Active Travel Is Still Huge — Here’s How Backroads Is Meeting the Demand

Tom Hale knows a thing or two about active travel — after all, he’s been in the business since 1979, when he founded Backroads to offer bike tours. Now, 44 years later, the company has evolved to provide a wide variety of high-end, active tours in close to 60 countries. 

Today, Hale (the company’s president) says the business is about “one-third biking, one-third hiking and one-third multiadventure.” Tour options range from active ocean and river cruises to culinary-themed walking trips, active safaris, family trips and more. And the company is constantly evolving, from introducing its slower-paced “Dolce Tempo” trip style a few years ago to adding more than 20 new trips for 2024. 

Here’s a closer look at what differentiates Backroads from other active travel companies and some of its exciting recent and upcoming developments.   

Given the pandemic-era surge in demand for outdoor experiences, how has the active travel segment been doing? Is demand still high?

So, 2019 was our high-water mark, up until recently. In 2020, we dropped about 95%, almost down to nothing like everybody else. In 2021, we came back at about 50% of 2019, and then 2022 was our all-time high, and we’re quite a way over that this year.

We’re up about 40% in 2023 over our pre-COVID-19 high, and 89% of our bookings are in for 2023, so the year is looking very solid. For 2024, we only have 5% of our bookings in typically at this time of year, but we’re up, I think, by 55%. So, the short answer is that the future looks very good for the active/adventure travel realm.

What differentiates Backroads from other active travel companies? 

Everything we do is active, and it’s pretty darned high-end. We’re probably eight to 10 times larger than the next-biggest high-end active travel company. We do all the planning and on-trip logistics. We stay at very elegant hotels [and offer] world-class dining. Our trip leaders are the best in the business. And we don’t subcontract our trips. That’s a big difference between us and a lot of adventure travel companies, who basically are going through subcontractors. 

We also do a lot of family trips — probably 25% of the business of Backroads is directed at families. And we do age-segmented family trips. It doesn’t sound like that big a deal, but the reality is that if your kids are closer in age to the kids that you’re traveling with, [their experience] will be so much better.  

Aside from family trips, do you have other target markets or specialized offerings?

Since 2020 or 2021, we’ve done a new thing called “Dolce Tempo,” and that’s an easier form of active travel. On a scale of one to five for how athletically challenging things are, it’s pretty much limited to levels one and two. And they are all e-bike trips. So, it’s directed at folks who really like the idea of active travel, but who would prefer to go with people who are [at their same pace].

We’re probably eight to 10 times larger than the next-biggest high-end active travel company.

Then we do ocean ship and river ship trips. We’re getting back into ocean [post-COVID-19] and we’re pretty much back at it as far as river ships. We use AmaWaterways as our provider, and it’s a great way to see the destinations actively while enjoying the relaxation of going down the river. 

Are there any other new developments at the company?

We have a lot of new trips coming up. We’ve got a new bike tour on the Camino de Santiago [in Spain and Portugal], a new Bordeaux to Biarritz trip [in France], a trip to Denmark’s islands, a trip to Finland to see the northern lights and we’re back in Turkey after being gone a few years. 

And then we have a couple of new segments coming out that we have not announced, and nobody knows about. The first is a women-only segment that’s going to be all walking and hiking trips. Reason being, we looked at where women were traveling solo and what kinds of trips they went on, and the top 20 were all hiking trips. So, we’re going to offer that next year. And then we’re also coming up with something for travelers who are a bit younger than our core demographic, targeted at 30- and 40-somethings.

We looked at where women were traveling solo and what kinds of trips they went on, and the top 20 were all hiking trips.

What’s the average size of a Backroads tour, and do you offer custom or private trips, as well?

The maximum group size for a bike trip is 26, and 20 for a hiking trip. But 14 tends to be the average for hiking and 16 for biking.

And we have a specific flavor of how we do private trips. We do a ton of scheduled trips, and then we do takeovers of scheduled trips that are entirely private. So, it’s not a custom trip, it’s a privately run, scheduled departure that has been thought through with the highest quality in mind. We have put so much work, thought, love and care into these trips. It’s going to be better than custom, which would also cost a lot more. And the good news is you can arrange it really easily, and we have about 6,000 or 7,000 dates available.

For travel advisors, now is the time to find your clients’ desired date and destination, because there are so many more open options for 2024. Those will only be available [for a takeover] until a couple of people sign up, so by January, there will be a whole lot less on the table.