Planning your first bike tour in eight easy steps

If you’ve read my guide on how to decide which form of bike touring is right for you, you’ll know that you have loads of options but that a key decision is whether you want to organise everything yourself or pay for a guided tour.

If you decide that you want to organise it yourself, good for you. It is very easy and can add to the enjoyment of your tour. I once read that 50% of the pleasure of the holiday is in the planning and anticipation. So enjoy even before you pedal that first nervous stroke…

Below, I have set out how I go about it, based on the over 25 tours that I have organised for myself and ridden, including the mistakes I made on the way. I am still learning!

What it comes down to is:

How long have you got? When will you be going?
Where do you ideally want to go?
Would it be good for cycling?
Should you do an ‘A to B’ ride or a loop?
Is it actually viable?
Sketching out a general route
Are the individual stages doable?
Planning it all and making bookings

It sounds a lot, but it is really very easy, worth the time of doing and will help you get a great result.

This guide should be useful to everyone but is more aimed at those like me with a more limited time/ fixed schedule to do their tour – because we have to get back to work/ catch a transport connection – and who want to sleep in hotels, apartments and hostels rather than camping.

I use RideWithGPS to plan my routes and have written a quick guide on how to use it to plan a day ride here. Komoot is also a popular option.

1. How long have you got? When will you be going?

First you need to decide when and how long you would like to go for.

Entirely up to you, but if I were starting from scratch, I would start with a long weekend ride – 3 to 4 days – or a week. Enough time to start building your legs up and get a decent taste: not so long that if you hate it, you suffer.

When? If you have a choice, I have one firm recommendation that will be good for most of Europe: May. May is really delightful to ride in. April and September are also great months though the latter can be surprisingly hot. If it is your first bike tour, I would do it at a time when the chances of good weather are greatest.

2. Where do you ideally want to go?

When you will be going matters a huge amount to what is feasible and will narrow things down. I have had to learn this the hard way. I shivered in freezing rain and sleet in late March in Alsace and the Ardennes. I boiled in 40C heat in August in Slovakia and along the Hungarian Danube, the sweat pouring down my face so hard that I could hardly see. If I had to plan those trips again and had no choice over the date, I would have gone a lot further south in March and a lot further north or west in August…

Within these parameters, there are still a lot of options. So how do you decide? I have written a longer guide for those travelling in Europe here but here are some ideas:

Following a Roman or historical road;
Following a Eurovelo route or other established bike route;
Exploring a particular area that is rich in an area of history that you are interested in such as World War One battlefields;
Following the route taken by an author or writer;
Visiting a region that you have heard a lot about or even visited by car and thought “That would be great to cycle in”;
Cycling from your home to a major city such as Paris or Berlin.

Maybe you hear from friends, maybe you read an article in a newspaper, or maybe you read a book. Something catches your eye and you think “That could be interesting…”

If you haven’t heard of Eurovelo routes, have a look here. These are great routes for discovering Europe. You can easily follow bits of them or do a mix and match of routes.

3. Would it be good for cycling?

This is where you need to do some research, either using Google or buying a few travel books. What is the terrain like? Do other people ride there? (Always a good recommendation.) What do they say about it? Is it compatible with what you like and your experience level? I am OK on main roads, but maybe you want a route on bike paths. Is it too hilly for you or too flat?

A good sign is if you come across lots of companies organising bike tours there. Take a look at their routes and the towns they stop in. Sometimes you can pretty much work out the exact routes that they take.

4. A to B or a loop?

Doing a loop will simplify things for you no end. Cheaper return train or plane ticket, possibility to travel with a bike box and packing materials that you can leave at your starting point and use on the way back. There can be a sense of satisfaction in returning to your starting point after many kilometres and many adventures.

But on the other hand… there is something rather satisfying about doing an A to B. The line looks nicer on the map and is more impressive when you tell friends. You get to see more terrain and have a wider experience.

I do both, though probably more A to B than loops.

A very nice compromise would be to do an A to B but with the possibility of taking the train from B to A at the end or even for part of your trip. In 2023, I rode from Oslo to Stavanger before taking the train back. In retrospect, I should have taken the train inland from Oslo to a starting point closer to the really beautiful parts of my trip.

5. Is it actually viable and likely to be enjoyable?

This is a mistake that I have made too many times and continue to make… You get excited at the possibilities and already in your head, you are cycling through the foothills in glorious evening sunshine… What can possibly go wrong?

Well what can go wrong is that when you actually get to plan it, it can involve a level of logistics so complicated that it would make a military commander’s head spin… You can discover that to get from your home to your intended starting point means a day and a half of mixed transport, all of which could get delayed… Difficult enough on your own, but with a fragile bike to transport and protect?

Very occasionally it is worth it. I was determined to start my ride from the southernmost town of Europe in… the southernmost town. That meant a flight to Athens, a two-hour layover, a flight to Heraklion in Crete, renting a car, driving two hours with the bike in its travel box, dropping the bike at my hotel, driving back to the airport and returning the rental car, and then taking a three-hour bus back to the hotel… It was fine: I spent a day in the rental car, touring the hills of Crete. But not something I would do every day.

Or you can do it, but it will involve consistently long days in the saddle and no breaks. Fine in theory, but when you are out there, you might end up cursing yourself, and it leaves no space for bad days or anything to go wrong.

Look at the arrival and departure logistics early on. And for the arrival, can you get your bike there in a state that you can unpack it without too much hassle? (For the departure, can you pack your bike without too much hassle? This might mean procuring a cardboard box from a bike shop.)

I have written here about transporting your bike. To give you the short version: it can end up being easier but more expensive to go by plane than by train. Airlines are used to taking boxed cargo and lots of luggage whereas international trains are much more restrictive.

