Resources for Accommodations on your Italy Bicycle Tour

The top image is of a farm house accommodation in Tuscany (an "agriturismo") while the bottom image shows bungalows in a campground near Rome.

If you are bicycling by yourself or if you are camping you can often "wing it" in finding a place to sleep at night. But as we've explained elsewhere, "when you are organizing a ride and you have one or ten other people, you need answers to questions like:
1) How long is today's ride?
2) How high is that mountain pass (or, from the engineer, "what's the total vertical today?")
3) Where are we sleeping tonight?
4) Where's the best lunch stop today?
. . . and on and on and on."

So here are a few resources for finding that lodging in advance. And even if you don't book in advance (since many people prefer not to be locked into a specific destination) you can at least get an idea of what is available.

Italian Hotel Directories:

ENIT - the Italian Government Tourist Board has the most comprehensive data base of Italian hotels. Theoretically, it is comprehensive, ranking all hotels in Italy by star class and location. It helps to know your Italian geography a bit (especially the Regional, Provincial and Communal - township - hierarchy). Using this you can find a hotel almost anywhere in Italy. And, there's an English version!

Here is an example in finding a hotel in or around Palermo, Sicily:
Type Palermo into the "Town" field and click "search."
You'll find a pretty blank screen that offers you 70 hotels in Palermo and "hotels in the municipality of Palermo." Click on the "70 hotels in Palermo" text and you'll find a list of those hotels and a further list of 40 municipalities. Both lists are very useful in finding lodging in the Palermo region. Click here to see that page.

Bicycle Friendly Hotels, Farms Lodging, and Pensions in Italy

"Albergabici" is a portal that gathers hotels, pensions, farms (agriturismi), hostels and a few campgrounds that claim to be friendly to cyclists. It is sorted by Region, then province and town. The lodging lists can then be sorted by type of lodging (4 star hotel, bed and breakfast, agriturismi, etc.)

Here's the page for Palermo.

Villa and Hotel Hub and Spoke Self-Guided Bicycle Tour in Tuscany

A great example of a combination seven-night self-guided tour that involved the hub and spoke concept with hotel changes but mostly three night stays in two different hotels is praised by a customer who just did this in May 2009:

"To Everyone at BikeRentalsPlus:

We just finished our self-guided tour of Tuscany and it was absolutely fantastic! Our bicycles were excellent, and all the arrangements worked perfectly (including the prompt and efficient responses to emails and phone calls during the pre-trip planning stages). Most importantly, the cycling routes were stunningly scenic and mostly traffic-free, far surpassing my expectations. The points of interest were also extremely well chosen, as were the accommodations. The Borgo Tre Rose (where we lodged for the first three nights) was particularly memorable, with an outstanding restaurant and a breath-taking setting, while our visit to the Abazzia Sant’Antima was an unexpected highlight of the trip. After our bicycle tour we visited Siena, Florence, and Venice, but sightseeing in these crowded cities paled in comparison to the experience we had on the bikes, where we had country roads and ancient villages practically to ourselves. It was much more exciting to discover a beautiful Duccio in a quiet church in Montepulciano, or a Giovanni Pisano on a deserted street in San Quirico d’Orcia, than to wait on line at the Uffizi to see more works of art than could possibly be seen in a day (and I say this as a trained art historian). Thanks for a great trip – we will definitely be back next year for more!

Signed,
Prof. MH
Professor of Art
New York State"

This is a great example of someone who wanted the independence of pedaling on their own without having to move daily but who also benefited from the expertise of a pre-designed bike tour. They also benefitted from the logistics which had already been taken care of.

Services provided on this tour included:
1) pre-tour consultation and travel advice;
2) bicycle rental of new, 30 speed Titanium bikes;
3)pick up at the train station, deliver y to the first hotel and bike fitting;
4) hotel bookings for seven nights;
5) pre-designed routes;

The links above explain the different services in detail and the photo shows the villa-hotel this couple used their first three nights.

For details on other options, bike rentals, and other services visit the Bike Rentals Plus!web site.

Designing Your Own Bicycle Tour

This post is part of a thread about a Giuseppe Garibaldi "themed bicycle tour" design and implementation in Sicily. To see the whole thread click here.
I've designed a lot of bicycle tours over the last 25 years. Indeed, one of the best things about this business for a geographer is to sit home in Colorado during the winter designing tours and then be able to go pedal the route and see how it came out. This takes practice, though, and I want to tell you an anecdote to warn you about the drawbacks of doing this.

In Sicily now I'm alone. Hence, I've not booked any hotels in advance and although I've got a route in mind I've already varied quite a bit from it. When you are pedaling alone nobody cares where you sleep, how far you ride, or how hard the ride is. That's the biggest drawback of designing your own route for family or friends. Everything needs to be pretty predictable as you'll always get questions such as where do we sleep tonight? How far is it? What's the hotel like? How much climbing is there, and so on.

The parent company of Bike Rentals Plus! - ExperiencePlus! Bicycle Tours has a great tour in the Dordogne region of France that I designed in 1995. But we heard this anecdote from three couples - customers - who came one year on that tour. It seems that the year before six couples had the idea of flying to Paris, renting couple of vans (6 people per van), taking their bikes, and heading off to the Dordogne for their own bike tour. So there they were the first day - they had booked the first few nights hotel, and they went out for ride. But the next day the weather was a little threatening. "Hey," somone said, "it looks clear to the west. Let's drive west for an hour and take a ride."

Now France is a great place to ride a bike - it's hard to go wrong. But it is also hard to just pick a spot and go riding. Those rides take planning, especially where there are 6 couples! It turns out that the three couples who came on our Dordogne tour the following year were so frustrated with the lack of planning, the driving around looking for rides, they decided to come back with a professional tour company the next year to do it right.

The moral of this isn't that you shouldn't designe your own tour. Go for it. But remember that if you have eleven other people to take care of, lodge, feed, and track evey day, you should do some planning. And to do that you probably need local knowledge. Today, many tour operators will design a tour for you for a fee. They might even arrange luggage shuttles to help from hotel to hotel. And some provide the service of recommending and booking hotels.

So, what do you do? Design your own or hire a professional? Above all it depends on your level of risk. Rent a villa and design your own rides locally. That's pretty easy if you get the right villa. Head out on a ride on your own. That carries low risk and high satisfacion if you are ready to jump on the train, make sure you've got your bike. But as you add people, make sure they are game to share the rish with you. Otherwise you are on the line and you'd best get some level of local help to make the most of your trip!