Why You Should Consider A Private Active Travel Vacation

Why You Should Consider A Private Active Travel Vacation

Private vs. Group Active Travel

Most active travel trips are scheduled group departures, meaning a set of dates listed for each trip, and depending on the company operating it, typically 12 to 24 people can sign up. Many companies offer women-only group trips, and Backroads, the U.S. leader in the luxury active travel space, has many segmentations, including trips for families with younger kids and families with teens, adult only, participants in their 30s, in their 40s and so on. These can help people who want to travel with others in similar life circumstances, but in every case, it still means traveling with strangers.

That is not necessarily a bad thing, and the bulk of the many active travel trips I have done have been group departures. Almost without fail, it is a great group with fun conversations, and I’ve made friends on these trips I keep in touch with. In fact, the active travel industry is rife with real life stories of couples or solo travelers who met on a cycling or hiking trip and continued to schedule more such trips together for years.

But occasionally there can be personality clashes or people who other people on the trip find annoying. On most other kinds of vacations you travel with whoever you want to travel with, family, friends, several couples or whatever, and there is no reason you can’t do the same with active travel. But there are more reasons to go private than just the company.

Reasons To Choose A Private Active Travel Vacation

The most obvious is your traveling companions, having your own chosen group. Every year my wife and I do a hiking trip with seven other friends, and I recommend the destination and put together the logistics. After doing this several times, we know that we are all on the same page athletically in terms of how challenging we want the hikes to be without getting slowed down. We know what kind of accommodations and meals our group prefers. We know that at the end of the day we are happy having cocktails and dinner together, playing cards, soaking in the hot tub or whatever kinds of post-hiking activities there are. In short, we have a social and cohesive group that plays well together.

But there are several other key advantages to doing private trips. The first is that you can go almost any time you want, whereas many “catalog” or “brochure” trips, even with the best operators, have only a couple of departure date options and you are locked into those. You can also make trips shorter or longer. It is also typically a smaller group, and this allows more options of where to stay, especially for lodging with limited capacity, such as the wonderful mountain rifugios of the Dolomites.

Maureen Poschman, spokesperson for Backroads, told me that now is the time to be looking at private trip bookings for 2027 because most itineraries were just released and until someone signs up, any scheduled trip can be “taken over” as a turnkey private (rival Butterfield & Robinson also just published its catalog of 2027 trips). She noted that many people choose active private trips for celebration travel tied to specific events, such as birthdays and graduations, or reunions with college friends or family. “Firm up people’s calendars before other events get in the way of travel—which everyone wants to prioritize,” she suggested.

Private trips are also fully customizable. While many groups of friends or large families take a standard trip like 6-day Tuscany cycling and just book it privately, this always gives you the option to upgrade or downgrade the lodging, add or remove included meals, and change the included special experiences. For example, if I go on a scheduled trip that includes a visit to an art museum, I’m going to the art museum, but if I do it privately we might swap that for a cooking class. Top luxury active travel outfitters like Backroads, DuVine, Butterfield & Robinson and Trek Travel have excellent guides, routes, bikes and support, but they also tend to use luxury lodgings, something that while nice is not as important to every traveler. Go private and you can have all the same high quality parts of the experience but potentially at a lower price.

However, in general, private trips tend to be more expensive simply because people who customize often add more things in, and with a smaller group the price per person usually goes up. For Backroads for instance, it typically takes about 12 people to get the private price down to the same as a group trip, and not that many people travel in groups of twelve or more friends. But there a is wide range of price points and options for private active travel

Ultra-Luxe Private Active Travel

The top of the line in this space is a truly bespoke custom private trip, not a private takeover of a pre-planned catalog itinerary. These allow you to literally go anywhere in the world, when you want, with whoever you want, for as long as you want, and to do exactly what you want along the way. I’ve heard of cycling or hiking trips where one of the participants is a military history buff and the tour operator books special battlefield visits with an expert historian along the way, or painting classes for art lovers or whatever you want. Adding a yoga instructor to the trip for guided daily sessions is not as rare as you might think. All of the higher end companies do bespoke trips, but among the bigger operators Butterfield & Robinson is best known for it, with several destinations they only do as Bespoke trips, such as South Africa, India and the Galapagos Islands, with suggested itineraries.

But if money is no object there are a couple of active travel tour companies that do not even have group trips and specialize only in private bespoke itineraries. The best known is Gray & Co., whose clientele runs towards celebrities and top executives who prize privacy and anonymity when traveling and use their own private jets. Gray & Co. is in all likelihood the smallest company ever to win World’s Best Tour Operator from Travel & Leisure magazine (as in any kind of tour operator, not just active). Because most Gray & Co. clients have done all the iconic classics (cycled in Tuscany and Burgundy, hiked the Tour du Mont Blanc, etc.) they are constantly pushing new boundaries of active travel to places less on the radar for it such as Greece, Uruguay and South Africa. As founder Cari Gray told me, “There would be no such thing as a hidden gem if it wasn’t hidden.” She knows where they are hiding.

