Why are cycling holidays so expensive? What you’re actually paying for

So where does the money actually go?

Let’s add it up, and we will soon see quite how good value a Pedal Nation tour is.

 

 

The cycling holiday season isn’t quite over, but as the winds pick up and the days shorten, our minds have already wandered towards 2027. If you’ve been browsing cycling holidays in Europe, you may have thought:

“Blimey. That’s a lot of money for a cycling holiday.”

Fair point. Before I worked for Pedal Nation, I’d probably have said the same. I’m a seasoned solo cycle tourist, perfectly happy camping behind a boulder, out of sight of the road, on a bed of heather (occasionally concrete). Whatever food I can carry tends to look rather sorry for itself in a carrier bag at the bottom of a heavy pannier – or strung from trees as if bears would even consider stealing it. A shower? Does that puddle look really dirty to you?!… My recent solo trips in North and South America ran to about £20 and £10 a day respectively.

So why would anyone pay hundreds, or even thousands, of pounds for someone else to organise a cycling holiday?

Because when you add it all up, it costs a surprising amount to provide.

Somewhere to sleep

On a Pedal Nation tour, we don’t camp behind boulders. We stay in hotels every night. With en suite bathrooms. Phew. And hotel prices across Europe have risen sharply: a decent mid-range room can easily cost £125–£200 a night, and significantly more in Scotland and Ireland.

Take our Portugal End to End tour. Eight nights of accommodation come to around £1,000 per room. If shared by two riders, that’s still about £500 each, before a single bike goes in the van. On our Road to Berlin tour, a room for the trip costs around £1,575, or roughly £790 each when shared, on a trip currently costing £1995 (plus £495 single person room supplement if preferred). And our Highland Fling and Wild Atlantic Way holidays run to ten and twelve nights respectively in parts of the world where the limited number of hotels and high demand push prices sky-high.

Getting bikes and kit there

We move your bike and luggage to the start and from the finish, and that means a van, fuel and ferries. Fuel isn’t exactly cheap either. Very roughly, driving a van to Faro, Prague or Vienna costs around £350, £250 and £300 one way respectively, depending on the route, vehicle and fuel prices. Plus around £1,000 for the ferry. Those are obviously costs for the whole tour, shared between the riders on it, but they’re real. And because we deliberately keep our groups small, there are fewer riders to share those costs between.

Then there’s feeding everyone. Shock news: people who cycle 70 or 80 miles a day develop quite an appetite.

The people

Our guides are a big part of the experience, and we pay them as generously as we can. Cycle-tour guiding is not a route to early retirement. On top of their pay come their accommodation, food and travel to and from the tour (guides often need to work several days before and after the holiday simply driving there).

Behind the scenes, someone has to research and develop the routes, find and book hotels, plan, market and administer the tours, and stay on call throughout your holiday. Because, lovely though a cycling holiday is, things occasionally go wrong. A bike breaks. Someone gets ill. A flight is cancelled. A rider takes a wrong turn. The van decides it would rather be somewhere else.

The costs you don’t see

Insurance. Travel bonding. Vehicle costs. Carnets for taking bikes into Europe. Booking systems. Marketing. And all the work that happens in winter, when there isn’t a single Pedal Nation rider on the road in Europe.

What surprised me most when I joined is how small the margins are. It’s tempting to assume a tour company is making a fortune. Once you see what has to be paid for, it’s clear why that isn’t the case.

So what do you actually get?

On a Pedal Nation tour you get your accommodation, breakfast and lunch provided. There is a support van and two guides, one cycling with clients and the other driving. Your bike can be transported to and from the holiday for free, and we transport all your luggage between hotels, taking your bags right to your room when possible. The route is well planned and draws on the personal knowledge of actual cyclists. Hotels and restaurants are personally selected, the van is never far away, and there is 24/7 office back-up.

How we keep prices down

We try hard to keep overheads low. We’re a small team (Sunny, Paul and I do the behind-the-scenes work) and we all work from home, so there’s no big office to pay for. We look for good-value hotels that still meet the standard we want for our riders, and book well ahead to get better rates. And we’re always looking for savings that don’t compromise what matters.

Cheap isn’t necessarily good value, and expensive doesn’t necessarily mean better. We want to offer a genuinely good holiday at a price that works for our riders and lets us run the business properly.

How do we compare with other companies?

You’ll find cycling holidays that cost less than ours, and plenty that cost more. We sit at the keenly priced end of the market. Also, when comparing, it’s important to compare like with like:

• How many people are on the tour?
• What’s included, and are meals and accommodation part of the price?
• How much support do you get?
• What happens if something goes wrong?
• What sort of experience are you actually looking for?

Here’s how we answer those:

• Group size: maximum 12 riders, so you get personal support and real camaraderie.
• Included: hotel every night, breakfast and lunch, luggage and bike transport.
• Support: two guides and support van with you throughout, and someone on call if anything goes wrong.

We keep our groups small deliberately. You can find slightly cheaper tours where you’re riding with another 29 people, and that’s a perfectly legitimate way to travel, but it’s not what we want Pedal Nation to be. Small groups also mean less pressure on the places we visit, including the unhelpful dynamic where every local hotel is booked out for one night and empty the next. For us, smaller numbers are part of what responsible cycle touring looks like.

About those 2027 prices

We’ll be increasing our prices for 2027 in mid-October. Our costs have risen faster than our prices, and we’d rather adjust them honestly than cut corners, make the groups bigger or reduce what’s included. We’d much rather keep providing the kind of holiday we actually want to provide.

But there’s good news.

Book before 15 October and you’ll get our current early-bird prices, before the increase. Sign up to our newsletter before the end of this week and you’ll get a further 5% off the early-bird price, for you and for anyone you refer.

Because despite everything we’ve just told you about the cost of running a cycling holiday, we still like a bargain too.