So why did Magnificent Rail change its name?
When you talk about rebranding a well known business and changing its name, the old saying “if it ain’t broke, dont fix it”, sure does come to mind!
So let’s set the record straight. Magnificent Rail has been successfully operating for over three years, run 62 adventure trips, across 20 destinations, and helped 1015 Magrailers live out their adventure dreams. A hefty proportion of our guests have travelled with us a number of times, because they just love our small group, culture rich, rail based adventures.
What’s even better, and gets us really excited, is that we have created a strong community of like minded travellers who are just hanging out for the next round of trips to be released, and staying in touch with their previous Magrailers to see if they want to travel together again.
So when it came to deciding to rebrand and change our name, it was more about taking our business to the next level, and finding a way to deliver even more incredible and unique adventures to our loyal travel community than fixing something.
When we started thinking about a change, toward the end of 2025, our first step was to reach out to some of our regular Magrailers to get a feel for what they loved about our current trips and how we do things, as well as to find out what types of things they would like to see more of. The results may, or may not, be a surprise to you, but here’s what we found!
You told us you wanted:
- more adventures longer than 24 days
- more itineraries that included more out of the way destinations
- more nights in one location
- more local experiences.
You also told us that, for some of you at least, it was not necessarily the rail focus that brought you to us in the first place, and that you were not opposed to us expanding our itineraries and even changing our name. Thanks for that!
Let’s break that down!
Our Magrail itineraires varied in length from 12 to 24 days, and we already had some opportunities to chain (or book a number of trips back to back with a few days in between), but what we heard was that you were often already booking one of our tours as a part of a bigger trip away, and really wanted to make the most of your expensive airfares to cram in as much as you can while you are away.
We said: Easy! Let’s make it happen!
If you are already familiar with Magrail, then you know we like to get off the tourist trail, slow things down and help you experience local people and culture in a way that your average solo traveller just can’t get access to. This is where the magic happens! Helping to prepare a meal and share it with a local family, right inside their home, while they chat and give you an insight into their daily life and culture, or visiting a local farm or artisan to see how they make their living and get hands on with helping out and learning their craft.
Because of our immersive style of travel, most of our trips already had you staying two nights at most stops, because we know you love to pull into a place, enjoy the organised activities and day trips, but still have time to do a little exploring of the local area on your own, or even just grab the chance to have some downtime by the pool or rinse out some clothes. Staying 2+ nights at more stops will slow things down even more, there’s nothing worse than that “I really just wanted one more day” feeling before you have to move on.
We said: Easy! Let’s make it happen!
So after many months of planning and working on things behind the scenes, we are very happy to announce that Magnificent Rail officially became Magnificent Explorers on the 16th June 2026! A very big thank you to those that joined us for the official launch event, offered warm messages of support and already expressed their interest in our new trips.
At the end of the day, you found us because you are “EXPLORERS” first! So we will continue to offer small group adventures for curious travellers, that take you to beyond the obvious.
We will still offer small groups, with a maximum of 14 guests on each trip, and be open to solo travellers and couples of both genders. We’ll keep, and build upon, our active adventure focus (get training because some of our newer adventures have activities that will really get the heart pumping), offer more opportunities to chain trips, and really ramp up the local experiences in even more off-the-beaten-path destinations.
And in addition to offering a new mix of rail and non-rail based adventures (three already dropped with our launch, with many more to come), we are also busy planning some local events for our Explorer community to attend. We are excited about these, so our team can get a group of you together, in different regions across the country, to mingle with like minded travel lovers and build on the amazing community of “Magnificent Explorers” we already have!
If you made it to the end…thanks! We love having you on this ride with us, we’d love you to jump on to the website, take a look and let us know what you think. After all, it was your support and feedback that got us to where we are.
Stay safe, stay magnificent and keep exploring!
Justin, General Manager at Magnificent Explorers