Any recommendations for self-guided bike tour companies in Europe?

[FunTourSeeker]

We've been happy with Abicyclette in the Dordogne, but unhappy with Rad Reisen in Denmark and Radweg Reisen from Vienna to Budapest. What we'd like is a place that 1) puts together interesting routes - through forests, into historic villages, etc. - that avoid cars wherever possible but don't just go along designated bike highways, 2) find an array of interesting and attractive boutique hotels to stay in, and 3) respond personally and promptly to questions.

 

[Brandane]

Cycle.travel is all I have needed for planning tours in UK or Europe (well, France in my case).
Admittedly you do then need to organise your own accommodation, but with all the various websites available that is quite easy to do.
Maybe it's just me, but I've never seen the point in paying £££ to supposed "self guided tour organisers" for them to spend half an hour doing the above for you.

 

[TomDW]

I've just done a self supported trip around Slovenia/Italy. I hired a bike from Cycling United in Ljubljana. They gave me a big guide book with route recommendations, hotels, sights, restaurants. If anything went wrong they'd drive out to me and sort it. So it was a cycle hire but added benefits.

 

[TomDW]

1) puts together interesting routes - through forests, into historic villages, etc. - that avoid cars wherever possible but don't just go along designated bike highways,

You've lost me there ! Do you mean you like quiet roads?

 

[FunTourSeeker]

You've lost me there ! Do you mean you like quiet roads?

Yes, we like quiet roads but that's not exactly my point. We went along Euro velo 6 for much of our trip along the Danube this summer and it was quiet but it was also boring much of the time (just went through fields, without even being very close to the river, most of the time) and it was exposed to the sun, rather than shaded by trees, almost all the time. We like forest roads, roads along rivers, and roads that go through historic villages.

 

[FunTourSeeker]

Cycle.travel is all I have needed for planning tours in UK or Europe (well, France in my case).
Admittedly you do then need to organise your own accommodation, but with all the various websites available that is quite easy to do.
Maybe it's just me, but I've never seen the point in paying £££ to supposed "self guided tour organisers" for them to spend half an hour doing the above for you.

I see that, but we've found that the cost of self-guided tours isn't much more than the cost of the hotels they put us in and we like having someone else carry our luggage from place to place. But I'll take a look at Cycle.travel.

 

[Gwylan]

Yes, we like quiet roads but that's not exactly my point. We went along Euro velo 6 for much of our trip along the Danube this summer and it was quiet but it was also boring much of the time (just went through fields, without even being very close to the river, most of the time) and it was exposed to the sun, rather than shaded by trees, almost all the time. We like forest roads, roads along rivers, and roads that go through historic villages.

Did that a few years ago. Do time it to beat the Geraustrian holidays by going early in the season
Plan route from hotel to swimming pool and thence to hotel.

Start no later than about 0800 stop about 12, lunch, hide in the shade, have swim if you like, slope off about 1500, cycle to about 1800.
Find accomodation, shower, eat and enjoy the evening.

 

[Cirrus]

Did a trip with these https://www.belgian-biketours.com/ , which worked quite well. They supplied the bikes, GPS tracks, booked the accommodation and transported the luggage.

 

[lifeonabike]

The pattern in what you liked and what you didn't is worth naming, because it predicts the rest of the market. Abicyclette is a small French outfit that draws its own routes. Radweg-Reisen and the Danish operation are volume businesses, and a volume business routes you down the national cycle trunk route because it is the only line it can guarantee to a thousand people a season. Vienna to Budapest is the extreme case: the Danube path is effectively a cycling motorway with a hotel every forty kilometres, and it gets sold precisely because it never goes wrong.

So the filter is not the country, it is the size of the operator and who owns the routing. Three questions sort it out fast.

Ask who drew the GPX. If the answer is that it follows the EuroVelo or the national route, you will get the trunk line. If they can tell you why they leave it at a particular point and where they rejoin it, somebody has actually ridden it.

Ask for the hotel list by name before you book, not by category. "Three star, centrally located" is how a volume operator describes whatever bed it managed to contract. A small operator names the places, because the names are the reason it charges more than the others.

Send one genuinely awkward question at the enquiry stage - an odd bike size, a request to add a night in the middle of the route - and time the reply. That single test would have told you about both of the ones you disliked, before you paid.

On where to look: for boutique hotels with routing that is not the trunk line, the small national operators generally beat the big German and Austrian ones. In Italy, Slovenia, Portugal and rural France there are one and two person outfits doing exactly what you describe. The problem is that they market badly in English, so they are close to invisible from the UK. There are marketplaces that pull them together - I should say I am involved with one, so weigh that however you like - but the three questions above work whichever route you go in by.

One practical thing. If you want boutique hotels and a route off the main line, book earlier than you are used to. Those places have ten rooms rather than eighty, and the shoulder season weeks are the first to go.