How to Start a Mountain Bike Tour Company: Guides, Trail Access, Shuttles and Group Size

01What a mountain bike tour company actually sells

A mountain bike tour company sells a day or a week of riding that the customer could not easily put together alone: someone who knows the trails, has permission to be on them, keeps the group together, and sorts out the bikes, the transport and the lunch. The product is trust in the guide and the logistics. The trails are rarely yours.

That shapes everything in this guide. Unlike a shop, you do not control the main asset. A land manager, a landowner or a protected-area plan does. Unlike a road tour, the risk sits in the terrain, so who guides and how many riders each guide takes matter more. And transport is not a side issue: uplift and shuttles are often what makes a day work, and they bring their own licensing.

What the data does and does not tell you about demand

We looked for a defensible market size and did not find one. What exists is narrow, and we use none of it as a forecast.

• England and Scotland: we found no mountain bike participation figure for the UK. England’s Active Lives survey counts cycling for leisure and sport as a whole (at least twice in 28 days, adults 16 and over): about 5.8 million adults in the year to November 2024, 304,000 fewer than the year before. Scotland’s forest agency counted cycling and mountain biking together on its estate (about 764,000 visits) in a survey whose fieldwork ran to 2013.
• Wales: a Welsh Government written answer (October 2024) put domestic overnight spend on mountain biking trips at £31 million a year, from 2022-23 data. It covers domestic visitors only, so overseas visitors are left out (our reading), and day-trip data was not yet available. The answer also says statistics are not available at regional level or for downhill mountain biking specifically.
• US: the Outdoor Industry Association reported 54 million people aged six and over riding road, mountain, gravel or BMX bikes in 2024, a combined figure. The Forest Service’s visitor survey found bicycling named in 5.9% of national forest visits (2017 to 2021 cycle), without a separate mountain biking line.
• Guided demand: we found no published figure for guided mountain bike demand, average guided group size, or guide utilisation.

The honest reading is that there is plenty of riding, and no public number that tells you how many people will pay to be guided in your valley. Test your own market before you spend on permits, vehicles and a fleet.

02Choose your model before anything else

“Mountain bike tour company” covers four different businesses, and the rules in this guide hit them differently.

We would pick one (our view, not a finding). A single well-run day ride, run the same way every time, should teach you more about terrain, guests and costs than a brochure of five. If you want the general business basics (licensing, insurance, package travel, VAT, pricing), they are in How to Start a Cycling Tour Business in the UK. This guide goes deeper on what is specific to mountain biking, and does not repeat that one.

What riders pay

Published prices are hard to compare, because they mix per-rider and per-group pricing, bikes included and bring-your-own, and “from” prices. With that warning, the guided day and half-day pages we read on 14 October 2026 ran as follows. We did not average them.

• UK: from about £58 for a one-off guided ride event in December 2025 (ride only, £85 with lunch) to about £180 a person for a four-hour guided e-MTB experience priced at £360 for two, lunch included. Several pages quote a price for a guide’s day, not per rider: £180 to £220 for a day with one to five riders at one Scottish guiding firm, which reads as a group price.
• EU: the Portuguese pages we read had a half day from €195 for one rider on the mainland (French and Italian pages gave lower or conflicting figures, from €49 for a half-day discovery ride (the page does not say per person or per group) and from €130 for a seven-hour e-MTB tour), with per-head prices that fall as the group grows; a full-day e-MTB tour at €215 a person in a group of four or more, rising to over €500 for a single rider.
• US: roughly $80 to $270 per rider at group rates and for half days (solo full-day prices on one operator’s list run from $310 to $440), with guide gratuity listed separately or as an extra on all four pages, and sales tax stated as separate on only one.
• VAT: none of the UK or EU pages we read said whether VAT was included.

03Guiding standards: what is law and what is market

A common mistake in this area is to treat an award as a legal licence, or the reverse. Here is the line, place by place.

Great Britain: no licence for adults that we found, with one exception

We found no law in England, Wales or Scotland that requires a qualification to lead adults on a mountain bike ride for payment. There is one statutory scheme that can reach mountain biking, and it turns on three tests together: payment, under-18 participants who are not with a parent or guardian, and a trekking terrain test.

The Adventure Activities Licensing Regulations 2004 require a licence from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) for anyone who provides certain adventure activities “in return for payment” to people under 18. “Trekking” is on the list, and regulation 2 defines it as travelling on foot, horse or pedal cycle over terrain that is moorland or more than 600 metres above sea level, and from which it would take more than 30 minutes to reach an accessible road or refuge. HSE’s own page lists off-road cycling among the most familiar trekking activities. So, on our reading, the licence is needed when you charge, you take under-18s (without a parent or guardian), the ride is on that kind of terrain, and no exemption applies (the regulations exempt, for example, a school’s own pupils and a club’s own members).

On our reading, a paid guided ride for adults on forest tracks and trail-centre routes is outside it, and a paid ride for a school group on remote moorland is inside it. The cases in between, such as ground that may or may not count as moorland, or a road that is about 30 minutes away, depend on how HSE reads “moorland”, “travelling time” and “refuge” for bikes. On the regulation’s text, both the terrain test and the 30-minute test must be met. We could not confirm how HSE reads them because the HSE guidance document would not load. If youth groups are part of your plan, ask HSE before you sell them anything.

The UK awards are market standards

Three bodies run the main UK mountain bike leader schemes we found. Mountain Training, which runs the walking and climbing awards, has no mountain bike award on its list.

Two things to keep straight. First, both British Cycling and Cycling UK have an award called “Trail Leader”, with different limits, so name the body every time. Second, the limits are the schemes’ own. They sit close to the HSE’s 600 metre and 30 minute figures but, as far as we can tell, are not defined by them, and we found no scheme page that refers to the HSE licence. We found no land manager page naming a required award. Cycling UK’s page shows a full-course price that we could not confirm, so check it with the body before budgeting.

