About me

Welcome to AlanSpeak Travel. If you’ve landed on this page, you’re probably trying to work out who’s actually behind the website and what exactly AlanSpeak does.

The short answer is: I’m Alan. I’m Irish, I’ve lived in Spain since the late 1980s, and travel, languages and living between countries have been part of my life for rather longer than I care to calculate.

AlanSpeak is my independent online travel agency, based in Fuengirola, Málaga. Its roots lie in something I’ve been involved in for more than 25 years: bringing young people to Ireland to learn English. Over the years, the programmes, participants and expectations have changed, but one principle has remained remarkably constant — learning a language works better when you actually live it.

Today, my work has three main areas of interest: English-language travel in Ireland, tailor-made journeys through India and personalised travel experiences in Andalucía. They’re very different destinations, but my approach to each is much the same: get to know the places, work with people I trust and design journeys around the people taking them.

English, Ireland and Learning Through Experience

For more than 25 years, I’ve organised English-language experiences in Ireland, particularly four-week summer programmes for young people. I’ve seen how much these experiences can mean to a teenager, not simply in terms of learning English, but in developing independence, confidence and an understanding of another culture.

I’m now rebuilding these programmes around Tipperary, with an emphasis on smaller groups, personal preparation, host-family experiences and the opportunity to use English in everyday situations.

Learning English abroad should be about considerably more than sitting in a classroom for a few hours and then being kept occupied until bedtime. The language is important, obviously, but so are the friendships, cultural contact, growing independence and experience of functioning in English in the real world.

Ireland is particularly good at this. English is everywhere, but so are history, music, sport, landscape, humour and a culture in which conversation still matters. For a young person, the experience can be educational without every minute needing to feel like a lesson.

English is the reason for travelling, but Ireland is part of the education.

Over the years, some former students have maintained friendships with their Irish host families long after returning to Spain. Those lasting connections say rather more about the value of the experience than any amount of brochure language.

Looking further ahead, I also intend to develop programmes for adults who want to improve their English in Ireland while enjoying its culture and discovering the country. After all, there’s no reason why language learning should stop at eighteen, or why adults should feel they’ve accidentally enrolled in summer school twenty or thirty years too late.

And Then There Is India

India has become another important part of AlanSpeak Travel, although for very different reasons.

It’s an enormous, complicated and extraordinarily varied country, and precisely the sort of destination where good local knowledge and dependable professional contacts make a real difference. Trying to reduce India to the Taj Mahal, Rajasthan and a few nights in Goa does it very little justice.

My experience of India has grown through personal travel, visits to hotels and destinations, participation in professional tourism events and direct relationships with Indian travel organisers, destination specialists and local operators. Attending tourism trade events in Kerala and Madhya Pradesh has given me opportunities to meet the people behind the services, ask questions and understand much more about how journeys actually work on the ground.

My particular areas of interest include Kerala and South India, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, but my work isn’t confined to those regions. I also design extended, tailor-made itineraries bringing together several destinations, sometimes over the course of a month or more.

A good itinerary isn’t simply a collection of attractive places joined by lines on a map. Travel times matter. Hotel locations matter. So do the guides, the transport, the pace of the journey and whether the experiences being offered are actually suited to the people travelling.

I don’t claim to know every corner of India. Nobody with any sense would. But I take the word specialist seriously. For me, it means continuing to travel, research, build relationships and understand what I’m recommending, rather than simply repeating what appears in somebody else’s brochure.

India can be exhilarating, exhausting, beautiful, frustrating and astonishing, sometimes all in the same afternoon. Designing a successful journey there means understanding those contrasts rather than pretending they don’t exist.

Andalucía — Closer to Home

Spain has been home since the late 1980s, and I’ve been based in Andalucía since 2015. Living here has given me the opportunity to discover a region that offers considerably more than sunshine, beaches and the familiar attractions of the Costa del Sol.

Andalucía has extraordinary landscapes, historic cities, rural communities, food traditions and an agricultural heritage that visitors don’t always get the chance to experience.

I’m particularly interested in small-group and special-interest travel, where the journey can combine cultural discovery with local experiences, traditional food, agriculture, regional history and encounters with the people who make a place interesting.

I enjoy putting together programmes that go beyond the usual sightseeing circuit, whether for visitors discovering Andalucía for the first time or groups travelling with a particular interest in mind.

Sometimes the most memorable part of a journey isn’t the famous monument. It’s the conversation over lunch, the unexpected stop or discovering something you didn’t even know you were interested in.

Travel Without the Brochure Language

This probably explains quite a lot about how I approach travel generally.

I’ve travelled for most of my life, but not in the glamorous influencer sense of the word. My experience is closer to the reality most people recognise: missed trains, questionable hotel decisions, accidental discoveries, exhausted airport coffees, conversations with complete strangers and those odd little moments abroad that you remember years after you’ve forgotten the name of the museum you visited.

I also learnt a long time ago that imagination is rarely the biggest limitation on travel. Money, time and energy usually are.

Good travel planning therefore isn’t about pretending budgets don’t exist or trying to turn every holiday into a once-in-a-lifetime luxury experience. It’s about deciding where the money is worth spending, where it isn’t, and how to get the best experience from the time and budget actually available.

I’ve also come to appreciate that luxury doesn’t necessarily mean five-star hotels, expensive meals or somebody carrying your suitcase. Sometimes the real luxury is access to an unusual experience, time spent with interesting people or the opportunity to discover somewhere that would be difficult to reach or understand on your own.

And although Ireland, India and Andalucía are my principal areas of focus, I can also help arrange other holidays and journeys through established professional partners.

Sometimes that means an unusual journey through India or a summer learning English in Ireland. Sometimes it means a cruise, a train journey, a city break or a week somewhere warm with a balcony and absolutely no intention of doing anything educational whatsoever.

There is room for all of it.

Travellismus

There is also a less commercial side to all this. Travellismus is where I write about the more human side of travelling: the observations, people, absurd situations, cultural differences and occasional disasters that don’t fit neatly into destination guides or holiday brochures.

Travel can educate you, exhaust you, embarrass you, calm you down or completely change your perspective without warning. Sometimes it gives you beauty. Sometimes it gives you chaos. Quite often it gives you both before lunch.

Where AlanSpeak Is Going

AlanSpeak Travel isn’t trying to become another enormous website selling every possible holiday to everybody.

The direction is increasingly deliberate: English and educational travel in Ireland, carefully researched and individually designed journeys through India, and personalised travel experiences in Andalucía. Alongside these, I continue to arrange selected holidays and other travel experiences where my professional contacts and experience can genuinely add something.

I’m an independent travel agent. When you contact AlanSpeak, you’re dealing directly with me, not a call centre or an anonymous booking system.

I want to understand what you’re looking for, what matters to you and what you’re prepared to spend. From there, the job is to design something that makes sense, rather than try to persuade you that every destination, hotel or experience is perfect for everybody.

I’ll continue to travel, learn, meet people and discover places worth sharing. There will always be more to explore, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And if something isn’t worth recommending, I’d rather say so.

If you’re thinking about a journey and would like to discuss the possibilities, get in touch. Tell me what you have in mind, even if it’s only the beginning of an idea.

The best travel plans sometimes begin with a conversation.