The (Family) Navigator: Tom Marchant, co-founder, Black Tomato

Tell us about you and your company.

At Black Tomato, we specialize in creating remarkable experiences for people around the world, immersing them in local cultures and adventures that they would never be able to do without our help or through guidebooks. We got into it because my partners and I connected over our love of travel at college. We used to travel every spare moment we had—this was in the days before “experiential travel” was a thing. But we were having these profound experiences around the world, and we also wanted to harness our entrepreneurial spirits and decided that we’d combine a love of something we do with being in business. I didn’t (and still don’t) subscribe to the adage, “Don’t turn something you love into work, because you’ll fall out of love with it.” It’s the other way around. It doesn’t feel like a job because I’m doing something I love. So, the seed was planted at college, then we worked some corporate jobs for a few years afterwards, refining what was going to become Black Tomato.

When we started the company, we categorized our trips according to how they make you feel and not by destination, because my big belief was (and still is) that it’s not about a list of destinations. You travel ultimately to feel, even if it’s subconscious. So, we categorized our website according to experiences that would make you feel inspired, or experiences that would make you’d feel you’d achieved something, or truly escaped, returning more informed and better for the experience. We didn’t even list destinations. (Which wasn’t great from a search perspective.) But today, over 50 percent of the inquiries we get, people don’t know precisely where they want to go. They know how they want to feel. Sure, there will be some people who will go, well, I’ve heard loads about Namibia, I see that you guys do it, I want to travel with you for the way you can get me under the skin of a country. And that’s why you can now search on the site by destinations. So, we cater for multiple search approaches, but, for me personally, and still at the heart of the company, we are in the emotional fulfillment business.

What is the entry level for somebody to use Black Tomato?

There’s no planning fee, no membership, and no single entry point. Every trip is built from scratch, specifically for you. We are a luxury, fully bespoke travel company, and a Black Tomato journey reflects that: the properties we work with, the depth of access we offer, the level of craft that goes into every detail. We’ve spent two decades building relationships that most travelers would never otherwise reach, and that expertise is embedded in everything we do. What our clients are really investing in isn’t the hotels or the flights, it’s hundreds of hours of expert thinking and organization they never had to do themselves, and the confidence that every detail has been considered long before they think to ask.

We have roughly 18 summers to plan family travel. How do you encourage parents to think about this equation and planning travel for the future? 

It’s a useful way to think about it, not to create pressure, but to create intention.

The way we think about it at Black Tomato is in arcs: the curious years, the courageous years, the contribution years. Young children want wonder. Elementary-age kids want action and agency. Teenagers want to feel like they’re doing something real. When you design trips around where your children are in that arc and in life, something interesting happens: travel stops being a reward at the end of term and becomes part of how you build them as people. Curiosity and courage are qualities we want to nurture in kids at every stage, and travel is one of the most natural ways to do that. We build both into every trip we design for families, whether that’s a six-year-old spotting their first wild elephant or a fifteen-year-old learning to photograph marine wildlife off the coast of Cape Town.

Children won’t remember the TV they watched or the toys they played with. What they’ll remember is the weight of a turtle as they released it into the sea, the silence of watching a sunrise over the Serengeti, or the first time they tasted something completely unfamiliar in a market they found by accident. Those moments don’t just entertain. They build character, empathy and resilience. That’s the investment parents are making when they travel thoughtfully with their families, and it compounds long after the trip ends.

Some parents of young ones intrepidly keep traveling like they always did, and then others find they are anxious about it to or need to make compromises. How do you encourage parents to stretch their imagination about family travel? Put another way, what is your approach to finding the sweet spot between the age of young travelers and a destination/itinerary? 

The biggest myth I encounter is that having kids means choosing between an ambitious trip and a manageable one. It’s a false choice.

The trips I’m most proud of are the ones where the children unlock a depth of experience the parents couldn’t have accessed on their own. A six-year-old in Kenya doesn’t need to understand the ecosystem to be completely undone by seeing an elephant up close. A ten-year-old in Morocco doesn’t need historical context to respond to the colors and sounds of a medina in a way that stays with them for years. Children often get to the emotional core of a place faster than adults do, partly because they haven’t learned to be skeptical about it yet.

The sweet spot isn’t about dialing down ambition. It’s about calibrating pace and intensity to the age group. Young children need rhythm: reliable sleep, some familiar food, flexibility. Elementary-age kids want to be active and feel genuinely part of the story. Teenagers want agency, and they want to feel like the trip was designed for them, not just tolerated. Once you build around those things, you can take children almost anywhere.

And what are some favorite/successful trips you would recommend for…

• Parents with very little ones
• Parents with elementary-school age kids
• Parents with teens or tweens? 