Why get one anyway? Because British Cycling says employers recognise its awards as the industry standard, and because some awards come with insurance. British Cycling says its award holders can use its third-party insurance as long as they are current members and first aid and safeguarding training are kept up to date, and its Trail Leader page asks for a two-day outdoor first aid certificate to be covered. We did not get as far as reading commercial insurers’ policy wording, so we cannot say whether any names a required award; ask your own insurer in writing what it wants.

First aid, reporting and young riders

The 16-hour outdoor first aid course that appears in the awards is a scheme and insurance requirement, not an HSE rule. The HSE’s duty on employers is to assess first aid needs and provide “adequate and appropriate” equipment, facilities and people. For the public, the HSE “strongly recommends” that employers include them in that assessment. Under RIDDOR (the injury reporting regulations), a non-fatal injury to someone who is not a worker is reportable when they are taken directly to hospital and the accident arose out of or in connection with work (for example how the ride was organised or supervised, or the equipment used). On our reading, a paying guest hurt on a guided ride could count, so keep an incident record from day one.

If you will guide under-18s regularly, safeguarding checks (the Disclosure and Barring Service in England and Wales, the PVG scheme in Scotland) may apply. We did not read the legislation closely enough to say when, so take advice before you offer youth sessions.

France: the opposite rule

France regulates paid sports supervision. Under the Code du sport (article L212-1), only people with a recognised qualification may, for pay, teach, lead or supervise a physical or sporting activity. The French government’s page says that doing so without the qualification and prior declaration is punishable by one year in prison and a €15,000 fine, and that a professional card is issued. The French state’s sports-in-nature page on VTT supervision (1 July 2026) lists diplomas including a DEJEPS (a state youth and sport diploma) with a VTT (mountain bike) option, and a BPJEPS in cycling activities that excludes downhill and enduro, and the France Compétences register shows that DEJEPS cycling diploma, with a VTT option, as active. After Brexit, a UK national cannot use the EU freedom-to-provide-services route; the French page says it is limited to EU and EEA nationals, and recognition of a foreign diploma goes through a national commission. The evidence we found on how this works in practice comes from snowsports bodies, so treat that as our reading rather than a mountain biking ruling.

So the rule of thumb is not “Europe needs a licence”. It is: check the country, because France requires a diploma and, as far as we found, Great Britain does not for adults.

Portugal (mainland): registration and insurance, and no guide rule that we found

Portugal is our single worked EU example (France, Austria and Germany appear as contrasts, with France covered mainly for its guiding rules), and we cover mainland national rules only. A paid guided mountain bike ride is, on our reading, “animação turística”: the organisation and sale of recreational or sporting activities in the natural environment, of a leisure character and of tourist interest to the region where they take place. The operator must register on the national register of tourist entertainment operators (RNAAT) run by Turismo de Portugal, through a prior notice before starting. The 2015 amending decree set a base registration fee of €135 (less for microenterprises), but Turismo de Portugal’s own pages now differ: its fee page (August 2023) lists €136.93, or €91.28 for a microenterprise, and its May 2024 FAQ lists €136.58 and €91.05, so check today’s figure. The operator must also hold civil liability and personal accident insurance listing every activity. The 2009 decree set minimum sums to be updated each year for inflation, but later versions refer the amounts to a ministerial order we could not find, so we could not confirm today’s figures on an official page.

We found no national qualification for mountain bike guides in these rules. That is a statement about what we found, not a statement that none exists, so ask Turismo de Portugal. Two other points matter to a start-up. The RNAAT’s own FAQ (May 2024) says that bike hire on its own is not tourist entertainment. And in areas classified for nature conservation, nature tourism activities need recognition through the same platform, and recognition does not replace separate authorisation from the nature conservation institute (ICNF), as section 4 shows.

The US: permits ask about guides, and name no award

On US Forest Service land, as far as the two documents we read show, the permit is where the question is asked. Two example permit documents we read (a Forest Service prospectus and an application form) ask applicants about their guides’ qualifications (the prospectus asks for “guide qualification requirements”, the application form for a qualifications roster and the level of first aid training). Neither named an award. We found no US state that licenses mountain bike guides, but we did not check all of them, so do not turn that into a claim.

The Forest Service’s “guiding” definition is broad: services such as supervision, education, training, touring and “transporting people” provided for monetary or other gain. In the US, IMBA no longer certifies instructors: its programme became the independent Bike Instructor Certification Program in January 2018. Its Ride Leader course lists a course fee of $135 plus $65 membership, and it requires current first aid and CPR certification.

What we would do

Hold at least one recognised leader award for each guide who leads paying guests, in the scheme that matches the terrain you ride. Add a 16-hour outdoor first aid certificate. Write down which terrain each guide is cleared to lead and why. Then ask your insurer, in writing, whether it wants more.

04Trail access: who lets you ride, and who lets you charge

This is the part that decides whether you have a business. Three questions come before any route: is riding there lawful at all, does the land manager let you run a paid group there, and what do they want in return.

England and Wales: bridleways yes, footpaths no, access land no

• Bridleways, restricted byways and byways open to all traffic: cycling is allowed. Section 30 of the Countryside Act 1968 gives the public a right to ride a bicycle on a bridleway, and cyclists must give way to pedestrians and horse riders.
• Footpaths: no. Cycling on one is a trespass against the landowner, usually a civil matter.
• Open access land (the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, “CRoW”): the right to roam is a right on foot: Schedule 2 excludes anyone who “drives or rides any vehicle” (it does not name bicycles), and Cycling UK says there is “generally” no right to cycle on access land. Schedule 2 also excludes anyone who engages in an activity “organised or undertaken … for any commercial purpose”. On our reading, a commercially guided mountain bike group is excluded twice over on access land. A bridleway that crosses access land is a separate legal basis and stays usable.
• Permissive paths and trail-centre trails: you ride as the owner allows.
• Wales: proposals to open more paths to cyclists have been around since 2017, and Cycling UK’s page, updated in February 2025, said access legislation was “currently being reviewed in Wales”. We found no enacted change by 14 October 2026, but we did not find a current Welsh Government statement either, so check.

