Holiday Gift Guide 2024: The Best Biking Trips In The World

There’s no better gift than the gift of travel, and for cyclists, there are no better trips than supported itineraries with great hotels, meals and special add-ons like wine tastings, cooking classes, dinners in Michelin-starred restaurants and local hidden gems, special attractions and city tours along the way. The best active travel specialists like Butterfield & Robinson, Backroads and DuVine are routinely rated among the best luxury tour operators in any kind of travel and use world class hotels and guides. Routes are planned meticulously, bikes are first rate, luggage is moved so you don’t have to carry anything, meals are heavily curated, and these trips are offered in the best destinations for cycling on the planet.

Almost all of the top companies also now offer motor assisted e-bikes as an option, so even less trained or avid cyclists can enjoy a biking vacation.

So, if you know someone who is active, give the best gift of all this year, the gift of a world-class cycling vacation. These are 12 great options.

Iconic Tuscany

Ask most cyclists to pick one dream destination and it would be Tuscany, the classic of this genre. Every major bike tour operator has trips to Tuscany, but no one has been doing it longer than award-winning luxury active travel specialist Butterfield & Robinson, a frequent Travel + Leisure World’s Best Tour Operators winner generally credited with having invented the entire category of luxury active travel back in 1966. B&R’s 6-day “Super Tuscan” itinerary ($9,6965) lives up to its name, starting in Florence and staying at just two fabulous spots, the Relais & Chateaux Borgo San Felice and the stunning Rosewood Castiglion del Bosco, one of the world’s greatest hotels (read more here). It is fully guided and escorted and along the way there are wine tastings, city tours, a Michelin-starred restaurant dinner and much more.

Drink In The Best Of Burgundy

Cycling is practically a religion in the home of the world’s most famous race, the Tour de France, and there is great riding in every corner of the country, but the classic French cycling trip is Burgundy, and when it comes to food and wine, few active travel operators dive as deep as DuVine, another winner of Travel + Leisure World’s Best Tour Operators. DuVine is one of the top luxury companies in this field but was launched by a wine lover and has an intense focus on food and wine, with wine included at every meal (well, not breakfast). The 6-Day Burgundy trip ($5,995) cycles along the famed Route des Grand Crus, with three different wine tastings, a Michelin-starred dinner, food and wine paired lunches and dinners, featuring local culinary specialties such as coq au vin, beef bourguignon, escargot and regional meats and cheeses.

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Italy For Food Lovers

One of the best things about active travel is that burning calories leads to guilt-free indulgence, and there’s no better place for that than Italy, with gelato stops along the way, amazing wine everywhere and arguably the best food on the planet. Tourissimo is an active Italy specialist focused on the American market, with a devotion to regional cuisine and an insider’s perspective. Food and wine are important components of all of Tourissimo’s trips, but they go a step further with their signature “Chef Bike Tours,” offered four or five times each year in different regions and hosted by famous guests chefs, with cooking classes, demos and lots of special meals. James Beard Award winner, “Too Hot Tamales” TV star, cookbook author and renowned restaurateur (Border Grill) Mary Sue Milliken is a regular who has led several trips and is returning to host a ride in Calabria in June 2025. Other cycling star chefs have included Jody Adams of Rialto in Boston and Gabrille Hamilton of New York’s Prune.

Epic Colorado Mountain Biking

Fruita, Colorado, just outside Grand Junction, has long been one of the pilgrimage destinations for avid mountain bikers. But due to logistics including lack of van and guide support on trails, more technical skills needed, and bikes that break down more often down, very few top active travel tour operators even offer single track mountain biking trips. One big exception is REI Adventures, the travel division of the national outdoor retailer REI. They run several trips in top notch spots, including a 4-day single track ride in Fruita and Grand Junction ($2,899), based out of a hotel in quaint downtown Grand Junction that includes some of the sport’s most famous trails.

Self-Guided Spain

For Europeans, self-guided active travel has always been much more popular, and the trend has started to reach the U.S. in the past few years (read more about this trend here at Forbes). These trips are logistically just like fully guided ones, where an itinerary includes all the hotels along the way, daily route options, an app with directions and details, bikes, and luggage is moved for you every stop, but there is no guide or van that goes with you. There are also no other guests but your party. A big appeal is a much lower price point, as this is the most affordable way to take a great active vacation, but there is also the private aspect—no other strangers on a group tour—and the flexibility to go on dates of your choosing, not when a trip happens to be scheduled. UK-based Macs Adventures is the leader in self-guided active travel and recently opened a U.S. office that has been booming.

