To connect opera enthusiasts with the world's most captivating performances and cultural treasures, celebrating the transformative power of classical music and art through travel.
For over four decades, HAT Tours has built journeys around the performances that genuinely matter, and the people who feel them the same way you do.
Some experiences don't just stay with you. They become part of how you see the world afterwards.
Every journey we have built has begun there. Where we start has not changed. Almost everything else has been refined since.
Aspee arrived in Paris as a young engineer from Bombay, drawn by Europe and shaped by a lifelong love of mathematics and precision. What he found, quite by chance, at the Opéra de Paris, was Boris Christoff singing Boris Godunov. He had never heard anything like it.
A passionate architect and engineer by profession, Aspee went on to design and build hospitals, bridges, and nursing homes across continents. Work that demanded exactness, vision, and the ability to see what others could not yet imagine. The opera never let him go. Through every project, every city, every country, he found his way back to the great stages of Europe. Eventually he made London a second home, drawn by proximity to the performances that mattered most to him. The buildings he designed will stand for generations. The feeling he first discovered in that Parisian theatre has guided everything since.
Grethe grew up in Denmark with music as a first language. A soprano by training, she crossed the Atlantic by ship to sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City and discovered along the way that she loved travel as deeply as she loved music. She returned to Europe to study German language and literature in Heidelberg, and eventually made Copenhagen home, where the Royal Theatre offered what she had always sought: opera, ballet, and classical performance woven into the fabric of daily life.
For years she worked across the continent, helping distinguished American organisations bring their members to Europe for cultural journeys worthy of the name, attending performances wherever her work took her, never drawing a line between the professional and the personal. She came to understand something, slowly and from the inside, that most tour operators never do: that the difference between a good journey and an unforgettable one is almost never the destination.
Two people who had each spent a lifetime loving music and learning what makes a journey worth remembering. Their partnership was not something either had planned. It was simply the obvious thing. HAT Tours was founded in 1982 by Aspee and Grethe, not as a tour operator trying to sell opera. As two people who understood what it meant to love this art form at the highest level, who had each spent decades learning what makes a journey worth remembering, and who wanted to share that with the people who felt the same way.
Alister has always understood that travel, at its best, is not logistics. It is the experience of being exactly where you are meant to be. That conviction has driven every decision he has made in this industry, and every company he has built within it.
At Harrow School, where he was first introduced to art and culture as disciplines worth taking seriously, he developed the instincts that would later define his professional path. He trained and became a FINRA member to be licensed financial consultant, a grounding that taught him how a business works. He chose to narrow that knowledge deliberately at Cornell University, moving into hospitality consultancy and spending more than a decade learning the specific mechanics of bespoke travel from the inside.
His connection to HAT Tours began long before his title. In 1997, he led the transition of HAT Tours into the digital world, opening what had been a deeply personal, word-of-mouth business to a wider audience without altering what made it worth finding. In the years that followed, he brought a fresh focus to the Ring Cycle within the company, deepening its presence in the tour catalogue and building it into the cornerstone program it is today.
That same drive to build from the ground up led him to found Splendors of India, while at University of South Florida. The Indian travel market was not empty. It was full of itineraries that were, at their core, identical. He built Splendors of India for travelers whose interests ran deeper than the standard routes could reach. Not the predictable landmarks. Trips designed around cultural depth, human connection, and the kind of encounter with a living civilization that most itineraries never reach. From concept to running company, it gave him something no consultancy could.
He is now President, a title that reflects where a decades-long commitment has arrived, not where it began. He travels on most departures. Between tours, he is out looking for what comes next. You are unlikely to find him at his physical desk. Even his desk, he sees as a concept, which he travels with and can access at any given moment.
Every itinerary begins with a single question: which productions, casts, and conductors this season are genuinely worth the journey? We build from there. The city follows the performance, not the other way around. It has been this way from the beginning, and it will not change.
Four decades of direct relationships with the great opera houses of Europe mean our guests are consistently in first-category orchestra seating, where the music sounds the way it was intended. We work directly with the opera houses ourselves. Every seat is sourced, reviewed, and chosen with one standard in mind: that nothing between you and the performance should be left to chance.
Fifteen guests or fewer on every departure. Not a logistical detail but a deliberate decision about what kind of experience is possible. The conversations at dinner after a performance, during an interval, or over lunch the following day, among people who felt the same thing at the same moment, are not something that can be arranged. They are simply what happens when the group is the right size.
Owners and senior team members join the majority of our departures. Not as supervisors but as companions who have attended these performances, know these cities, and care personally about what every guest experiences. When something needs attention they are the first to step in. When it does not, they step back and let the guides and tour managers do what they do best. Knowing the difference is something only experience teaches.
Approximately 30% of our guests travel with us again. Some have joined us more than a dozen times. This is what they say.
A journey like this deserves the right conversation before any commitment is made.
When you are ready, we are here.
We'd Love to Hear About Your Traveling Interests