I love this question. Family travel is one of our specialties at Black Tomato. We’ve been designing trips for families at every stage for twenty years, and we think about it with the same level of craft and emotional intelligence that we bring to any journey. Everything from the pacing of an itinerary around a toddler’s nap schedule, to finding the exact experience that will make a fifteen-year-old put their phone away. We’ve written a lot more about how we approach family travel if you want to go deeper, but here are some of my personal favorite starting points by age:

With little ones: Finnish Lapland is pretty close to magic. The combination of reindeer, snow, the Northern Lights and the possibility of Father Christmas is everything a small child already has in their imagination, just made real. Sri Lanka is another one we love for young families: Wild Coast Tented Lodge has child-sized ‘urchin’ tents alongside the adult ‘cocoons,’ and the pace and sensory richness of the country is entirely accessible even for the very young. New England road trips work brilliantly too, with short legs between stops that are ideal for nap-happy toddlers.

With elementary-age kids: Morocco is my first call. The Atlas Mountains, the desert, the medina of Marrakech: it’s sensory theater, and children of that age respond to scale and strangeness with an openness that is wonderful to watch. Italy is another perennial, particularly Southern Italy – Puglia or Sicily. Cooking classes where the kids get to make the food, ancient history that feels like adventure rather than curriculum, beaches that go on forever. Costa Rica is exceptional for this age group too, spotting sloths in the rainforest, watching sea turtles nest under a full moon, rappelling down waterfalls. These moments will live in a family’s story for years.

Greece is also worth calling out here, partly because it’s where one of my favorite things we’ve ever created really comes to life. We have a product called Take Me On A Story, a series of immersive family trips built around classic children’s literature, and one of them follows the myths of Hercules through Greece. Children who’ve grown up with those stories arrive already emotionally invested in the destination, and watching that connection click in real time is something special. The idea that a story your child already loves can become a passport to a place they become curious about is, I think, one of the most powerful things travel can do at that age.

With teens and tweens: Japan is extraordinary. The collision of ancient and modern, the depth of the food culture, the sheer density of things to discover. Teenagers who think they’re too cool to be amazed tend to get completely undone by Japan. For those who want something with real intellectual and creative weight, we have a product called Field Trip: a curriculum of immersive, educational encounters that can be added onto any Black Tomato trip or built into the entire journey if you want to go deeper. In South Africa, for instance, we partner with Chris Fallows, one of the world’s most renowned wildlife photographers, whose camera was the first to document breaching great white sharks off Seal Island back in 1996. Teenagers join him for a half-day boat ride off the coast of Cape Town to photograph and document marine wildlife for themselves, guided by someone whose work has appeared on magazine covers around the world. We have 64 Field Trip offerings spanning 37 countries, covering everything from marine biology to filmmaking to conservation, so the right encounter exists for almost any interest and destination. It lands brilliantly with teenagers who want to feel like they’re doing something real, not just sightseeing.

What mistakes do you find parents make when planning trips with their families? 

Over-scheduling, without question. The impulse to maximize every day and cover every landmark is understandable, but it’s the enemy of good family travel. Children don’t need more. They need better. A classic example: what looks like a straightforward two-hour transfer on paper is a very different proposition with a jetlagged seven-year-old who hasn’t slept on the plane and is already running on empty before the trip has even started. We think about things like that constantly when we’re building family itineraries, because the moments that unravel a trip are rarely the big things.

The second mistake is planning the trip through your own eyes rather than your children’s. It’s worth pausing and asking: what will a nine-year-old find extraordinary about this place? What will they touch, taste, smell, and be moved by? A parent can stand in a Roman forum and feel the full weight of thousands of years of history. Their child is more likely to be transfixed by a pigeon, or desperate to splash in the nearest fountain. Neither response is wrong, but only one of them was planned for. When you plan around their curiosity rather than your bucket list, you end up with a completely different trip, and usually a much better one!

The third is underestimating the value of having someone quietly handle the thousand tiny decisions that would otherwise sit on your shoulders. The best family trips run on almost invisible rails, where everything has been considered before anyone thinks to ask. That’s what we aim for.

You personally have two kids, and presumably you’ve been traveling with them since they were born. What was the first challenging trip you took them on and how did it go? 

I do: two wonderful girls, 5 and 7. Thailand was our first proper long-haul trip as a family (when they were 3 and 5). I won’t pretend it was seamless. The time zone shift, the transfers, the disrupted sleep schedules are a lot to absorb, and when you’re doing it for the first time with young children, there’s a level of mental preparation required that nobody really warns you about. My honest advice to any parent planning their first big long-haul trip is simply: prepare for it and know it’s going to be worth it in the end. Expect the jet lag to land differently on small people than it does on you. Indulge in comfort foods. Build in time for the whole family to recalibrate upon arrival.

The other thing Thailand taught me is that when you take children somewhere culturally very different from home, they respond with total wonder, but that wonder has a threshold. The sensory richness of a place like Bangkok or Chiang Mai is extraordinary, and children absorb it intensely. Too much too fast and it tips into overwhelm. Pacing is everything!