One of their trips in particular jumps out for self-guided, using paradors as lodging in Spain’s gorgeous Extremadura region. Unique to Spain, paradors are a collection of historic castles, monasteries, convents and fortresses that have been preserved by the Spanish government by converting them into Inn-style lodging. It’s a novel program to protect these antiquities and each parador is completely unique, historic, distinctive, and offers a unique sese of place. When you arrive at the end of your day on the bike, each also features a restaurant showcasing authentic regional cuisine of that locale, making things very easy for self-guided riders. “Cycling the Paradors of Extremadura” (from $1,795) is an 8-day trip that visits five properties dating back to the 15^th century.

Danube River Cruise And Bike

Hotels tend to stay in place, but on a river cruise, for example, you can go to sleep in Paris and wake up in Normandy. In addition, most active travel trips move from hotel to hotel every night or two, but even though they move your luggage for you, some travelers love the idea of just unpacking and packing once. For both these reasons, a big active travel trend has been using boats instead of hotels, especially European river cruise ships which have larger rooms and no seasickness. Another benefit is that guests also can take advantage of all the “regular” cruise offerings, so if you feel fatigued or the weather is terrible and you decide to skip a day of riding, you can eat the included food on board or partake in one of the boat’s daily shore excursion offerings. Otherwise, it’s just like a hotel-based trip, as a van with guides meets the boat each morning and the rides, lunch, winery tours, and all the usual bells and whistles are included off the ship.

This has exploded in popularity and most top active travel companies now offer European river cruise trips, but none more than Backroads, yet another winner of Travel + Leisure World’s Best Tour Operators, which pioneered the concept and has more than a hundred cruise trips, many of them partnered with luxury European line AmaWaterways. The classic is the “Danube River Cruise Bike Tour,” from Prague to Budapest (from $6,230), traversing five different countries (Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary) in 8-days without ever changing rooms. Much of the riding is joyfully car free on one of the world’s most famous bike paths, the Donauradweg, right along the Danube. There’s an Oktoberfest-style festival in Bavaria, wine tasting in Austria, and guided walking tours of charming Vienna, Budapest and medieval Bratislava, and the ship is from AmaWaterways.

Best of Cambodia & Vietnam

It’s hard to pack more great culture and tourism into 8-days then on this stunning trip from the inventor of luxury active travel, Butterfield & Robinson. “Cambodia & Vietnam Biking” starts in Cambodia’s Siem Reap at the ruins of Angkor Wat, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the greatest tourism destinations on the entire planet. Then it crosses into Vietnam (international flight included) and visits another UNESCO World Heritage Site, the old city of Hoi An, staying at a spectacular luxury beach resort, the Four Seasons Nam Hai Hoi An. Along the way there are fantastic meals, VIP private tours and two private boat excursions ($7,495). If you have some ladies on your holiday gift list, this itinerary is also offered in a Women’s Only version.

California Wine Country

All around the world, from Argentina to Portugal to South Africa, wine country is always one of the most popular cycling destinations, and just as Tuscany and Burgundy are the top spots in Italy and France, the most iconic American road cycling trip is in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys of California. Backroads, the nation’s oldest active travel specialist (1979), has several options here, but the best is the deluxe 6-Day “California Wine Country Bike Tour,” using top shelf lodgings in both Napa and Sonoma, including the Solage Calistoga, Auberge Resorts Collection and the Hotel Healdsburg. The highlights include amazing cuisine, riding through the majestic redwoods and vineyards, and of course lots of wine, with two scheduled tastings, wines with dinners, and many more tasting opportunities within walking distance of the in-town lodgings.

For The Avid Cyclist Seeking Challenge

Most luxury bike tours offer multiple daily ride options for easy and moderate distances, usually maxing out in 30s or low 40-mile range. That is more than enough for most casual riders, but on the low side for fitness-oriented avid cyclists. Among the top luxury tour operators, DuVine is the one that caters to more advanced cyclists, with its “Challenge” collection, featuring roughly twice the daily mileage of the industry’s “normal” trips and big climbs, including some classic Tour de France ascents, such as the infamous Alp d’Huez.