Now the question new operators most want answered: do you need a permit to lead a paid group along a public bridleway? We found no statute, government guidance or governing-body guidance that says so. The permit regimes below are landowner and land manager rules, not highway law. That is a statement about what we found, not a reassurance. Two councils’ guidance on events on rights of way (West Sussex and the Isle of Wight) asks organisers to get or consult the owners, and one adds that numbers should suit the place, and a big group that wilfully blocks a narrow bridleway or gate can raise an obstruction offence under section 137 of the Highways Act 1980 (our reading). Racing is a different matter: promoting a race or trial of speed between cycles on a public way is an offence unless authorised, and authorisation is not available on a bridleway. Keep guided rides and timed events separate in your head and in your marketing.

Never guide on trails you do not have permission for, even popular ones. Forestry England says that building trails without a landowner’s consent is illegal, and a guide who takes paying guests onto an unauthorised trail may also put their insurance in doubt. That last point is our inference, so ask the insurer.

Scotland: access rights that reach commercial guiding

Scotland works differently. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 extends access rights to carrying on an activity “commercially or for profit” where the person could do it non-commercially, so, on our reading, a guide can lead a group without a land manager’s permit if they act responsibly. The Scottish Outdoor Access Code sets the tone: the bigger the group, or the more regularly a place is used, the more care is needed (paragraph 3.57). It says permission is needed if an event needs new or temporary facilities or is likely to hinder land management unreasonably (3.60), and that guides should risk-assess, speak to regular land managers and take care not to harm other businesses (3.62). Access rights do not cover building trails, land that has long been open only on payment (the Act looks at 90 days a year since 2001, so, on our reading, long-established paid-entry bike parks set their own terms), or motorised vehicles. According to the National Access Forum’s sub-group (2020), the statutory position on e-bikes under access rights is unsettled until legislation or a court rules. But the sub-group’s note records a pragmatic position that e-bikes are within access rights until further advice and NatureScot’s cycling page treats an e-bike as the same as a “normal” bike; the draft guidance we saw in February 2025 was still in development, but the code’s cycling page (updated August 2026) now links published e-bike guidance from a Scottish mountain biking body, which is not a statute or court ruling.

Land managers: what they ask for

Where you do need permission, each body works differently. This table summarises the pages and documents we read on 14 October 2026. Fees and insurance levels differ by document and date, so confirm them before you plan around any of them.

Two cautions. The Forestry England insurance figures come from older application forms than its latest pricing document. And the National Park pages describe notification thresholds for events (the Peak District for commercial events or 50 or more people; Dartmoor above 30 cyclists), not guiding permits. We read a guided ride as arguably an organised event for commercial benefit but no page says so, so ask the authority.

Where the permit pages and forms we read set requirements, what landowners ask for is much the same: an insurance certificate, a risk assessment, notice, and sometimes first aid certificates. The reason is liability. Under the Occupiers’ Liability Act 1957 an occupier owes visitors a common duty of care, and the Act says that where a danger comes from a contractor’s faulty construction, maintenance or repair work, an occupier is not answerable without more if it chose the contractor reasonably and checked competence (section 2(4)(b)). That covers works contractors, not guides, so treat it as an analogy. So an owner who lets you in will want proof that you are competent and insured (our reading). We found no published indemnity wording from any of them, so read the permit before you sign it.

e-MTBs

In Great Britain, a compliant electrically assisted pedal cycle (EAPC) has a motor of no more than 250 watts continuous rated power that cuts out at 15.5 mph, and the rider must be 14 or over. Forestry England and Cycling UK treat these as pedal cycles, and GOV.UK says you can ride one “anywhere else pedal bikes are allowed”. A machine that does not meet those limits is a motor vehicle, and riding one on a bridleway in England and Wales is an offence under section 34 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 unless you have lawful authority (our reading). If you hire out or guide on e-MTBs, check each model’s specification.

The EU: three contrasts, then Portugal

Rules differ a great deal. Three quick examples show the range, and none is a complete guide to its country.

• Austria: the Forest Act lets anyone enter forest for recreation on foot, but use beyond that, such as “Befahren” (driving) or riding a horse, needs the owner’s consent (section 33(3)). The word “cycling” is not in the section, and applying it to bikes is a reading we did not verify. Consent can be limited to particular uses or times.
• Germany: the federal forest law allows cycling in forest only on roads and paths (section 14), and the states set the details. One state forest service still described a “2 m Regel” for all paths in its state forest when we looked; its page does not say what the rule measures, and we read it as a path-width limit without verifying. We could not read the state statute.
• France: we found no general right to ride any path in the sources we read. Departmental plans work through agreements with willing owners (we did not verify local orders), and a 2023 law lets entry onto physically marked private land be punished. The guiding diploma rule is in section 3.

Portugal (mainland). On the national rules we could read, there is no single “cycling in forests” rule. Access depends on the protection regime of the area and its management plan. In protected areas, the plan can ban an activity, allow it, or require authorisation from ICNF depending on the protection zone. The first protected-area plan table we read listed mountain biking as prohibited in the strictest zones, needs authorisation in a middle zone (with a footnote limiting groups to fewer than 15 on existing trails) and permitted in the lowest-protection zone. Another park’s table showed different entries, so do not say mountain biking is allowed or banned in Portuguese parks. It depends on the park and the zone.