KC&E Adventures is another boutique company that offers a very small slate of unique once-a-year group trips (like gravel biking in Iceland) and otherwise is almost all about custom private trips. While they also have a billionaire clientele, KC&E tends to cover more specialized experiences other companies do not, such as gravel riding and off road mountain biking. They have also carved out an unusual area of expertise in planning trips for clients who travel with their own personal security, hire security locally, or both, something more logistically challenging than you might think and beyond the scope of many travel planners who have never done it.

Luxury Private Active Travel And Special Variations

The top names in luxury active travel all offer private versions of their trip and bespoke trips as well. These include Butterfield & Robinson, Backroads, DuVine Cycling + Adventure Company, Trek Travel and EF Adventures. But some of these add a few wrinkles to the equation.

Both Backroads and EF Adventures have programs for a “trip organizer” to put a private group itinerary together and then invite people to join it, which could be friends, co-workers, members of a club, etc., with the organizer going for free or at a steep discount depending how many fellow travelers they get signed up.

Backroads also has a regularly updated list of specific trips offering “private trip small group savings” where you can get a lower price even with groups of less than the 12 usually needed to make private as affordable as non-private. They typically offer several of these across all three disciplines (cycling, hiking and multi-sport) every month of the year.

Within its private cycling offerings DuVine has an entire subcategory of private “Villa Bike Tours,” which base your group out of a luxury villa with private chef for the entire trip rather than hotels. It sort of makes sense that if you choose specifically to go with only friends and not strangers, than you might want to stay in a place without strangers, i.e. not a hotel. There are also many active travelers who relish packing and unpacking just once. As DuVine points out, these trips are also excellent for groups of varied ability since there are lots of guided and supported daily options that return to the same villa. These are offered in Tuscany, Provence and the Napa Valley.

DuVine also offers exceptional and highly inclusive (on board chef, open bar, etc.) private yacht cycling tours in the islands of Greece and Croatia, and because the boats hold far fewer guests than most group tours accommodate, this is one of the best ways to get four or five couple on a top tier luxury private trip for around the same price as a group option.

Another Way To Do Private Active Travel: Self-Guided

Self-guided trip are by definition private because you undertake them on your own, with no strangers—and no guide or support van. However, this is not as daunting as it might sound.

Self-guided trips, even at the luxury level, are considerably less expensive, allowing those who don’t need guiding to get more of a special luxury experience than they might otherwise budget for. Hiking in particular requires much less guiding and support than cycling and many avid hikers are totally confident on their own. This is especially true in destinations without significant language or cultural barriers, such as hiking in Ireland. For instance, I would not go self-guided in Japan because the guide adds so much to your understanding and appreciation of food, art and customs.

Other than the guide, you still get the big things that make for a great active travel vacation: luggage that is moved for you from hotel to hotel so you can travel light, detailed curated routes, a quality bike (for cycling trips), and generally a safety net of potential assistance a phone call away.

Butterfield & Robinson is the standout luxury operator offering self-guided versions of its trips, and my wife and I did one of their self-guided cycling trips in France for our anniversary when we wanted alone time, and it was a great experience. We ride by ourselves at home all the time, so with computerized turn by turn directions it was easy and we stayed in the same luxury hotels and ate the same great food and Michelin-starred meals and all the other bells and whistles. On our arrival day a B&R guide met us at the hotel with bikes, did fittings and orientation, gave us his number, and off we went. We never needed to call.

Tourissimo is an Italy-based and Italy-only active travel specialist that offers cycling and hiking trips in all regions with a deep dive into Italian food and culture. They also have one of the most robust programs for specialized culinary active travel with several trips a year led by famous chefs (DuVine offers similar food and wine focused Chefs on Wheels tours). Tourissimo has a high-end self-guided product more in line with Butterfield’s called “Co-Pilot Tours,” and options include most of the itineraries from their high end “Magnifica Tours” collection. I have traveled with Toruissimo multiple times, it has been great, and when we did our annual friends group hiking trip to Turin and Piemonte we used them and my friends loved the hyper-local focus on all things Italian.

Likewise, Walk Japan is a Japan-only hiking and walking specialist which I have traveled with. They are excellent and offer self-guided trips, though their guides are so good I think that using one in Japan is a better option (read more here).

Trek Travel also offers self-guided and is known for providing arguably the best bikes in the industry, but their self-guided itineraries are not as identical to the fully guided trips as Butterfield’s and use less posh accommodations with far less included meals. The good news is that price savings are considerably more dramatic.

Macs Adventures is the biggest company in active travel that specializes in self-guided and does nothing else. We used Macs for one of our annual friends group hiking trips in Spain and everyone was very happy with it. While Macs has a wide range of price points in terms of levels of accommodations, they are generally not a luxury company per se, but they deliver well on the essentials, moving your luggage, well planned routes and a fantastic proprietary navigation app that is above what most others have. They have an immense catalog of trips all around the world.

In Europe, sister companies Eurobike and Eurohike also operate similar all self-guided roster of trips at lower price points, including their most elevated lineup, Tours With Charm.

There are a lot of great options, and a lot of good reasons to consider a private active travel vacation.