The standout among these is the “Italian Coast-to-Coast Journey,” across the width of the country, 7-days from the Adriatic Coast to the Ligurian Sea through the heart of central Italy. It averages 57-miles and 5,426 feet of elevation gain daily. DuVine always has a big food and wine focus, and this ride passes through top gastronomic regions, Tuscany, Umbria and Le Marche, with lodging in Relais & Chateaux hotels, a Michelin-starred dinner, wine tastings and a Super Tuscan pairing dinner along the way. They also upgrade the supplied bikes for this effort, using luxury Italian Colnago V4 road bikes with top-of-the-line Dura-Ace Di2 electronic shifting and carbon wheelsets. It’s a lot of time in the saddle, but the support is the same white glove style as on DuVine’s easier trips, and you will not go hungry.

Gravel Grinding

For the past several years, the fastest growing segment of cycling has been gravel grinding, riding slightly heavier duty road bikes with beefier tires on dirt and gravel roads. The main appeal is greatly reduced auto traffic, while getting further into nature and off the beaten path. While it’s a bit more physically demanding because of increased rolling resistance, it is not technical like mountain biking. Vermont-based cycling and hiking specialist KC&E Adventures has been a leader in gravel tours, is known for smaller than industry average group sizes, and combines two hot trends, Croatia and gravel riding. One of the emerging hotspots for bike travel, Croatia has been popular with all the top companies for road riding, but gravel is the new frontier, and the 7-day “Gems of the Adriatic” enables riders to explore the country’s beautiful coastline, fishing villages, Roman amphitheaters, vineyards and medieval towns in a way you could not see by other means ($5,300). Lodging features a mix of local boutique winery hotels and luxury brand name gems such as the Kempinski Palace Portoroz, with great local meals and tours along the way. It is also offered as a womens-only trip.

Cycling’s Bucket List: U.S. Coast-to-Coast

Riding across the width of the United States is a dream trip for many avid cyclists, but most people who do it go on their own, self-supported, carrying lots of extra weight, dealing with inevitable mechanical issues and often camping or rolling the dice on lodging along the way. Trek Travel is the only top-tier active travel company offering this as an annual scheduled and fully supported trip and given what is included, it’s a bargain as well. The 48-day trip includes hotels every night, breakfast daily, most lunches and dinners, computers, van support and guides, snacks and drinks along the way, entrance fees for all attractions, and high-end road bikes for $27,000.

It begins in Astoria, WA, touching the Pacific Ocean the first day, then rolls across Idaho, Montana, Wyoming (home to the toughest climb of the entire trip, the infamous Big Horn Pass), South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and finally Maine, where you will reach the Atlantic. Not counting the four rest days (days 11, 21, 31, and 41), the shortest ride is 30 miles on the first day, but most are between 80-100, fifteen are over 100 and the longest is 126. The average is 88 and the total distance 3,800-miles. Lodging is mostly in mid-level hotels such as Double Tree by Hilton, Marriott, Holiday Inn Express, Hampton Inn and a few more unique boutique properties. Each participant gets use of a high-end, ultra-light Trek Domane SL7 Gen 4 carbon road bike (retail price $6,830), with electronic shifting, hydraulic disc brakes and carbon wheels. Trek Travel also offers coast-to-coast cross-country trips in England, Italy, and Spain.

Luxury Cycling Any Place

If you are having trouble deciding which trip to take or simply want to go someplace out of the box, the best solution in all of active travel is Gray & Co., the smallest outfitter ever to win the top spot in the Travel + Leisure World’s Best. The ultra-luxury company has no catalog or schedule trips, and does only bespoke custom private itineraries, especially for hiking, cycling and multi-sport. The choice of the private jet crowd, Gray & Co. is amazing, detail-oriented, extremely hands-on, and does extras like sending a team to run through the entire itinerary as an advance test to make sure there are no surprises like road construction. They are extremely well connected with the world’s top hoteliers and local experts and can add extras like historian-led battlefield visits or private artist-led museum torus onto bike trips. The go everywhere in the world, but some great cycling hotspots Gray & Co. excels at include Spain’s Mallorca, where many pro cycling teams go to train; California’s Santa Barbara region; Chile and Argentina, and South Africa by road bike combined with luxury safari. If money is no object and you want the best, contact Gray & Co.