Fire danger is the other mainland issue. Portugal’s rural fire rules (Decree-Law 82/2021) use five danger levels set by the weather and nature agencies. At the top two levels (“muito elevado” and “máximo” in the Decree-Law), restrictions apply. An information sheet describing the national rules, published by a Portuguese local authority (not an official legal text), said that in priority areas, circulating or staying in public or community forest, and holding organised sports events, was prohibited at those levels, and a ministerial order in 2022 banned access to forest spaces in some zones during a contingency period. We could not read the articles that set the restrictions, so treat this as a warning to check the fire-danger notices every day you ride in forest, and write a fire-danger cancellation clause into your terms (the weather cancellations guide linked in section 9 covers calling tours off).

The US: agency by agency

Federal land is a patchwork. The agency that manages the trail runs the permit.

• Forest Service: under 36 CFR 251.50, uses of National Forest System land are special uses that need an authorisation unless an exemption applies (noncommercial recreation is exempt), and guiding for gain is a use that needs one. Even travel on a forest road needs authorisation if it is for outfitting or guiding. One national forest’s page says temporary permits run in 50-day steps to a maximum of 200 service days in a 180-day period. It says it considers priority use permits (up to 10 years) only from applicants who have held a temporary permit; that is local practice, and the EXPLORE Act (2025) added a separate Forest Service and BLM temporary permit of up to two years (16 USC 8545), whose other terms we did not read. Forest offices ask for a pre-application meeting and give “probable” timeframes, not fixed ones.
• Bureau of Land Management (BLM): commercial use needs a special recreation permit, and the agency’s page says: “Do not advertise, collect fees, or begin operations until you have received written authorization from the BLM.”
• National Park Service: commercial services need a concession contract or a commercial use authorization of up to two years, and the statute (54 USC 101925) limits these authorisations to listed kinds of operation, which on our reading include small ones with $25,000 or less of annual gross receipts working wholly inside a park unit. Bicycles are limited to park roads and designated routes, and new off-road bike trails need a special regulation.
• Wilderness: the Wilderness Act bans “mechanical transport” in designated wilderness, and the Forest Service treats bikes as banned there, and we did not verify the position of the other agencies. We found no change in 2025 to 2026. The Forest Service’s own rule, 36 CFR 261.18(b), prohibits possessing or using a bicycle in National Forest Wilderness; we did not check the BLM or National Park Service texts.
• Fees: the Forest Service handbook (the only one we read) uses a per-client-day schedule and flat fees for temporary permits. The EXPLORE Act, enacted in January 2025, caps percentage-based fees at 3% of adjusted gross receipts for temporary and long-term special recreation permits (not National Park Service commercial use authorisations). We could not reconcile the two, so ask the local office which applies.
• e-bikes: the Interior Department (which includes BLM and the National Park Service) has had an order since 2019 aimed at unifying e-bike rules on its land, and decisions on which trails allow them are local; the National Park Service leaves them to each superintendent. The Forest Service page says Class 1, 2 and 3 e-bikes are allowed on motorised trails and roads, and new access on non-motorised trails needs a public process. Check the specific trail before you put an e-MTB on a tour.
• States: each state sets its own rules for its parks. Utah’s rules for commercial activities, for example, ask for requests at least 30 business days ahead and cover guides, and its vendor page names a standard general liability policy of $1 million per person per occurrence and $3 million aggregate (lower limits can be approved), and its rules say only that insurance may be required. The Vermont page says a permit is generally needed where participants pay a fee; the North Carolina, California and Colorado pages we read said little about guiding. Treat any state as its own question.

05Group size: we found no rule, so choose one on purpose

If you came for “the” ratio, here is the awkward answer. We found no law or regulator in the UK, and none in the EU rules we read, that sets a rider-to-guide ratio for commercial mountain bike tours (we did not research Italy or Spain, and for France only the guiding-qualification rules). The figures that exist come from different bodies for different purposes, and they are not interchangeable.

The pattern in the commercial pages is clear enough: where firms publish a number on technical or remote terrain in the UK and EU, it mostly sits between 5 and 12 (one Italian listing shows up to 30) and clusters at 6 to 8 per guide or group. In the US, one day-tour operator in a popular desert trail town publishes groups of 2 up to 13 and adds a second guide above six or seven guests, and a multi-day operator publishes 13 guests and two guides on most permits. We read that as a product of their permits, not a general standard.

What land managers cap

We looked for the 12 or 25 caps that people quote for national parks and forests, and found no such cap for mountain bike groups in the UK or US documents we could read. What we found instead were these.

• Event thresholds, not guiding caps: 50 participants at Eryri National Park (its mountain bike size bands start at 30); Forestry and Land Scotland’s event bands for cycling start at 25 to 50 for a small event; 30 cyclists at Dartmoor.
• US National Park Service tour plans for road and pathway bike tours (not singletrack): Grand Teton allows no more than 10 visitors with at least one guide and two guides maximum, a total of 12; Rocky Mountain allows 18 in total and one guide to no more than eight participants.
• A Forest Service ranger district’s 2019 prospectus: up to 14 bikes or people, guides included, per day per trail, and no more than seven on the trail at one time.

Ratio, seats and money interact

Your real limit is usually the smallest of four numbers: what your guides’ awards say, what the terrain and weather safely allow, what your permit says, and what your vehicle seats. The last one surprises people, and section 6 shows how. The money matters too. In the worked example in section 8, adding the seventh rider at 1:6 adds a guide, so the direct cost per rider goes up, not down.

Grading riders, not just trails

UK trail colours (green, blue, red, black) grade the trail, not the rider. Forestry England says its scheme “is being replaced, over time, by a new grading system”, and its own pages and those of the Scottish and Welsh agencies differ (the Scottish agency describes a “double black” grade, for example, and Forestry England’s older scheme has an orange bike-park grade). In the US, many trail symbols follow IMBA’s 2004 rating system, which considers only technical difficulty (we read it on a county’s copy), and IMBA Canada notes that a black diamond in one region may be a blue square in another. So do not tell a guest that a colour means the same everywhere.

