What Glamping Actually Means (And What It Does Not)

"Glamping" is a bad word for a good idea. It sounds like a marketing department invented it, because one did. But the thing underneath is real and worth explaining properly, because the single most common question we get is some version of: so is this camping or is this a hotel?

Neither, exactly.

The short definition

Glamping is staying in a tent that has been built to hotel standards. You sleep under canvas, but you sleep in a real bed with proper linen, and somebody else has already put everything up. At the better end you also get your own bathroom.

What you keep from camping is the connection to where you are — the sound of the sea, the light coming through the canvas in the morning, the fact that there is nothing between you and the sky but fabric.

What you drop is all the parts of camping that are work: the pitching, the sleeping mat, the shared shower block, the cold, the packing away of a wet tent at the end.

What it is not

It is not camping. You do not bring a tent, a sleeping bag or a stove. You do not need equipment or any experience.

It is not roughing it. If the phrase "back to nature" makes you picture a long walk to a toilet in the dark, that is not this.

It is not a hotel room with a tent-shaped roof either. Canvas is not a wall. You will hear the sea, the wind, birds at first light and rain if it rains. That is the point of it; if you want silence and a thermostat, book a room.

The dome specifically

Domes have become the standard shape for good reason. A geodesic dome gives you height in the middle rather than at one end, so you can stand up properly, and it moves air well — which matters a great deal in a coastal climate. It also handles wind better than a square tent, because there are no flat faces for a gust to push against.

The other thing a dome does is give you a very large curved surface overhead. Lying in bed and looking up at an arc of canvas is a genuinely different experience from looking at a ceiling. It is most of why people book these.

Who it suits

It suits couples who want somewhere memorable rather than somewhere efficient. People who like being outdoors but do not want to earn it. Anyone who has looked at a row of identical hotel rooms and felt nothing.

It suits less well anyone who needs total climate control, guests with limited mobility over uneven ground, and people who are unhappy without a solid door between them and the outside.

We would rather tell you that before you book than after.

Glamping in India, and on this coast

Glamping arrived in India through the desert — Rajasthan's luxury tented camps have been running for years — and then spread to the hills. The coast has been slower, largely because the monsoon makes a tent a seasonal proposition. From June to September, canvas on the Karnataka coast is not a good idea, and any honest operator here takes their tents down.

That leaves roughly October to May, which happens to be exactly the season you want to be on this coast anyway.

We are, as far as we can establish, the first people doing it in this part of Udupi district. That is less a boast than an explanation of why there is nothing to compare us to nearby.

What a night here is actually like

You arrive in the afternoon, when the heat is still sitting on everything. Your tent is in a coconut grove, so it is shaded — one of the two domes if you booked one, or one of the four classic tents further into the palms. There is a pool.

Around five the light goes long and gold and everybody drifts down the path to the beach, which is fifty metres away and almost always empty. The sun goes into the Arabian Sea at about half past six.

Then it gets dark properly — there is very little light pollution here — and dinner happens outside under a canopy with the sea breeze coming through. Later the sky is genuinely full of stars, which is a thing city visitors tend to stand and look at for longer than they expect to.

In the morning you wake up early, because the light comes through canvas and the birds start before you would like them to. Nobody minds.

In one line: a real bed, no walls to speak of, and the sea fifty metres away. Our domes add a king size bed, a private shower and toilet, and power in the tent; the classic tents share a shower and toilet block across the garden and cost a good deal less.

See the tents and check dates