Pillow is please to announce our full range of Oktoberfest tours for this year. We are offering our popular 6 day London to London weekend tours again, but this year we have also added an amazing 9 day “European Explorer Tour”, which visits Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich during Oktoberfest and Paris. As always, we have fantastic Oktoberfest budget accommodation options as well. Please CLICK HERE to visit our OKTOBERFEST TOURS page.

At Pillow we are always asked to recommend places to stay in London before and after our tours start and finish. For this reason, we would like to highlight a fantastic article on globalgrasshopper.com which gives details of the best 10 budget hotels in London. Please click here to visit their website and see the article.

Pillow is pleased to announce its offering fantastic budget accommodation in London during the 2012 Olympic Games. We will be offering Pre-Erected tents, complete with airbeds and breakfast provided each morning. Our campsite is near the village of Theydon Bois, which is perfectly located on the Central Line and means you will be at Stratford Station (For the Olympic Park) in 20 minutes. 

For more information about our budget accommodation during the London 2012 Olympic Games, please click here.

We are busy gearing up for our tours to Running of the Bulls in Pamplona (San Fermin Festival) during 2012, and will again be offering a fantastic selection of tours, accommodation and travel options for the San Fermin (Pamplona Running of the Bulls) 2012. But its always fun to have a look back at 2011. It’s interesting to see local government officials in Pamplona have used technology to count how many people take part in the annual San Fermin Festival Bull Runs. They estimated that 20,400 people ran over the 8 different bull runs during 2011, with the first Bull Run on 7 July being the busiest with 3600 people taking part. They also estimated 56% of the runners are Spanish, 8% of the runners are from Australia and New Zealand, and 4% of the runners are from the UK.

Other interesting facts are 80% of the runners are aged between 18 to 35 years old, and 49% of participants are running for the first time. They also estimate that 94% of runners are male, with 6% being female. All we can say is bring on San Fermin 2012!

A brief review of our climb Mt Toubkal Tour is published on the Australian Times website today. Please click here to see the full story and you will be transferred to the Australian Times website.

A brief section of the article is below.

“I was trekking with a group of 9 people, and we set off the following morning at 3am to try and reach the summit before the midday heat kicked in. The climb was exhausting, and reaching the top felt like a genuine achievement. I reached the summit just as the sun was rising, and looking down over the clouds and seeing hundreds of lower mountain peaks is a sight I will always remember. There was also a genuine camaraderie with the other members of the group, we had only met 24 hours earlier, and we all managed to summit and share this amazing experience together.”

Pillow is please to announce we are in the national news again. The Independent Newspaper journalist Mick Webb has written a “Travellers Guide to Festive Spain”, and we are delighted to see he has recommended his readers take our La Tomatina Tour. In the article he writes …

“Not all fiestas can claim a lengthy heritage: one of the most eye-catching, colourful and messy is La Tomatina, which is just over 60 years old. On 29 August, in the small Valencian town of Buñol, 35,000 people cover each other in 120 tons of very ripe tomatoes during a one-hour battle. The adventure company Pillow Tours (01666 504 601; pillow. co.uk) offers a three-day guided trip to La Tomatina for £149 per person based on two sharing. This includes two nights’ B&B at a two-star hotel in Valencia and transport to the town of Requena (on 28 August) for a wine and water festival – as well as to Buñol, for the big one. You have to make your own way to Valencia; be warned that flights from Gatwick on easyJet leaving on the morning of 28 August and returning on the morning of 30 August are already selling for more than £200 return.”

To see the article, please see pages 14 & 15 of the Independent Newspaper Travel Section on Saturday 7 January 2012, or to see the online story, please click here.