Operators handle the rider side with their own labels and checks. The approaches we found were a booking questionnaire against a written grouping guide followed by observation on the first morning, self-declaration against a plain description (such as “comfortable riding most types of terrain in different conditions”), and simple pre-checks such as being able to use hand brakes and change gear. We found no operator using a rider video or a formal trail test. One European operator we read says it only puts guests with riders of the same standard, and may decline a booking if the fit is poor. That reads as a sensible rule: the firm’s own wording is that mixed-ability groups are “no fun for anyone”, and a poor fit is also a safety question for the guide to manage.

Write your own grading in plain words, ask for it at booking, and give the guide the power to regroup or turn a rider back. Keep a record of the decision.

06Shuttles and uplift: the licensing line is seat count

A shuttle turns a hard day into a good one, and it is where a small operator can walk into a licensing problem. The rules below are for Great Britain unless we say otherwise. Northern Ireland has separate regimes and we did not research them.

The seat-count line (Great Britain)

• Driver plus eight passengers is not a public service vehicle (PSV) by seat count. Under section 1(1)(a) of the Public Passenger Vehicles Act 1981, a vehicle adapted to carry “more than eight passengers” and used for hire or reward is a PSV. A van with nine seats including the driver’s carries a driver and eight passengers, so on its face it is not caught by that limb; check that the maker’s ’nine seats’ include the driver, and count passenger seats on the registration document. A driver with a car (B) licence may drive a vehicle with up to eight passenger seats (the 1 January 1997 date in GOV.UK’s table matters for trailer limits).
• On our reading, a shuttle built into the tour price is almost certainly “hire or reward”. Section 1(5)(a) treats a vehicle as carrying passengers for hire or reward “if payment is made for, or for matters which include, the carrying of passengers”. We found no official guidance exempting uplift that sits inside a package price, and no exemption for tour operators.
• Nine or more passengers (ten seats including the driver) changes everything. You need a PSV operator licence. The driver needs the minibus entitlement (D1) without the “code 101” restriction, which means “not for hire or reward”. Driver CPC (the professional driver qualification) is likely to apply to a paid minibus driver: GOV.UK says that if you need a PSV operator licence the carriage is commercial, and its “main job” exemption is for carrying materials or equipment for your job, not passengers. Check each person with the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA). The tachograph rules apply to vehicles “constructed or permanently adapted to carry more than nine people including the driver”, and GOV.UK uses wording on this scope in more than one form, so check the seat definition with DVSA before you rely on either reading.
• A restricted PSV licence covers up to two vehicles, and for 9 to 16 passenger seats only where the use is not a passenger transport business, or the operator’s main occupation is not running such vehicles (for a limited company, the company is tested). A traffic commissioner decides, so do not tell yourself it is automatic.
• Section 19 and 22 permits are not available to you. The Department for Transport says commercial organisations, “including privately owned schools, nursing homes and activity centres”, are not eligible.

Up to eight passengers: the private hire question

Below the seat-count line, a different regime may apply: private hire licensing by the local council in England and Wales (outside London). A vehicle of up to eight passenger seats can also be a PSV if it carries passengers at separate fares in the course of a passenger-carrying business, and a payment can count as a fare even when it also covers other things, so read the Traffic Commissioners’ guidance and ask your council. The 1976 Act defines a private hire vehicle as one seating fewer than nine passengers that is provided for hire with a driver to carry passengers. Whether a guide driving guests as part of a guided ride is “providing” private hire is genuinely uncertain. A Department for Transport note (2011, England and Wales, without the force of law) gives six questions, including whether carrying people is an ancillary or main part of the service, whether the driver has other duties and whether a qualification is needed. The Law Commission said in 2014 that the position is uncertain, and its draft Bill to exempt such transport was never enacted, as far as we found. In Scotland, a different test applies under the Civic Government (Scotland) Act 1982.

Our reading is that a guide driving four to eight guests as part of a guided day has a reasonable argument that the transport is ancillary. But councils differ, and we found no council guidance on mountain bike or activity tours. Ask your licensing authority in writing, and ask your insurer too: a trade body for driver-guides warns that an unlicensed vehicle may be uninsured, which is its view, not an official one.

Hours, belts and loads

• Drivers’ hours: GOV.UK’s table puts commercial tours in vehicles of up to eight passenger seats under the GB domestic rules, but its rows for other business use differ, so ask DVSA which fits your shuttle. The domestic rules set a maximum of 10 hours’ driving in a working day, and no more than 16 hours between starting and finishing work, with no record-keeping requirement for passenger vehicles. Larger vehicles used commercially fall under the assimilated rules and a tachograph.
• Seat belts and passengers: the Highway Code says adults and children aged 14 and over must use a seat belt where one is fitted, and GOV.UK says the driver is responsible for passengers under 14 (a fine of up to £500 if a child is not correctly restrained). Only one person to a belted seat.
• Bikes and trailers: the Highway Code requires loads to be secure and not to stick out dangerously. A trailer needs a secondary coupling such as a safety chain, and GOV.UK gives a maximum trailer width of 2.55 metres. Since December 2021, a post-1997 car licence allows trailers up to 3,500 kg maximum authorised mass, but the vehicle’s own towing limit still applies. We found no verified figure for how many bikes fit in a nine-seater or on a trailer, so measure your own, and we found no primary source on a bike rack hiding a number plate or rear lights, so check that with DVSA.

How the ratio and the van interact

This is the part that surprises people. If the guides drive, a nine-seat van holds the guides plus the riders, so the number of riders it can carry falls as you add guides.

