Basel for the first two days, and the week that follows from them

Why the first two days decide the week

Art Basel takes over the Messe Basel halls on Messeplatz for a week every June, and anyone who has been knows that the week is lopsided. The opening days are reserved for invited guests, and they are when the serious looking and most of the serious buying are done. By the time the public days arrive the aisles are full, the pieces people were talking about have found owners, and the dealers are tired and very polite.

So plan the trip backwards from the previews. If your invitation covers them, arrive the evening before, sleep properly, and give the first morning to the main hall while you are still fresh. The rest of the week can be as loose as you like. Plenty of visitors from London do only the first three days and fly home before the crowds, and there is a good deal to be said for that.

Getting there from London

Basel's airport sits just across the border in France and serves the city through its own Swiss exit, so you land, collect your bag and are in the centre in about twenty minutes by car. There are direct flights from Heathrow, which is around half an hour from Bond Street on the Elizabeth line. The alternative is London City to Zurich, followed by about an hour on the train to Basel, which some people prefer in fair week because the direct flights fill early and the Swiss trains do not disappoint.

Whichever you choose, book it the day the invitation arrives. Fair week is the busiest of Basel's year, and the airlines and hotels know it. A guest setting out from Mayfair has an easy start either way. Half the galleries in W1 will be on the same flights, and it is common to see the same faces in a departure lounge on Monday and across a dinner table on Tuesday.

A hotel on the Rhine

The Rhine divides Basel into the old town on the south bank and Kleinbasel on the north, where the fair halls stand. The grand choice is the Grand Hotel Les Trois Rois, on the old town bank, with balconies over the water and a history as an inn that goes back centuries. When people in the art world talk about staying on the Rhine, this is usually the house they have in mind, and in fair week its rooms are spoken for very early, often by guests who reserve the following year's as they check out.

Smaller houses line the Kleinbasel bank as well, closer to the halls, with views back across the water to the old town. Either side works. Basel is small enough to cross on foot in half an hour, its trams run constantly, and its hotels give their guests a ticket for local public transport, so the distance between the river and the fair is not worth worrying about. What matters more is a room facing the water, because the long June evening on the Rhine, with people swimming down it and the little current driven ferries crossing, is one of the real pleasures of the week.

The dinners round the halls

Very little of what matters at Art Basel happens inside the fair after six. The halls close and the city fills with dinners: galleries hosting their collectors, foundations entertaining their boards, friends of friends taking over a restaurant in the old town or a garden in Kleinbasel. The invitations arrive in the days before and during, and the best of them are small.

These are the evenings a companion is most useful for, and the manner required is the one any gallery dinner in London would ask. She is introduced by her first name, she talks to whoever is beside her, she is interested in the work and unafraid to say when she does not know something, and she never becomes the story. A table in Basel in June is full of people who last met at another fair on another continent, and a composed newcomer who asks good questions is welcome at any of them.

Leave one evening free. The Fondation Beyeler, in Riehen on the edge of the city, is a tram ride out, a long low building by Renzo Piano set in a park, and it usually opens a major exhibition to coincide with the fair. An early evening there, away from the crowds, is often what people remember best about the whole trip.

How days away are written

This is the travel companion booking in its fullest form, several days abroad, and it is priced as a single written figure as soon as the plan is concrete enough to price: the dates, the flights, the hotel and the shape of each day. Tamsin works out the whole of it, fares included, and sends it to you before anything is reserved. The fee is handed to your companion in person when she arrives at the start of the trip, in the figure you agreed, and it is not raised again.

Put her on the same flights as you and tell Tamsin where you will meet: at the airport in London, at the gate, or at the hotel in Basel. Travelling together from the outset is the more pleasant choice. Say too which dinners you already have in the diary, so that she can pack for them; the fair itself has no dress code, but the dinners after it very often have one, spoken or not.

Who travels well to a fair

Not every woman on the list takes bookings abroad, and those who do say so on their own pages. Three are especially well suited to this one. Vanessa, from the brunettes, is at her best over long evenings, photographs walls for reasons she cannot explain and swims in cold water whenever she finds any, so a morning in the Rhine before the halls open would suit her exactly. Laura likes to walk everywhere, prefers daylight to late nights and asks direct questions of people she has only just met, which at a gallery dinner is a considerable asset.

Patricia is the most travelled of the three and the most discreet about it. She names no places and no people, a habit formed abroad, and she is calm company across the kind of long day an art fair produces. For a gallery evening closer to home before you leave, the note on the dining room above The Audley describes a Mayfair dinner under the pictures of a gallery that began in Switzerland.