Despite all the inevitable wobbles, Thailand remains one of my favorite trips we’ve ever taken. Once you get through the intimidation of the first big long-haul, the rewards are completely disproportionate to the effort. The girls were mesmerized and still talk about that trip to this day.

What are a couple of the most successful trips you’ve taken as a family and why? 

Sri Lanka keeps coming up when I think about the trips that have really landed with my kids. It has this amazing quality of being simultaneously accessible and completely transporting. You’re never far from wildlife, from extraordinary food, from a coastline that makes you forget everything else, and yet the pace of the country never feels overwhelming, even with young children in tow. Wild Coast Tented Lodge in Yala is a big part of why it works so well as a family trip: the kids have their own ‘urchin’ tents right alongside the adult cocoon suites, elephants and leopards move through the unfenced grounds, and the whole atmosphere manages to feel both adventurous and calm. The girls loved releasing sea turtles into the wild on the coast and still talk about it today!

The other trip in mind came together for practical reasons rather than as a grand concept from the onset: we did four days in Morocco, then straight to Iceland for a family birthday. I wasn’t sure the combination would work, but it turned out to be one of the best trips we’ve ever taken as a family. Morocco first: the warmth, the color, the souks, the Atlas Mountains, all that glorious human noise. Then Iceland, which felt like landing on a completely different planet. The girls adapted to both without missing a beat. What I’d assumed would be a hectic week turned out to be the most compelling thing about it. As a parent, watching your children hold two such wildly different worlds in their heads at the same time is one of the better things travel can do.

Morocco has become a place we return to repeatedly, and that return dimension has become as meaningful as the first visit. We’ve been working with Afoulki pour les Femmes, a women-led association supporting remote mountain communities in the Atlas Mountains, on developing a traveler’s cottage in the village of Aghzane. My girls have grown up with this project. They have friends there now, they ask about its progress, they feel a personal stake in it. Watching your children develop that kind of connection to a place and its people, one that deepens each time you go back, is really what “travelling well” truly means to me.

Do you do anything special to prepare your kids before a trip or certain destination?

Building anticipation is part of the experience. Before we go anywhere new, we get out the atlas, spin the globe, pull up images of where we’re headed to show them. If there’s a restaurant nearby that serves the cuisine of wherever we’re going, we’ll go there for dinner the week before. Before Paris, we watched Ratatouille as a family, and for the entire trip the girls were peering into every restaurant kitchen whispering “do you think Ratatouille is in there?” That film did more for their curiosity about French food than anything I could have said. We’ll read things together too: relevant stories, some history, sometimes a children’s book set in the destination if one exists.

And then there’s the packing, which in our house has somehow become its own event. The girls don’t just pack clothes, they deliberate over which toys and stuffed animals are coming based on which ones they think will most enjoy the destination. I have learned not to rush this process. There’s something in that ritual, the choosing, the preparing, the sense that something is about to happen, that is its own form of excitement.

I’ll also give each of them a small job on the trip: one becomes the family photographer for a day, another is in charge of finding us somewhere to eat one evening. Ownership changes the experience completely. A child who feels like a participant rather than a passenger is a fundamentally different traveler.

Any tricks for keeping your kids engaged or avoiding meltdowns on a long flight? 

Before you even get to the airport, pack surprises in the bag that haven’t been mentioned until you’re in the air. Download audio stories for the journey, ones tied to wherever you’re heading if you can find them, because keeping the anticipation alive at 35,000 feet is half the battle. Destination-themed coloring books are something we always bring too: screen-free, calming, and a surprisingly good way to get children curious about where they’re going before they arrive. Good headphones are non-negotiable. And yes, snacks always help.

I’m also quite relaxed about screen time on travel days. Save the battles for things that matter.

Beyond the practicalities, I think it helps to give the flight a frame. This is the bridge between home and a completely different world. It has its own kind of anticipation if you approach it that way, and that mindset tends to travel well with children.

How do you handle visits with your kids to museums or nice restaurants? 

With museums, it’s not really about which one you pick, it’s about how long you stay. Kids get tired, and tired kids stop absorbing anything. We did the Louvre with the girls and rather than attempting to cover it, we chose a handful of rooms we knew would resonate with them and left while everyone still wanted more. Aim for fewer things, done better.

We also have a game we play that I’d recommend to any parent. We walk into a room and I ask each of them to go and find their favorite painting and come back and tell me how it makes them feel. Then we all go and stand in front of it and talk about it to each other. That’s how you get children to engage with art—not by explaining it at them, but by asking them what they think. We do it at the Tate Britain near us fairly regularly and it works every time. The conversation that comes out of it is always surprising.