So 1:8 fills one nine-seater exactly with one guide and eight riders. At 1:6, a seventh rider needs a second guide, which still fits one van (seven riders and two guides is nine people), but an eighth rider needs a second van, and that costs money. Our worked example in section 8 puts a price on these steps.

EU and Portugal

Driving licence categories are harmonised across the EU: category B covers a vehicle for no more than eight passengers in addition to the driver, and D1 covers up to 16. A replacement directive adopted in October 2025 will repeal the 2006 one, and we did not retrieve its application dates, so we give none. Operator licensing is national but follows common EU admission rules for vehicles for more than nine people (Regulation (EC) 1071/2009), private hire rules are national, and EU-wide rules on drivers’ hours and tachographs (Regulation (EC) 561/2006) and on the Driver CPC (Directive 2003/59/EC) also reach larger vehicles. In mainland Portugal, the national road transport regulator says commercial public passenger transport in buses may be carried out only by licensed persons, and that own-account passenger transport “sem fins lucrativos ou comerciais” (without profit or commercial purposes) is done under a certificate. The regulator’s page is about heavy passenger vehicles and gives no seat count, so we could not tell where a nine-seat van sits. On our reading, a company charging clients does not obviously fit that certificate, but we found no statement from the regulator about tourism, and we could not read the decree on tourist entertainment to see what it says about operators’ vehicles. Ask the regulator before you buy a vehicle.

The US

On a federal reading, a vehicle designed or used to carry more than eight passengers including the driver, for compensation, in interstate commerce is a commercial motor vehicle (49 CFR 390.5), which brings driver qualification, hours and inspection rules and a US Department of Transportation (USDOT) number. The commercial driver’s licence threshold is 16 or more passengers including the driver. But intrastate rules belong to the state, and the thresholds differ: a copy of Utah’s code, current at January 2025, sets its intrastate threshold at more than 15 passengers including the driver (or more than 12 with a gross vehicle weight rating of at least 13,000 lb). The eCFR page for 390.5 carries a note that the section was amended and then ’suspended indefinitely’ from 21 July 2026, so we could not confirm which text is in force; the note covers the whole section, so treat the federal figures above as provisional and check the current rule. Colorado regulates passenger carriers by type and has an “off-road scenic charter” category, and we could not tell whether a guided ride with a trailhead shuttle falls into it. On federal land, the Forest Service counts “transporting people” as guiding, and the Bureau of Land Management’s Moab office publishes a list of permitted shuttle companies. Treat the shuttle as part of your permit, not an afterthought.

Chairlift and gondola uplift

If your days include a bike park, on our reading the lift is the lift operator’s regulated business, not yours. In Great Britain, the Cableway Installations Regulations 2018 provide for the regulation of cableway installations under Regulation (EU) 2016/424, whose rules cover the design, construction and entry into service of new cableway installations; in the EU that Regulation applies directly. You buy lift tickets or arrange access. We found no operator page that addresses commercial or guided groups using its uplift, so ask the operator in writing whether it welcomes them and on what terms. In the US, a federal law lists mountain bike terrain parks and trails among the activities the Forest Service may, in appropriate circumstances, authorise ski-area permittees on National Forest land to provide.

07Bike hire at trail centres

Hire is its own small business, and “bike hire for trail centres” can be a first step towards a tour company (our view; we found no data on how common it is), because the hire shop is next to the trails.

Who runs the shop, and how

Trail-centre hire on public forest land is typically a concession. In the tender notices we found for England and Wales, the buyer (Forestry England or the Forestry Commission in England, a council acting for Natural Resources Wales in Wales) invited private operators to bid for a bike hire, retail or workshop contract in a competitive tender (one notice was only a prior information notice, and we found an award notice for just one). The terms ranged from five years plus two one-year extensions to about 10.5 years, and one Welsh contract was for seven. Some bundle a café or workshop, and one lot at an English site was an uplift minibus and trailer only. The English notices carry estimated values, all excluding VAT, from £630,000 (a family, leisure and gravel hire concession) to £8 million (a lot that bundled a café, bike shop and workshop). Those are estimated contract values, not rent, and we found no published rent or turnover percentage in any notice. If the values are estimates of turnover over the term, which is our inference, they work out at roughly £90,000 to £760,000 a year across the sites. The notices do not say how the values were built, so treat that as an order of magnitude. Tender windows can be short: one notice ran for about a month. A new entrant needs to watch the Find a Tender service, Forestry England’s own tender portal (one notice we found was there) and the Welsh procurement portal.

If you are tempted to start a guiding business on the back of a hire shop on public land, read your concession terms first. A land manager that provides a facility for one business “could prevent commercially competing businesses from using it”, as 2014 Scottish access guidance implies (its example is an equestrian facility, and applying it to hire is our reading) (not a rule for England or Wales), though it says this had not been tested in practice.

What hire costs and what the shops ask

UK hire pages we read on 14 October 2026 showed these ranges. They are shop-specific and some pages looked stale, so treat them as ranges, not a market price.

• Full-suspension mountain bikes: about £48 (three hours at a Welsh trail centre) to £85 a day.
• e-MTBs: about £85 to £130 a day.
• Helmets: every UK page that said whether a helmet was supplied included one in the price. We found no published price for hiring body armour, and one shop said pads were not available for hire.
• Deposits and ID: two approaches. One shop’s hire page says it pre-authorises a card for £250 per full-suspension bike and £1,000 per e-MTB, though its conditions page gives other figures, so ask any shop for its current terms. Another asks for photo ID to be left for the hire, and its page mentions no deposit. These are shop policies, not law.
• Age: GOV.UK says you can ride an electric bike if you are 14 or over, provided it meets the e-bike rules. One shop’s hire page set 18 as its minimum age to hire, though its conditions page says riders must be over 14. A shop’s age rule is its own.
• Opening: reduced winter hours and closed days appear on some of the pages we read.

