WHY COMARA:
Slow travel for queer women
Comara is a founder-led, small-group slow-travel company for queer women. Trips are capped at fourteen, private rooms are standard rather than an upgrade, and I travel with every group. The first season is Portugal in 2027: The Awakening, through Lisbon and the Atlantic coast in May, and The Harvest, in the olive groves of the Alto Alentejo in October.
WHY COMARA
Comara exists to create a community for the women you choose as family. That's who I'm gathering — one table at a time. I hope you'll come along. We saved you a seat.
HOW I THINK ABOUT SAFETY
Portugal is among the most welcoming countries in Europe for queer women to travel as we are, and I've walked the routes we'll take. The groups are small, so you're never anonymous and never handed off to a stranger — I'm with you from the first evening to the last.
Safety, to me, is also who opens the door. I stay with women-, queer-, or family-owned hosts wherever I can, and I've met them myself. How a place responds when it learns who we are tells me most of what I need to know — which is part of a larger standard every property has to clear before it makes an itinerary.
HOW I CHOOSE WHERE WE STAY
Every property on a Comara itinerary is one I've stood inside. I didn't always have this written down — when I started, I had photographs, long email threads, and instinct. In May 2026 I flew to Portugal to see two properties I'd already built trips around, and neither held up in person. I came home and wrote down exactly what a place has to clear before it goes on an itinerary.
Read the full standard →
ABOUT ME
I'm Ginny Armstrong. I'd lost faith in group travel — the motor coaches, the chain hotels, the same restaurants as everyone else. Where's the authenticity? I wanted to travel the way I do — with people who wanted the same. So I went looking for something small, intimate, and design-forward, built around local, independent places and the people who run them. I couldn't find it. I was sure it existed. It didn't. So I built it. Meet Comara.
I grew up traveling all over the world. My dad owned a travel agency in our hometown and took groups overseas — London, Ecuador, the Galápagos, and Tunisia, all before I was ten. None of it would have happened without my grandmother Dorothy. She loved the world. More than that, she loved showing me the world. She is the reason Comara exists — the one who let me witness a way of living other than the one I knew. Comara is named for her.
And then there is the grandmother I am named after. Ginny had a habit I didn't recognize until I was old enough to miss it: she saved you a seat. At the table, at church, in whatever crowded room she'd reached first. She did it without ceremony and without making you thank her for it. You just arrived, and there was a place, and it had your name on it the way unspoken things do. She saved that seat for everyone — the ones who belonged, and the ones who weren't sure they did.
Comara is that seat, kept. One grandmother gave me the world. The other gave me her name, and a table where everyone has a place. This is the table set for the women who become each other's chosen family.
I live in Colorado with my wife and our kids. I came to all this later than some — I was married to a man before I understood I was gay. My wife and I have built a family the way a lot of ours are built: a few different beginnings, all of it ours. We take on too many projects — life would be boring otherwise - and love to spend time outdoors. I am so appreciative that you're here. Even if we don't end up meeting, I do hope you say hello.
- Ginny
When you're ready, the table's set.
