About me

About Me

Welcome to AlanSpeak Travel. If you have landed on this About Me page, you are probably trying to work out whether there is a real person behind the website or just another polished travel brand repeating the same recycled promises found all over the internet.

There is indeed a real person here. I am Alan: Irish by birth, based in Spain since the late 1980s and travelling for most of my life. Not in the glamorous influencer sense of travel, but in the far more familiar reality most people actually experience: missed trains, questionable hotel choices, accidental discoveries, long conversations with strangers, exhausted airport coffees and those strange little moments abroad that stay in your memory for years.

Over time I learnt something important: imagination rarely limits travel. Money usually does. Good travel planning is not about pretending budgets do not exist. It is about helping people travel better within the reality of the budget, time and energy they actually have available.

That philosophy shapes everything I do through AlanSpeak Travel. Some clients want cultural trips filled with museums, history and guided visits. Others want train journeys through regions tourists barely notice. Some want cruises, beach holidays or city breaks. Others simply want to disappear somewhere warm for a week with a balcony, decent food and absolutely no intention of answering emails.

Honestly? I understand all of them.

Spain remains one of the most rewarding countries in Europe to explore properly. Beyond the clichés there are railway lines crossing forgotten landscapes, historic cities that still feel lived-in instead of staged for tourism, chaotic local festivals, mountain villages, long lunches that accidentally become dinners and coastal towns where time seems to slow down completely.

I also have a serious weakness for cruises, especially long ones. There is something wonderfully satisfying about unpacking once while entire countries glide past your cabin window one after another. I probably spend far too much time searching for those small travel details that quietly improve a holiday: smarter flight timings, easier transfers, useful stopovers or those oddly satisfying little perks that many travellers never realise even exist.

But About Me should probably explain something else too. Travel, at least for me, stopped being just about ticking places off a list a very long time ago. That is partly why Travellismus exists.

Travellismus is the more reflective side of AlanSpeak. Less “Top 10 Things To Do Before Breakfast” and more the strange, human and occasionally uncomfortable reality of travel itself. The moments that stay with you are often not monuments or famous landmarks, but conversations, observations, absurd situations and people you unexpectedly remember years later.

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 at the same time.

So this About Me page is really less about selling travel and more about explaining how I see it. AlanSpeak Travel continues to grow gradually as both a travel agency and a personal project built around curiosity, honesty and the belief that travel should still feel human.

Save the website, come back from time to time and see where the next journey leads. The best travel plans have a habit of changing direction when you least expect them to.

If you are looking for travel inspiration that does not come from a brochure, explore the UNESCO World Heritage Sites.