Outside the UK, we reached few hire prices. In mainland Portugal we saw e-bike rental from about €35 for four hours to about €70 for a day, none of them a full-suspension trail-centre price, and a Utah shop listing $75 a day for a mountain bike and $159 for an e-MTB, noting that e-bikes are heavily restricted on some trails nearby. We found no EU trail-centre full-suspension hire prices, so we do not give an EU range.

Standards and liability

One hire page says a customer’s own helmet should be EN 1078 compliant, which tells you the standard is in use, not that supplying one is a legal duty. We could not verify from a primary source which bike standards apply to hire fleets (EN 14766 for mountain bikes and EN 17406 for electrically assisted mountain bikes are the standards we expected to apply, but we could not confirm any of this), so check with your supplier and insurer. Do not rely on a “no liability whatsoever” line in your hire conditions. One shop’s page states it, but in England and Wales you cannot exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence (the Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977 for business liability, and the Consumer Rights Act 2015 for consumer contracts; Scotland has its own rules, which we did not check); the UK guide explains the Consumer Rights Act point.

In Portugal, Turismo de Portugal’s FAQ on the national register says mere bike hire is not tourist entertainment. It does not say what applies when hire is combined with guiding, so ask Turismo de Portugal.

What a hire bike has to earn

A hire bike has to earn back its purchase cost, servicing, insurance and damage. The example below uses made-up round numbers, and Chart 1 shows the result: at example day rates inside the ranges we saw, a full-suspension bike covers its own cost in 17 to 23 hire days a year and an e-MTB in 14 to 20, before the shop, staff and any rent are paid for.

We found no published information on how concession operators charge e-MTB batteries, and none of the tender notices mentions it, so ask before you promise guests a recharge.

08The numbers: a worked example

The sums below are worked examples built on example prices and costs. They show how the arithmetic behaves, not what you will earn. We found no published guide day rate, group-size average or utilisation benchmark, so each figure is a placeholder to replace with your own.

The example business: a guided day ride at £95 a rider (read as net of any VAT; VAT is not modelled). One guide per six riders, which is the operator’s choice, not a rule. A guide costs £140 a day. One nine-seat van costs £110 a day, driven by a guide; every departure uses a van, and no bike cost or bike hire income is modelled. A second van is added when riders plus guides exceed nine. Refreshments and spares cost £6 a rider. Card fees are 2% plus 20p. Overheads (insurance, training, marketing and admin) are £4,800 a year. Where a permit applies, we show it with and without a 20% share of ticket income, as one UK public forest body publishes for ticketed activity (section 4), plus the £84 application fee once a year, which the season figures include only where a permit applies.

Cost per rider is a sawtooth

In the example (Chart 2), costs per rider fall as the group fills, then jump when a ratio step adds a guide or a second van. At 1:6 a six-rider group costs about £50 a rider in direct costs, before any permit share. The seventh rider adds a guide, and the cost per rider rises to about £64, then about £71 at eight riders with a second van. At 1:8 the same eight riders cost about £39 each, and the ninth rider triggers a second guide and a second van and sends the figure back to about £64. Price against the sawtooth, not against the average.

Where a departure’s money goes

Chart 3 follows a six-rider day, which brings in £570. With a 20% permit share, £114 goes to the land manager, £13 to card fees, £36 to refreshments and spares, £140 to the guide and £110 to the van. That leaves about £157, or 28p in the pound, before overheads. Without a permit share the same departure leaves about £271.

How many riders to run a departure

Chart 4 shows that the minimum number of riders for a departure to cover its own direct costs falls as the price rises. At £95, it is three riders with no permit share and four with a 20% share (three riders would lose about £46). At £65 it is five and six. Set your minimum above this floor, then decide in advance what happens to a departure that falls short. Our guide to minimum numbers on guided tours covers that decision.

A season, by group size

Chart 5 asks what 90 departures a year would earn if every departure carried the same number of riders. With a 20% permit share and one guide per six riders, the year loses money below five riders (about £2,940 lost at four), earns about £3,170 at five and about £9,280 at six, falls to about £2,790 at seven and to a loss of about £1,000 at eight, then recovers: about £5,100 at nine and £23,400 at twelve. With no permit share, six riders earns about £19,600. If the operator’s ratio is 1:8, eight riders earns about £21,500 with the permit share. None of that is a forecast. The point is that, in this example, the ratio you choose, the van you run and the share a land manager takes can each move the answer by more than a few extra bookings.

09Insurance, waivers and the paperwork you cannot skip

The UK guide covers insurance, risk assessment, waivers and package travel in detail, and we will not repeat it. The mountain biking points are these.

• Ask your insurer in writing whether its policy covers paid guiding on the terrain you ride, your guides’ awards, e-MTBs, hire bikes, vehicles and carrying guests, and groups with under-18s. Land managers will ask for a certificate. Forestry England’s older forms ask for £5 million or £10 million of public liability depending on risk, and Natural Resources Wales asks for at least £5 million.
• Waivers do not remove negligence. In England and Wales a business cannot exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence (Unfair Contract Terms Act 1977, section 2(1), and the Consumer Rights Act 2015); Scotland has its own rules, which we did not check. A waiver still has a job: it records that the guest understood the risks and your rules.
• Multi-day riding holidays that combine accommodation with guiding or hire are, on our reading, very likely packages in the UK and EU, with insolvency protection rules and, for the UK, VAT treatment to think about. On our reading, a day tour of under 24 hours without an overnight stay sits outside the package rules. The UK guide sets out the rules, and the weather cancellations guide covers what the law says about calling tours off.
• Portugal: on our reading, insurance and a registration are conditions of running a paid guided ride (section 3).
• US: Forest Service outfitting and guiding permits, under its 2008 directives (which may have changed), require insurance for everything the permit authorises, and say that where a holder’s contractor buys its own policy, it must name the United States as an additional insured. We could not confirm minimum limits from a primary source.