6. Sketch out a general route

OK? That all look good? Now it is time to sketch out a route and see how feasible it is for the time you have available, the effort you want to put in.

One final check at this point before you go ahead and commit: take a look at all the small towns or heavily touristed destinations on your route and do a very quick check on a hotel booking site that something is available on the night that you plan to stay there. If things look tight and the reservations are cancellable, go ahead and book.

Sometimes what I do is to print out a map of the area that I want to ride through and mark on it all the interesting places that I would like to go through. Sometimes what becomes clear is that I will immediately have to rule many of them out. Usually, I can see a general outline.

So then I go online and use a bit of bike route-mapping software like RideWithGPS or Komoot and sketch out the route, putting my starting point and end point and then pulling the route this way and that, adding ‘control points’: the towns or bike routes I want to follow.

Very quickly, I get an estimation of the rough total distance and total climb.

How does it look? Suppose you want to ride 50km a day, and take a day off every 3 days. That means for a 15-day trip, allowing for a day to get there and a day back, you are looking at a rough total distance of 500 km. If anything, it should be closer to 475k or so because inevitably you will have to tweak the route to take you to hotels and sights of interest. Or avoid real bastard climbs…

This is the next figure that you should look at: how much you will be climbing. I like a mix of rolling countryside, the odd solid climb, and a bit of flat, so I operate by a rough rule of thumb that for every 10km of distance, I should be doing about 100m of climbing. Above that, I will be doing more climbing than flat and below that, I will be more on the flat than in the hills. Up to you but I find the 1:10 to be a good ratio.

At this point, as long as the distance and climbing are not wildly out, I recommend saving your route and then playing around a bit with the route to tweak the distance/ climbing to your liking. I often save a number of variants of the general route, making them ‘standard’, ‘easy’ and so on…

One thing that you should think about is the direction of your route. If you are doing a loop, is it better going clockwise or anti-clockwise? If you are going A to B is it better going north to south, south to north, east to west… A factor here might be the prevailing wind which in most of Europe is South West, so best if you can to be riding North and East… I once rode south from Tallinn to Vilnius only to be told halfway by a bike mechanic in Latvia that 9 out of 10 bike tourists went the ‘right’ way: south to north, with the wind behind them.

7. Are the individual stages doable?

OK, so you do this and it looks OK. Unless you are wild camping, one final thing to check before you commit: are there towns and villages with accommodation/ campsites reasonably spread along the route? If you are travelling in the thick of Western or central Europe, the chances are almost certainly yes, though if you are booking your trip last minute and in high season, you might want to check on an accommodation booking website that some of the smaller towns are not booked up. I use a combination of Booking and Airbnb but if I have to, also do a Google Maps search for ‘hotels’.

In more sparsely populated territory like the Baltic countries, Scandinavia, and the Balkans, you should definitely do this. It might mean doing a really long ride one day and a relatively short the next. This was the case in Albania, where I ended up riding 115k from Gjirokaster to Fier and then 40k from Fier to Berat.

I do a rough breakdown of my days from beginning to end, including rest days. It does not need to be exact: just a rough estimation.

To do this, I go to my overall route and I ‘select’ bits of it in turn, starting from the beginning. What I am looking for are towns and villages along the route at reasonable intervals. Using the main map, I can get an idea of whether a place has a few hotels – and if necessary, I can confirm on a hotel booking site (see below) – and places to eat. I then ‘select’ the part of my route between the town I am starting from that day, and the town I have in mind. What you will then see is a more detailed profile of that part, with the distance, climbing and other details. Does it look reasonable to you? If not, can the route be tweaked a bit, or do you need to find a town closer to your starting point?

I do this day by day, with a rough eye on towns where I can take a day off every 3-5 days. It is better if these are towns with something to do like visiting a museum, exploring the old town, or hiking.

When I have done this, more or less for the whole trip, I then plot it against my planned dates. Does it all work or am I trying to squeeze too much in? Are there too many hard days – long rides or heavy climbing – in a row? Will I have enough time to actually appreciate the towns and landscape that I am riding through? In other words: will it be a fun holiday?

These days, I do an informal colour-coding of the days: green for easy, yellow for moderate, orange for harder and pink for tough. It ended up not being completely accurate: some of the yellow days felt harder than the last day which ended up being rather easy. But it helped and should have alerted me that there were too many tough days.

Remember that you can often take a bus, train or ferry to make an individual day easier. There is precisely zero shame in this.

8. Planning it all and making bookings

Now is the time for action and no regrets. Book the travel tickets… Get the bike reservations if necessary…

Then go and book the hotels, starting with the smaller places and leaving the big cities until last. For my advice on how to book hotels, please read here.

Then go and plan individual day routes. Here I start to pay more attention to the details of each route, making sure that I am not being sent along some muddy trail or along the side of a dual carriageway – though occasionally you have to do these. I send the yellow Google Street View guy on several parachute drops to spy out the terrain for me.

If he can’t find anywhere to ‘land’, it might be a sign that the route is too tough or impassable.

Build in as much flexibility as you can over your exact route so that you can adjust to conditions and how you feel and remember to be open to local advice. In Slovenia, a hotel owner who was also a bike fanatic gave me wonderful advice on a more interesting route to Bled.

In a change to the published progeamme….

On a sunny day with a spring in your step, that twisty-turny route that goes up and down hills might look wonderful, but on a freezing cold day with torrential rain and your stomach playing up, you will want to take Route One and get it over with as quickly as possible.

Where possible, I give myself a few options for each day, marking them, say, Brussels – Liege Easy, Brussels – Liege Hills, and Brussels – Liege Hard.

Then start to get your gear together…

That’s it. That is really all there is.

Have fun…

Interested in reading more about other aspects of bike touring? Check out these other pages: