We are doing our first “bikepacking” trip this weekend. We’ll be riding the length of the Pine Creek trail that goes through the Grand Canyon of PA, carrying our belongings along and staying overnight at an inn at the halfway point.
I am intrigued by the idea of doing a multi-day adventure somewhere in Europe next year, and see that there are numerous options and outfitters who will shuttle your belongings from hotel to hotel. If you have done something like this, I’d love to hear about it.
Many years ago I did a self-supported version of this. I was a member of a local recreational biking club and there were some people who had done supported bike tours in France thru the Alps and realized they could do it on their own for less and they had their old route sheets. They invited me to join them on a 10-day trip. Back in the day you could check two bags for free and one of them could be a bike so everyone brought their own bike that they were used to in bike carriers. We rented a van and everyone took turns driving it. The driver put their bike along with all the bags in the van on their driving day and drove them to the next hotel. Everyone else went out riding. This was in the pre-cellphone era, I suppose these days you could call the driver if something happened to your bike and you need help.
So maybe this isn’t exactly what you were looking for in a reply but they did like the assisted trips they took. We were lucky on rain which can happen anytime in Europe, just one day of sprinkles. Lots of heat though!
I’ve done the trail you’re doing. We stayed at one end and paid someone to drive us to the other so we could ride back to where we started. The place we stayed was TERRIBLE, but the ride was fun.
If you live fairly close by, I highly recommend doing the GAP trail at some point. We did it with Wilderness Voyagers, which is towards the lower end of “luxury” or whatever in my opinion, but they were fine for that trip. I know several people who’ve done it on their own.
We’ve done multiple “active adventure” trips, mostly cycling.
In Europe we’ve only used a company called VBT, and we’ve done the Dolomites (the valleys, NOT over the mountains), Tuscany, and France/Switzerland. The one I’ve heard the most people rave about is Croatia, but I haven’t done it myself. NOTE - if you’re interested in VBT for next year, they usually run something between about now and mid-October where if you pay in full, you get 5% off. They also let you buy your airfare, along with pre and post trips (a couple of days in a city before and after) as a package, which is what we’ve done.
We used Active Adventures in New Zealand. It was a 14 day trip.
We did a hike, bike and helicopter trip to the Canadian Rockies with Backroads quite some time ago.
Some people have said Backroads is more luxurious, and some people say VBT and Backroads are very similar.
We’ve used Sojourn for multiple US based trips, but at this point I wouldn’t recommend them.
If you’re a cyclist, and NOT wanting to use e-bikes, pay attention to how many people on the trip are using e-bikes. Our Tuscany trip was the first one where there were many more using e-bikes than regular.
I think size of group matters, and it’s worth asking the average age of people on the trip, how many are groups, couples, singles. In our experience most groups are welcoming to other people, but not all.
Make sure you understand when a trip is actually “locked in” so you don’t wind up with the rest of the trip planned around the cycling, and then find out the trip won’t happen.
We did a family bike tour of Spain one year and Portugal the next. We used a small company called Cycling Country. They were great!
We have done several bike trips in Europe. Most recently, we did a very rugged bike trip in Spain, with the hotels included and transport of luggage, but no arrangements for lunches or food. On the other end, we did the Danube with Rad & Reisen a while back and that included everything, river cruise, food, some excursions, fun vibes on the boat with an ABBA party and many non-English speakers. In the middle, was a trip along the west coast of France that included Ile-de-Re and La Rochelle. We loved that because of the scenery and oysters! I don’t remember the company name for Spain and France trips. We also did Backroads in Napa and Sonoma for my 50th birthday and it was the best in terms of accomodations and service along the routes, with gourmet lunches served in a redwood forest, for example. My biking days are over, but we have great memories.
If possible - could anyone whose done this share a range of costs?
They are not cheap. If you look on the website for Backroads or VBT you get an idea pretty quickly.
Backroads Dolomites $6Kish and VBT similar, for example, for guided, 6-7 day trips.
I think what I am looking for is something between what @mikemac described and what others have experienced. We don’t want a group or even a guide, I guess. Just a tried and true route and someone to shuttle our luggage from point to point.
Unless you want to join forces @Jolynne_Smyth and take a turn driving the van! 
The companies I listed, plus TREK (which we have not tried) have non-guided trips also, but they are still pretty expensive. They make your hotel reservations for you, give you routes, give you bikes, things like that.
That’s tempting!! (esp, given the prices!) 
I love hearing about these adventures - I just have to get my fitness up to the level to even attempt something like this (good goal for my last three months of work!).
I just (Tuesday) completed my second European bike trip. Last year I biked Amsterdam to Bruges. This trip was the Tuscan islands of Italy. Feel free to ask any questions. Both trips were wonderful!
As a solo traveler, my bike trips (just the bike tour, including the rental of an e-bike) was around $4k, including the single supplement - my trips have both been boat and bike, so no moving from place to place with hotels, the boat is your hotel.
I just went back to my old google mail and found the name of the bike tour company in Valencia, Spain. It was Mediterranean Bike Tours, and in 2022, it was about Euro1,000 per person with a bike rental cost of Euro25/day for e-bikes and Euro15/day for regular bikes with 7 nights accomodation and breakfasts and transport of luggage. There were no lunches or snacks provided and it was definitely do-it-yourself. But the places they selected and the scenery was wonderful. They tailored the trip to visit what we wanted to visit.
This looks like the type of travel I’m looking for - thank you. 
We have been doing this for years. My first bike trip was in 1982 in China, organized by my father-in-law. We cycled from Macau to Guandong, then took a flight to Beijing and went aorund Beijing for a few days, and then to Kunming and cycled for a number of days around Kunming. I think we were one of the first (possibly the first) bike trips organized after China opened up. The trip was organized by the China Sports Federation. It was phenomenal as all travel was tightly controlled at the time by the CCP. We were able to see how people were actually living – not in the model communes that they took the other tourists too. Accommodations were not luxurious and the meals were mostly pretty bad. I am pretty sure that we were the first Caucasians some of the people in the villages outside of Kunming had ever seen. Plus we were riding 18 speed bikes and they were all using those black one-speed bikes. There was a sag wagon that carried our equipment and a staff of 10 for the 10 of us.
For our honeymoon, ShawWife and I flew with our bikes to San Francisco and cycled across the Golden Gate bridge through Sausalito and eventually to Napa via Novato and then cycled around Napa – we realized cycling and wine tasting in warm weather weren’t completely compatible activities. We carried all of our clothes in paniers. We then cycled across the mountain range to the Sonoma Valley and cycled there as well. The, in an epic day, we stayed in a motel frequented by biker gang - types, got up a 3 AM and did a 5 mile climb (it never got flat for 5 miles) and ended up in the Anderson Valley. When we got to the top, we found a place that served waffles and maple syrup and we just ingested sugar. Then we had a couple of glorious days at a place called the New Boonville Cafe – one of the original farm-to-table restaurants where they grew everything at the Cafe/hotel. The we cycled to Mendocino and then down Highway 1 back to San Francisco. Stayed in various wonderful places along the way Fort Ross, Point Reyes, etc.. It was a three week trip with great food. We were 30 and 27 and in very good shape. It was pretty difficult cycling – especially Highway 1 with cliffs immediately to our right and lumber trucks passing – but serious climbing as well.
About 15(?) years ago, ShawWife and her mother did a luxury bike trip in India organized by Butterfield & Robinson. Oberoi Hotels where people threw rosepetals on you as you entered the hotel. Mick Jagger was in one of the hotels. The challenge was that roads would go and then just stop. Super expensive.
Two years ago, ShawWife and I did a self-guided tour in Provence. Intura Travel made a route for us and booked hotels (and a few special meals). We had no guides but use our phones and their maps (missed a few turns). They had someone who took our luggage from hotel to hotel.
Last year, we cycled the Shimanami Kaido, a route across a number of islands (on these remarkable and beautiful suspension bridges) in the Seto Sea in Japan. My recollection is that we rented bikes from a rental place that came and picked up the bikes at the end of the trip but that the route itself was marked clearly and so we did not need even self-guided instructions. I think part of the rental package was baggage transfer.
ShawWife did another trip with a group that had Vermont Bike Tours or the equivalent guiding them in another area of France. The cost is a significant multiple of the self-guided tours she and I took in France but a lot less than the Butterfield & Robinson version.
We’ve done others but those are the highlights. Today, I will ride in Yorkshire on Zwift.
Some of that sounds amazing - I have a pretty poor sense of direction so self-guided would never be an intentional choice for me 
ShawWife has negative sense of direction (she’s probably wrong 60% of the time). However, we don’t do it just from the map. (And we don’t follow her intuition).
The tour company in Provence gave me .gpx files that I downloaded into an app called RidewithGPS that provided the directions. Since then, I bought a Garmin Edge 1050, which can take the same .gpx files and gives directions with images and sound (I have bone speakers and so can hear the directions). Google Maps bicycle directions can be spotty – we were following Google Maps directions on what appeared to be a bike trail until it abruptly became a pit with a pile of rocks inside. (Also, if I am not mistaken, Google Maps bike directions were disabled for Japan).
In Japan, the route was painted on the roads/dedicated bike trails.
In neither case, did we need to rely on our sense of direction.
These trips sound amazing! And the fitness of people here is impressive. 
Thanks for the general cost sharing too.
Can I ask how many hours of biking one usually does a day? I’m sure it varies a bit but wondered roughly if it’s a full day of exercise or moreso just a part…
You can pick trips with different levels of strenuousness. We usually pick easy to moderate or intermediate. We never spend the entire day riding. One we are considering for next year is Mallorca. It’s rated easy to moderate, and 10-40 miles of riding per day. The 10 is probably the first day to test out the bikes. If you figure you ride maybe 15 MPH that would be less than 3 miles of actual riding. But there are often towns to visit, sites to see, etc. during the day also.
My sense is that for a lot of organized trips, the riding is about half a day. They usually have activities for you to do/sights to see. That was definitely true in China. There might be a few longer days.
I think some of our self-guided trips have much longer days. Certainly the Northern California trip had some very long days.
I am training every day on my Zwift Ride (or outdoors) but I don’t believe either ShawWife or I could do that Northern California trip at this point. It would be too hard to climb the mountains or cycle Highway 1 from Mendocino to San Francisco.