Who runs Puglia Bike Tour

Puglia Bike Tour is operated by SEO S.R.L., a company registered in Calimera in the province of Lecce, with a workshop in Lecce. It is run by Eugenio, who lives in the Grecìa Salentina — the cluster of villages inland from Otranto where an old Greek dialect is still spoken — and who has been renting bicycles to people riding this part of Italy for long enough to have opinions about which roads are worth it.

The same operation runs SalentoBike, the Salento-based rental service. Puglia Bike Tour exists because SalentoBike kept being asked the same question by people who had already booked flights: can I ride from the trulli down to Lecce, and will you bring me a bike? The answer was yes, but there was nowhere to send them to read about it.

One thing: a good bike, a route, and the logistics of moving that bike between towns while you ride from one to the next. The rate is published, the bikes are named by model, and the fee for delivering outside our three free points is quoted before you commit to anything.

Accommodation, meals and luggage transfer. Not because they’re hard, but because bundling them is what turns a few hundred euros into a few thousand. You can book a room in Ostuni as well as we can, and you don’t need us to take a margin on it.

Guided tours. Selling accompanied cycling in Italy is regulated at regional level and needs qualified guides with the right insurance behind them. We don’t have that, so we don’t offer it — not as an upgrade, not on request. If a guide is what you want, there are operators in Puglia who do it properly.

Reviews and star ratings. There are none on this site. This is a new site for a route we are only now selling as its own product, and we would rather show you nothing than show you testimonials you have no way to check. When there are real ones, with names attached to real hires, they will appear.

Worth being straight about, because it’s the difference between this site and a brochure. The Salento half of this route — Lecce, Otranto, the Adriatic coast south of Brindisi, the inland lanes through the Grecìa Salentina — is home. Those roads have been ridden, in most cases repeatedly, in most months of the year.

The northern half is a different case. The Valle d’Itria, the descent to Monopoli, the Adriatic run up towards Bari: we know it, but we know it less well than we know Salento, and where our stage notes are thinner that is why. As we ride and re-ride those sections the notes will get better. Where a page here says something is unverified, it means exactly that rather than being lawyer’s padding.