The Allure of the Antique-Buying Vacation

The first time I visited a sprawling flea market in Paris, I had no idea what I was looking for. The thrill of the hunt—and of discovering something new—kept pulling me forward. For blocks along Boulevard Beaumarchais, serious buyers and browsers moved between stalls with the same hopeful curiosity. Perhaps the next table held something they hadn’t known they wanted. When I left that day, I wanted another chance to feel that way wherever I traveled.

Antique-buying trips themselves are hardly new, but their appeal has become particularly hard to ignore in 2026. My French Country Home, a French-focused operator that leads guests through Paris, Provence, and Normandy, began hosting tours more than a decade ago. What started as just one to two trips a year has grown to eight in 2026, with 11 already planned for 2027. England-focused Claiborne & Olive launched its buying trips only at the end of 2024, ran 12 in its first year, and has already sold out its 2026 departures.

What travelers are booking is more than a string of flea markets and antique shops. The appeal lies in being ushered into a world whose customs can otherwise take years to learn. “They’re truly paying for the person’s relationships and knowledge of that location,” says Tammi Saranko, founder of Claiborne & Olive. In a travel landscape where online recommendations are dime a dozen, these trips turn the endless scroll into a considered itinerary, taking travelers beyond anything you could find on the internet.

Antiquing lends itself especially well to this kind of human curation. Alexander Widener, decorator, collector, and owner of Widener Company, begins his research online before letting the trail become decidedly more personal. “The real key is once you land and you go into a shop, and you’re like, ‘This is the most amazing shop,’ ask the shop owner where else you should go,” he says. One dealer leads to another, then another. “Before you know it, you’ll have seen all of the best stuff.” Widener notes that dealers want to foster that curiosity, and are often eager to share their favorite sources with someone genuinely interested.

The buying trip, then, doesn’t so much replace that relationship-driven way of antiquing as invite travelers into a network that already exists. For Sharon Santoni, founder of My French Country Home and author of The Art of Antiquing in France, that expertise is quite literally an address book accumulated over decades of living and antiquing in France. One introduction might lead to a restoration atelier and drinks afterwards in the owner’s home, or to a small country brocante normally closed for the day, opened especially for the group. Afterwards, Santoni often notices a change in her guests; she calls it un moment de grâce. “I have the impression that my guests are little helium balloons, and I’m trying to hold them down,” she says. “They’re sort of floating, super happy.”

Once inside that world, the guidance is high-touch without feeling prescriptive. After all, part of the pleasure of antiquing is having the freedom to imagine exactly where an early 19th-century French earthenware pot might live in your own space. Guides can weigh in on condition, age, or whether a price seems fair, while leaving the final judgement in the hands of the buyer. “If they fall in love with something and they’ve come all the way from America, that’s their item,” says Saranko. Santoni takes a similar approach, taking no commission on guests’ purchases. “I’m just there for them,” she says, “to make sure they get the best deal possible.” And once the inevitable question of getting something home arises, there’s help for that too. For purchases that exceed the limits of even the most optimistically packed suitcase, access to shared container shipping is itself a draw on Saranko’s trips.

If the days are meticulously planned around the hunt, returning to a thoughtfully chosen—and very chic—hotel is the cherry on top. But the accommodations do more than soften the landing after a long day of sourcing—they extend the aesthetic experience of the trip itself. On Saranko’s England trips, that can mean boutique inns with deep British tubs, menu breakfasts, and dinners at some of the country’s celebrated gastropubs. Some guests become so taken with the atmosphere that they begin recreating it at home, buying the candle burning in the lobby, the robes hanging in their rooms, or locally made soaps and products. “They’re trying to take every bit of the trip home with them again,” Saranko says.

For Santoni, the setting is equally deliberate, with properties chosen for “visual beauty” and “impeccable service, but not pompous.” An upcoming Provence itinerary is based in a former priory, making the place guests return to at night as storied as much of what they encounter during the day. And when the setting is right, Santoni goes a step further, sometimes privatizing an entire hotel for the group, transforming it, as she puts it, into “our home for the week.”

The effect is complete aesthetic immersion—the rooms, landscapes, and objects encountered along the way all feeding the same appetite for beautiful things.

The antiques themselves are at the heart of this, objects with history that feel especially significant at a time when so much of what’s a click away can feel interchangeable. Widener’s first design-history video on TikTok, tracing the lineage of Wedgwood ceramics, drew close to half a million views. He thinks its resonance comes from a growing desire for objects with evidence of a life lived. “As much as AI is on the rise, I think handmade, craft, and antiques are equally on the rise,” he says. “As humans, we don't want to be like everyone else. We don't want to have the same lamp that everyone else has.” For Widener, the appeal is precisely what cannot be reproduced on demand. “Cracks, old repairs…a plate with a metal staple repair and patina. That happens over 300 years. You can’t fake that.”

With all the beautiful hotels, private introductions, and purchases that may require more than a single suitcase to get home, Santoni explains that the pleasure can’t be measured by a price tag. She has seen one guest leave a fair thrilled with a €2 blue-and-white jug while another spent tens of thousands on a painting. “It’s not about the money. It’s not about the bling,” she says. “They’re coming home with stuff, yes, in their suitcase, but they’re coming home with heads full of images and memories. And I don’t know which of those two treasures is the most important.”