Active travel such as guided cycling, hiking, trekking and multi-sport trips have been a fast growing trend, extremely popular in recent years, and just about every major tour operator has expanded its catalog and reported record year after year numbers since the pandemic. This kind of travel is a personal passion of mine, I do several active trips annually and have been covering this space for three decades. I’ve traveled with a lot of great companies and written about many of them here at Forbes, and don’t have a favorite, but when it comes to breadth of trips offered, customer segmentation, options, destinations and pushing into new and uncharted territory, no one can top Backroads, America’s oldest active travel company, since 1979. If you want to be on the trendy cutting edge and the first on your block to explore the hot new active travel destinations, check out Backroads’ new trip list.
In addition to Backroads, some of the key players I’ve written about for Forbes and many other publications include high-end luxury operator Butterfield & Robinson (read more here), food-focused luxury cycling outfitter DuVine (read more here), companies that do both regular trips and focus on classic race tours like the Tour de France (read more here), Trek Travel and EF Adventures, and regional specialists such as Tourissimo for Italy (read more here), Walk Japan for Japan (read more here), and Dolomite Mountains for hiking, cycling and skiing in the Dolomites (read more here). In the ultra-luxury space, there is bespoke-only Gray & Co. (read more here), and in the rarefied intersection of luxury and more avid “enthusiast” trips is KC&E Adventures (read more here).
Hot New Active Travel Destinations
Backroads Encourages New Experiences
A couple of years ago I met the wife a of a security contractor who was doing work in Eastern Europe (I won’t say where), and she had become a regular visitor to Krakow while he was off working. She raved about the city, the food, the fact that it was never bombed during WWII and is remarkably preserved compared to most cities in the region. We spoke at length and I decided I needed to go to Krakow, and since then I’ve seen it trend upwards in the travel industry and media, and I’m pretty sure it is on the verge of becoming one of “next hot places.”
