Ask most people outside the industry about the fastest-growing corner of travel, and you’ll get guesses about luxury resorts, wellness retreats, maybe adventure tourism broadly. Almost nobody says bikes.
They should. Multiple independent market research firms, tracking the sector from different angles, converge on roughly the same story: the global cycling tourism market was worth somewhere in the region of £115–120 billion in 2025, and it’s on track to roughly double or more by 2035, growing at somewhere between 9% and 11% a year. That’s not a niche hobby growing steadily — that’s one of the stronger growth curves in travel generally, and it’s been building for years, not months.
(Worth being upfront: market-sizing reports from different research firms vary meaningfully in their precise figures — a known limitation of this kind of industry data. The range and direction above reflect where multiple independent sources converge, not one single precise number taken at face value.)
01Why now, specifically
A few real, concrete forces are converging at once, not just one trend getting louder.
E-bikes removed the fitness barrier. For a long time, "cycling holiday" implicitly meant "holiday for people who already cycle seriously." E-bikes genuinely changed that calculus — a rider who’d never consider a multi-day tour on a standard bike can realistically do one with motor assistance, and operators are responding. Industry body EuroVelo has specifically flagged the growing commercialization of e-bike tourism as a defining recent trend, with destinations building out e-bike rental, charging, and guided-tour infrastructure specifically to capture this broader rider base.
Infrastructure investment is compounding. Cities and regions investing in cycling infrastructure — dedicated routes, charging points, better signage — aren’t just serving commuters. Every kilometre of safer, better-marked cycling route makes a destination more viable for tourism operators too, and that investment has been accelerating across Europe and North America for several years now.
Experiential travel keeps winning. The broader shift toward travel that’s about doing something, not just seeing something, keeps favouring activities like cycling tourism over passive sightseeing. This isn’t a RideLoop-specific observation — it’s one of the most consistently cited trends across tourism research generally, and cycling sits squarely inside it.
02What this actually means if you run a bike shop or tour business
Growth at the market level doesn’t automatically translate to growth for any individual operator — but it does mean something concrete: the pool of travellers actively looking for cycling experiences is getting larger, not smaller, and the operators positioned to capture that demand digitally are the ones who’ll benefit most.
That’s the real, practical implication. A growing market rewards visibility and ease of booking more than it rewards simply existing. An operator with a real, bookable online presence captures a share of demand that didn’t exist for them five years ago. An operator still running bookings through phone calls and a paper diary is competing in a growing market with the tools of a shrinking one.
The operators who’ll feel this growth the most aren’t necessarily the biggest — they’re the ones who make it genuinely easy for a cycling tourist, often discovering them for the first time, to actually book.
Maria Ines Vasconcelos
Co-founder, COO and CFO, Motacycles Ltd
Maria runs operations and finance at Motacycles and RideLoop: the numbers, the processes and the day-to-day running of the business. More about the team