Cycling vacations are among my very favorite types of trips because they combine exercise with travel and culture to produce one of the best ways to explore new regions. The pace lets you really see the surrounding towns and countryside in a way you just cannot appreciate from a car or train window, and the cycling lets you enjoy great local cuisine along the way without feeling guilty. On all the trips I’ve done, in the U.S. and overseas, I’ve met great traveling companions in my fellow participants, enjoyed special experiences along the way, from private museum or winery tours to cooking schools, and learned a lot about the regions I’ve pedaled through.
These kinds of trips can also be among the lowest stress in terms of planning, since the better bike tour companies I’ve travelled with all have excellent guides with strong local knowledge, plan routes that are generally more scenic and less heavily trafficked by cars, and pick the best places to stay along the way. While more hardcore budget travelers can load up the bikes with racks and carry their own bags, these top tour companies all move your baggage to the next hotel for you, provide van support and a cycling guide during the day, give detailed route maps for the daily options (usually a few different length routes to choose from to accommodate all abilities) and increasingly, offer participants pre-loaded GPS bike computers with turn by turn instructions. For those used to traveling in high style, the top tier operators like Gray & Co. or Butterfield & Robinson are true luxury companies whose bike trips rival any other kind of 5-star vacation. I recently wrote about how most of the major players in this industry have greatly upgraded their rental fleets, and in many cases, the bikes they provide are better than those guests own at home (read about these equipment advances here).
For all these reasons, bike tours can be among the very best active trips on earth. Here are five great options that cover the most desirable classic locations and themes:
Tuscany in Style: For many cycling enthusiasts, Tuscany is the number one spot on earth, and Butterfield & Robinson is the oldest and best-established company in the industry, often credited with inventing the entire concept of the guided luxury bike vacation. I’ve had the pleasure of traveling with this excellent company a few times, including Tuscany. While B&R offers standout trips all over the world, and has a well-deserved loyal following, this is a region crammed with bike tour operators competing for top hotels, and their expertise is even more vital here, as the company carves out the best of the best. The classic Tuscany Biking is a 5-night/6-day trip starting and ending in Florence from $4,995 and is ranked in the company’s medium tier of physical exertion. Tuscany is also one of a very few places where B&R offers a discounted self-guided option, with the same level of excellent hotels, routes, bikes and luggage transfers, but you ride without guides and van, a good option for experienced cyclists who want to still have a luxury experience but save some money, from $3,495.
American Classic: The most popular guided bike vacation destination in the States is California wine country, and fittingly, California-based Backroads is America’s oldest bike tour operator, founded in 1979. I loved the guides and meals on the last Backroads trip I did, and their take on wine country spans both Napa and Sonoma and falls into their highest tier of lodging quality, “Premiere,” with stays at properties such as the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Hotel Healdsburg. The 5-night/6-day trip starts at $3,298 and there are a lot of annual departures (plus private options). It skews towards the easier side, averaging 27 miles and 1,000 feet of elevation gain daily. Backroads also offers a quick getaway Sonoma Cycling Weekend option, 2-nights/3-days from $1,998.
Go Custom Anywhere: Increasingly, the luxury end of the cycling market is focusing on totally bespoke trips, and for deluxe companies like Butterfield & Robinson this can be half or more of their business. But for Gray & Co., a vaunted Canadian-based specialist that was named “World’s Best Tour Operator 2016” (of any type) by Travel + Leisure Magazine, it’s 100% of their business. Founder Cari Gray has many years of luxury active travel experience, her clients include billionaires and world-famous A-list celebrities, and her services include an amazing level of white-glove service, from transporting bikes inside vehicles to avoid damage from road dirt to pre-testing routes with her guides just before clients arrive. Gray guides clients to every corner of the globe, but since many of her avid cycling guests have been to the classics hot spots such as Tuscany, Burgundy and Napa, she skews towards less well-known spots with exceptional roads and scenery she has discovered, and some of her favorites are in South America, especially Chile and Argentina. With impeccable planning and an unheard of 2:1 guest to staff ratio, this is the best of the best when it comes to cycling, and trips typically begin at a minimum of $1,500 per day.
Foodie Rides: Boston and Italy based Tourissimo specializes in hiking and walking adventures specifically in Italy, leveraging the knowledge and experience of its Italian founder/owner and guides. Two years ago they created a special subset of trips for food lovers called Chef Bike Tours, where they collaborate with two accomplished American chefs to host group rides and cook and explore food culture along the way. Activities include collaborative dinners between the biking U.S. chefs and their Italian counterparts, special festive dinners, visits to wineries, dairies, and other producers, and cooking classes. All the cyclists on the trip get to participate in things like the cooking classes and tours and enjoy the benefits of the great meals, as well as plenty of one-on-one time to chat with the chefs and learn about their culinary experiences as they ride daily with the group. These trips would be great with just one host chef, but they double up for twice the fun and flavor, and get some really big names such as celebrity chef Mary Sue Milliken, co-owner of the Border Grill Restaurants the star of Too Hot Tamales on the Food Network, and two-time James Beard award-winner Traci Des Jardins, a past champion on Iron Chef. There are four annual Chef Bike Trips to Italy’s top food destinations such as Emilia-Romagna, Sicily, and Piemonte, and several guests from the inaugural year returned to try a different region in 2018. These trips are unusually all-inclusive, and while most companies leave participants on their own for a few nights, or omit adult beverages, the culinary themed nature here means every meal along the way is included in the price, along with beer or wine at each, as well as all the peripheral activities, classes and even mid-ride gelato breaks. From $3,995.
Type A Workouts: Most of the trips offered by top companies have options that can include daily routes up to 70 miles and some serious climbing, but a subset of more advanced recreational riders may find these trips not challenging enough. If you are training-oriented or your focus is more on the intensity of cycling than food, wine or museums, Trek Travel, a now independent spinoff of Wisconsin-based Trek Bicycles, has the answer. While Trek Travel has the same full slate of more laid-back luxury trips to France, Italy and the like, that its peers do, it also offers unique 5 and 7-day Ride Camps, essentially training camps, where you are based in one spot, eat healthier food, and ride a lot. I previously wrote about one in Boulder hosted by thirteen-time Cyclocross World Cup Champion and the sole American female to ever take the title, Katie Compton (read it here), but these fitness focused camps are offered in several locations throughout the year, all of them road cycling hotspots: Solvang, CA; Greenville, SC; Tucson, AZ; and Mallorca and Girona, Spain. Daily rides are typically 6-9 hours with some stops along the way, and the camps are aimed at Active and Avid riders, the two highest categories on Trek Travel’s four level scale. Active, the third level, is aimed at fitness-centric cyclists who work out at least four days a week, are comfortable climbing up to 7,000 feet in a day, and for whom a typical home ride is 3-4 hours and 45-70 miles. Avid riders are those comfortable with rides up to 110 miles and 13,000 feet of climbing “on a hard day.” All guests are given loaner Trek Domane SL 7 bikes with Shimano’s Di2 electronic shifting. These are high-end, race ready $5,000 road bikes and as nice or nicer than you will find on any bike tour at any price. Nonetheless, camps are significantly less expensive than the typical Trek Travel “vacation” trip, with 5-day/4-night camps from $1,199 and 7-day/6-night camps from $1,599 including lodging and most meals.