10Mountain bike tour booking software: what to look for, and what RideLoop does

A spreadsheet and a phone will run your first ten departures. They start to fail when you have several guides, a van with nine seats and a ratio that changes the cost of every extra rider, a wet week when everyone needs a new date, and a hire fleet next to the tours. That is where mountain bike tour booking software, or mountain bike tour management software, earns its place. The labels vary (a mountain bike tour reservation system, a mountain bike tour booking system, mountain bike tour scheduling software, mountain bike tour operator software, MTB tour operator software), so test the features rather than the name.

What to look for

• Departures with a capacity and a minimum. You want to set the number of riders a departure can take and the number it needs to run, and to be alerted when a departure is short (see minimum numbers on guided tours).
• Guide and vehicle allocation. Mountain bike tour scheduling software should let you assign guides and a van to a departure and show what that departure costs you. Ask how it handles the ratio and seat-count limits in sections 5 and 6, and whether it checks them or just records them. Do not assume any software knows your permit conditions or checks your guides’ awards for you, so keep those records yourself.
• Rider information at booking. Ask what it can capture: skill level, height for bike sizing, age, medical notes, and a signed waiver. See our guide to bike hire waivers, written for hire shops; the timing and record-keeping points carry over.
• Payments you can reconcile. Deposits, balances, refunds to the original payment method, and a clear answer on fees when you refund. For holding a deposit on the card, see deposits.
• A rain policy that is a decision, not an accident. If you offer a weather reschedule, ask what triggers it, what moves automatically (we think nothing should), and what happens if a guest does not reply.
• Hire in the same system, if you hire out bikes. Look for individual bike records, so one bike cannot be booked twice, a deposit method that fits your shop, and the age and ID checks you need.
• Roles and a record. Who can refund, who can change a booking, and a log of who did what.
• A way out. Whether there is a contract or an exit fee, and whether you can export your bookings and customers.

What RideLoop does for mountain bike operators (our product)

• Guided tours. Minimum-headcount alerts, and guide and shuttle allocation, for guided departures. You decide what happens to a departure that falls short.
• Holiday itineraries, for multi-day trips.
• Ride Guarantee: weather rescheduling for tours and holidays. RideLoop checks the forecast before every tour and holiday departure. Above the rain threshold you set, within a set window, each guest gets a free reschedule offer that they can accept or ignore. Nothing moves automatically. The new date keeps the same price, with no fee, and if the guest does nothing the original date stands. Ride Guarantee works on rain. Calling a tour off for wind, heat, lightning or fire danger is for your guide and your policy.
• Waivers and guest access. Digital waivers with an audit trail, and a guest portal.
• For a hire fleet, each bike is tracked individually, with barcode or QR scanning at pickup and return, on a calendar that does not double-book. Security deposits are a hold on the card, released after a clean return or claimed for damage. ID verification is optional, and you can run multiple pickup locations.
• Payments. Payments settle to your own Stripe account, and RideLoop’s commission is refunded with any refund and never charged on deposits or tax.
• Control and records. Staff roles and an audit log, CSV export and import, and an API and webhooks.
• No contract and no exit fee.
• Its limits, in plain words. There is no accounting integration today, and scanning at the counter needs an internet connection.

You can see how it fits a tour business on the RideLoop tours page, and if you want to see how it would handle your ratio, your vans and your policy, you can book a walkthrough. For the wider choice of software, our software buying guide has ten questions to ask any bike rental software vendor.

11A realistic first-season plan

The timings below are a guide. The permit lead times are the ones the land managers publish (section 4), and a National Trust property asks for at least nine months.

12Mistakes worth avoiding

1. 1Treating an award as a licence, or no award as no standard. In Great Britain the awards are not law for adults, but insurers and guests may read them as proof of competence (ask your insurer). In France, a recognised qualification is the law for paid supervision.
2. 2Quoting “the ratio”. There is none we could find in UK law or the EU rules we read. Pick a number for each terrain and write down why.
3. 3Guiding on trails you have no permission for. Public bridleways are one thing. Permissive paths, trail-centre trails and private land are another. Unofficial trails may put your insurance in doubt (our inference, so ask the insurer).
4. 4Copying one land manager’s permit terms onto another’s. Forestry England, Natural Resources Wales, Forestry and Land Scotland and the National Trust differ in notice, fees and paperwork.
5. 5Assuming a nine-seat van is always safe from licensing. Driver plus eight passengers is not a PSV by seat count, but paid transport can still raise PSV (separate fares), private hire and insurance questions. Nine passengers or more is a different case.
6. 6Adding the seventh rider without costing it. In the example, the extra rider raises the cost per rider because a second guide is needed.
7. 7Forgetting the permit share. A percentage of income changes the minimum number of riders. In the example it takes the break-even from three riders to four at £95.
8. 8Putting guests of mixed ability in one group. Write the grading, check it at booking and give the guide the right to regroup.
9. 9Relying on a waiver. It does not remove liability for negligence causing death or personal injury in England and Wales.
10. 10Ignoring fire and weather rules abroad. In mainland Portugal, forest access can be restricted at the very high and maximum fire danger levels. Check the notices every day you ride.

13Questions about starting a mountain bike tour company

Where to go from here

• Start with the general business basics: How to Start a Cycling Tour Business in the UK.
• Handle under-subscribed departures: minimum numbers on guided tours.
• Set a rain threshold and an offer: a rain policy for cycling tours that keeps the booking.
• Sort the money and the paperwork: our guides to deposits and rental waivers.
• Plan a multi-day trip: holiday itineraries.
• Start a hire fleet: How to Start a Bike Rental Business in the UK.
• See how RideLoop software handles tour bookings: rideloop.co.uk/tours.