The Latest Active Travel Trend: Cycling Escapes At Top Luxury Resorts

Exercise can work up an appetite, so a group of cyclists who also love food are heading to Maine’s culinary superstar, the White Barn Inn, this September to ride, eat and luxuriate.

The White Barn Inn, an Auberge Resort, is one of New England’s most acclaimed luxury boutique resorts, a Forbes 4-Star property with a Forbes 5-Star restaurant. It has been famous for its hospitality and cuisine for 150 years, but the “Autumn Cycling Retreat on the Coast,” is a new kind of adventure for travelers.

The all-inclusive weekend is a partnership with luxury active travel specialist KC&E Adventures, and runs Thursday September 19 to Sunday September 22, during peak fall foliage season in New England. The weekend includes two guided rides, one coastal and one wooded, 35-miles each with 15-mile optional extensions, with all ability levels welcome. It also includes a 90-minute spa treatment for each guest, pre-ride yoga class, and all food and beverage for the weekend plus snacks and amenities like a custom cycling clothing kit, with high-performance rental bikes available.

Being one of the top epicurean destinations in the country, they take the food and beverage part pretty seriously. It kicks off Thursday with cocktail hour and a private three-course dinner in the wine cellar. The Friday ride includes a stop at a classic Maine lobster shack for lunch, followed by a Macallan Whisky Cocktail Class upon return (the Inn has a partnership with The Macallan, generally considered the most prestigious whisky brand in the world). Then it’s a four-course dinner in the 5-Star restaurant. The Saturday ride includes a gourmet picnic, après ride libations by the firepit, and of course, a traditional Maine lobster bake dinner. All three mornings include breakfast at your leisure. The weekend package is $2,200 per person with all food and drink, on top of rates for whatever room, suite or cottage you choose.

KC&E is a white glove active travel company that offers a handful of scheduled but special trips like this one each year, and also does a lot of bespoke travel. I live in New England and am very familiar with area around the Inn, located in Kennebunkport, and it is one of my favorite places. The scenery, the cycling, and the food should all be fantastic.

But the White Barn Inn is not the only property embracing the cycling and active travel boom that has skyrocketed since the pandemic. All of the big luxury active travel tour operators such as Backroads, Butterfield & Robinson and DuVine have seen record bookings and in many cases cannot add trips fast enough. Combining cycling (or hiking) with great lodging and food in epic destinations has proven irresistible and is one of the hottest trends in travel. But while traditional active travel customers signed up for weeklong tours that moved from hotel to hotel, many of the newcomers are preferring a “pack and unpack once” approach and in some cases, shorter weekend trips. This is why a segment of the active travel market that has exploded is river cruise and yacht based trips, where the ship is basically a single floating hotel for the entire time. I wrote about this recently here at Forbes.

But the next iteration seems to be trips based out of a single hotel, usually a luxury hotel, like The White Barn Inn. The Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows in Santa Monica, in the middle of one some of Southern California’s best riding, just added a “Wattage Cottage” experience for cycling enthusiasts looking to take in the beauty and locale of the West Coast. The packages include a stay in one of the 31 premier bungalows, equipped with a premium TIME bicycle (the resort partners with local high-end shop Sundays Cycles, and if you prefer, you can ship or bring your own bike and they will assemble it for you). But you would be hard pressed to do better and are rarely going to see any hotel offering a bike like this, a TIME Alpe D’Huez frame with SRAM Force Etap AXS components, disc brakes and HED Belgium Ardennes wheels.

All guests receive Strava Maps outlining local cycling routes curated by area resident and cycling legend, Phil Gaimon. But a step up (and extra $1,000) is the chance to ride alongside Gaimon himself, a longtime American pro cyclist with over 100 wins, including the Hillclimb World Championship. Gaimon has written several books and has a popular YouTube channel cycling show. He partners with the Fairmont to ride with guests (pending availability), and said, “With perfect weather, incredible roads, and amazing culture, I’ve been saying for ten years that Los Angeles is the best place in the world to ride a bike. I’m excited for this opportunity to share that with the help of Fairmont Miramar Hotel and Bungalows.” The Wattage Cottage package also includes a massage and several gifts and extras, including food and beverage resort credits.

DuVine Cycling + Adventure Company is one of the highest-end players in the active travel world, combining cycling with a love of all things wine (hence its name). DuVine was the highest-ranked active travel company in the 2023 Travel + Leisure World’s Best Awards, coming in second among all tour operators, and first for active tour operators, with a 99+ rating. I’ve traveled with them, and it was fantastic.

Like the White Barn Inn, DuVine uses one of the nation’s most revered culinary-focused luxury resorts, Blackberry Farm in Tennessee (Forbes 4-Star lodging and dining), for a single resort-based 4-day/3-night scheduled group cycling trip in the fall, with three dates in September, October and November.

DuVine offers the same kind of resort-based scheduled trips at three other notable locations, Troutbeck in New York’s Hudson Valley Bike Tour, Glen Gordon Manor in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and Coquillade, a Forbes 5-Star hotel and Relais & Chateaux member in France’s Provence. They also do private trips on demand based at places like Vermont’s 5-Star Twin Farms, which is one of my absolute favorite luxury hotels in the world, just stunning, and Solage, an Auberge Resort (like the White Barn Inn) in California’s Calistoga wine country. Finally, DuVine offers a handful of unique Cycle + Sail trips on chartered boats that serve as a one-hotel base in places few other active travel companies service, Turkey and Greece.

No player in the luxury active travel field is bigger than Backroads, which is the nation’s oldest, since 1969, and still owned by its founder. Backroads has a fantastic reputation and high repeat rate, and I know why, because I’ve traveled with them several times, it’s always been great, and I can’t wait to go back. They have a huge catalog of trips all over the country and all over the world, but one thing that sets them apart is that they have repeatedly pioneered pushes into new spaces in the sector, especially boat-based trips, for which they led the charge, and they are the only ones segmenting trips by age to keep everyone happy.

They always seem to know what the next big thing will be, so it’s notable that they just announced a new category called Home Base trips for 2025—exactly this trend I’m talking about, bike and hike trips based out of a single property with no packing and unpacking.

“The new Home Base trips that launched are all in Europe,” said Backroads spokeswoman Liz Einbinder. “The gist of the Home Base concept is that they are centered around truly incredible hotels in destinations in Europe that are also ideally located.” The first three announced, in Italy’s Puglia, England’s Cotswold’s and Germany’s Bavaria, are for hiking trips, with cycling to follow. For now, Backroads’ extensive slate (more than 100 departures spanning 20 countries) of river cruise-based biking trips functions the same way, with one floating hotel for the entire trip. I did their Paris to Normandy cycling cruise on the Seine and was blown away.