With restaurants, my biggest piece of advice is to start young and make it a normal part of life rather than a big occasion. There’s a wonderful book called Bringing Up Bébé which touches on exactly this: the French approach of bringing children to the table from the very beginning, treating it as a social ritual rather than an ordeal. That’s always resonated with me. The dinner table is where conversation happens, where curiosity gets exercised, where children learn to sit with other people and engage. Build that habit at home and it travels well.

On the road, look for restaurants with flexibility on the menu, somewhere that can work around a child’s preferences without making it a production. We eat early, we let the girls order their own things, and we talk about the food as though it matters, because it does. And know when to back off – If they’re exhausted after a long day, that is not the night for a special restaurant. Order room service, call it an adventure, and try again tomorrow.

What are some of your favorite family-friendly properties that you always recommend?

Lewa Wilderness and Sirikoi Lodge in Kenya’s Lewa Wildlife Conservancy are both exceptional. Small-scale, run by people with a deep personal investment in the land and in their guests. Neither feels like a resort in any conventional sense, and that is entirely the point.

The Oberoi Marrakech is one I come back to again and again, personally included. I’ve stayed there with my girls and it consistently delivers on every level: the design draws on Morocco’s ancient palace architecture, the gardens are extraordinary, the Atlas Mountains sit right there on the horizon, and the whole atmosphere somehow manages to feel both grand and genuine.

For Italy, Borgo Egnazia in Puglia is where I point families first. It’s rustic refinement at its best: four outdoor pools, a cookery school, a beach club, tennis courts, and a landscape of olive trees and jasmine that makes you want to do absolutely nothing, which is sometimes exactly right. Passalacqua on Lake Como is the other Italian answer, for families who want something a little more storied. It’s an 18th-century mansion with a private dock, vintage boat trips, farm-to-fork dining in the gardens, and the kind of setting that does all the work for you.

In the US, the Ranch at Rock Creek in Montana is extraordinary. It’s the only Forbes Five-Star ranch in the state, and the Buckaroos and Cowpokes children’s program is genuinely one of the best kids’ offerings I’ve encountered anywhere: riding lessons from age four, fly fishing instruction, a Montana Master Naturalist program, a ropes course, arts and crafts. Children are busy, purposeful and happy.

For Asia, two properties stand out. Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor in Siem Reap has a dedicated children’s pool, children’s menus across all restaurants, and the Two-Bedroom Royal Villas are perfect for families needing space. It’s also one of the great bases for introducing children to a beautiful culture and civilization. Anantara Golden Triangle in Chiang Rai is the other one: a resort-style property with a sprawling pool and the mahout program, where you spend time with and learning about the resident elephants. Connecting rooms, babysitting and children’s menus are all there too.

And for something quite different, Nayara Tented Camp in Costa Rica remains one of the most thoughtfully designed properties I know for families: clifftop tented suites with infinity pools, extraordinary access to wildlife and adventure, and a team that really understands how to look after families at every age.

Favorite cities with kids and why?

Marrakech, for the sensory intensity alone. Children respond to it in an almost visceral way: the sounds, the smells, the colors, the rhythm of life in the medina. Clearly, Morocco is a favorite of mine!

Tokyo is extraordinary, particularly for older children. It’s orderly enough to feel safe and unusual enough to feel like science fiction. The food culture alone is one of the most generous gifts you can give a young person who’s still forming their relationship with the world.

Rome, for all the obvious reasons. History you can eat, literally sit inside, walk through. The Colosseum lands very differently when you’ve read about gladiators beforehand. And the coffee is not bad either.

Paris, which I think is one of the great family cities and slightly underrated as such. The landmarks speak for themselves, the food is an education on its own, and there’s something about the beauty of it—the architecture, the light, a slow afternoon on a terrace—that kids just absorb without realizing it. It also lends itself naturally to the slow, curious wandering that children are great at when you let them set the pace. We always leave feeling like we’ve barely scratched the surface, which is exactly how it should feel.

How would you say having kids changed you as a traveler? 

It slowed me down, and that has been entirely good. Before children, I traveled at a fast pace: seeing things, covering ground, collecting experiences. Having kids taught me that the best moments in travel don’t come from coverage. They come from depth. Sitting with something. Coming back to the same spot twice. Watching a place through their eyes rather than your own.

But more than that, it has deepened my love for what travel can do. Watching my girls’ minds being broadened and their eyes widened in real time, whether it’s releasing a turtle into the sea or standing in a souk for the first time, makes you fall in love all over again with the power of travel to shape people. There is something about getting to rediscover the world through your children that is quite hard to put into words. You get to be a child again yourself, in the best possible way.

They’ve also made me a better travel designer, which I didn’t see coming. Traveling with children forces you to ask a different question about a place: not what’s impressive about it, but what’s wondrous. It turns out that’s the right question to ask about any trip, for anyone. My kids just made it impossible to forget.