really useful orientation tour.

The guide explained that normally he does more focused tours: just about shopping or local crafts or food. This is another aspect of Travel XS’s offering: if a particular topic interests you, the company can shape the tours around that.

In our case, the guide gave us introductory tastes of several tours. We walked in wholesale streets generally, learning a lot about local wedding traditions in particular: wedding clothing for men and women, wedding invitations, wedding gifts, and so on. It was fascinating to see how many businesses survive just for the wedding trade.

He also showed us a few of Jaipur’s havelis. These are, in general, in much worse condition than the ones in Jaisalmer. The emphasis here seems to have been on paintwork rather than stonework, but much of that paintwork is damaged or faded. Many of the havelis are still owned by the original families. However, they’ve been divided up and the ground floors and courtyards are now filled with shop stalls.

As for crafts, we walked along the street where craftsmen make bangles from resin and watched one as he worked. We passed lots of different craft workshops and retail and wholesale dealers. For a taste (pun intended) of a foodie tour, we stopped for a cup of what he claimed is the best chai in town and to sample the best samosas in town. And we saw a section of shops where cooks prepare sweets and snacks in huge woks over wood fires.

Like the tour in Agra, much of this was territory we might never have explored, or at least not known what we were seeing. Jaipur is a planned city, so on the main streets the shops stand in neat rows with a covered gallery along their store fronts. In some of these tidy blocks, the shops aim at the tourist market. But the side streets are more chaotic, and I doubt we would have explored them much.

Blue City tour in Jodhpur

Again, I didn’t catch this guide’s name, but he basically just took me – Albert was feeling ill and stayed in bed – to see the bluest part of the Blue City.

Jodhpur is called the Blue City because of this oldest part, and I learned from this guide why it’s blue. The original blue paint was made from ground limestone mixed with indigo dye, and this mixture apparently helped ward off insects.

He explained that, at the same time, the amount of indigo used in the mixture was an indication of wealth. Wealthier people would use darker paint and/or paint it new more often: yearly was considered necessary. Nowadays they use chemical paint, and not all of the houses are blue.

I found it interesting to see that many havelis had intricate stonework decorations like in Jaisalmer, but so covered with years’ worth of paint that it dulls the detail. Nevertheless, he showed me the way to some very pretty narrow alleyways and stairways. He also pointed out the different types of stone that locals use to build their houses: dark red stone on the older houses, orange stone on buildings from the 1930s and later. Some newer buildings use both, creating stripes of color without paint.

Village tour in Udaipur

Our last tour provided by Travel XS was outside of the city of Udaipur. The idea here was that our guide, Divyansh, would give us a glimpse of life in a single village outside the city. This is where the “local hero” idea really shone: Divyansh grew up in a village nearby. It was clear that he was very familiar with the way of life – and many of the people – in the village he took us to.

We got there by car, perhaps a half-hour outside the city. Getting out, he walked us through the village, pointing out all sorts of aspects of village life. A woman was cooking breakfast over a fire outside her house, and he explained what she was cooking and how. He showed us her livestock and explained how villagers use the animals they raise. He showed us a different woman’s makeshift masks – made from discarded plastic bottles – that she uses to muzzle her goats so they won’t eat her neighbors’ crops.

Walking through the center of the village and passing a primary school, Divyansh told us about the school system.

He showed us an older house and the half-completed newer one next door. He explained how a government scheme was helping lots of the villagers build new houses, but the government releases the money in phases, which is why construction had stopped, pending the next payment.

We also walked through some farmland below the village, and enjoyed the quiet of the young wheat fields. Here Divyansh gave an overview of what crops the villagers grow, but also pointed out various plants and trees, explaining how locals use them for food, medication or other purposes.

My review of Travel XS

I haven’t taken an entire bespoke tour with Travel XS, but you can see that these “samples” were high quality. We stayed in atmospheric and comfortable boutique hotels and enjoyed tours of places we wouldn’t have otherwise visited, led by knowledgeable guides.

At the same time, it’s in the nature of a tailor-made itinerary that, if you want, they can arrange guides and transportation and housing for you to visit all of the standard sights, like the Taj Mahal in Agra or the Red Fort in Delhi. They can shape the tour to whatever your interests are. They can plan lots of tours and activities every day or leave you lots of free time. Whatever you want.

The fact is we did not find traveling in India easy. Arranging transportation was difficult at times. Things just don’t work the way they do at home. Booking hotels online was easy enough, but took an enormous amount of my time for such a long trip – reading reviews carefully to make sure each hotel was good enough and had the amenities we wanted. And we were never sure until we arrived in each city whether we’d chosen a good location in relation to what we wanted to see. We couldn’t tell ahead of time how noisy a neighborhood was. And we didn’t enjoy the haggling we had to do every time we took a tuk-tuk to go see a sight. Simply put, a bespoke tour would have been much easier.

I can also state that my contact at Travel XS was available via phone and whatsapp whenever I had a question. He notified me ahead of time about upcoming tours. He connected me via whatsapp with each tour guide so we could agree on times and locations to meet up. I appreciated the flexibility so I didn’t feel like I was rushing around to accommodate someone else’s set itinerary. It accommodated me.

When I told my contact that we had been ill and that my husband had spent a few days in the hospital, he pointed out that I could have called him to make sure my husband got to the best medical care. That had never occurred to me, since I’m so used to independent travel. The same goes for when the bus company canceled the bus trip I had booked from Jodhpur to Udaipur. It all turned out fine, but I would have avoided a lot of stress if I’d thought to ask for help.

This flexibility and support is in the nature of bespoke tours, and, from the “samples” I experienced, Travel XS does it well.

Travel XS’s website.