How the self-guided route works

“Self-guided” is a word the cycling holiday industry uses for something rather different from what it means here. In most catalogues, self-guided still means a package: your hotels are booked for you, your bags are moved for you, your route is fixed, and the only thing missing is a guide riding in front. That version costs about two thirds of the guided one.

Here it means what it says. You choose the towns, you book the rooms, you decide how far you ride on a given day and whether you ride at all. We are the bike shop, positioned along a route, that will bring the bike to you and take it away again.

A GPX track is a list of coordinates. Any phone navigation app that cyclists use will import it — Komoot, Ride with GPS, OsmAnd, Organic Maps — as will a Garmin, a Wahoo or any bike computer made in the last decade. We send the file; you load it into whatever you already know how to use, because learning a new app on holiday is nobody’s idea of a good time.

Two things worth knowing about GPX and Puglia. First, download your maps for offline use before you leave the room: mobile coverage inland is good in the towns and patchy between them, particularly in the stretches of open country where you’d most want it. Second, a GPX track tells you where the road goes, not what the road is like — for that, read the stage notes, which is where we put the things a line on a map can’t carry.

Support during riding hours, in English or Italian, by phone or WhatsApp. Realistically it gets used for three things: a mechanical problem you can’t solve with the kit on the bike, a change of plan that moves where the bike gets collected, and someone asking whether a road ahead is as bad as it looks. All three are legitimate reasons to call.

What it is not is a support van. If the bike fails somewhere we can’t reach quickly, we will organise getting you and it out, and it will take the time it takes. Puglia is not remote, but it is rural, and honesty here is worth more than a promise.

Give us your height and inside leg when you enquire and the bike arrives set up, rather than being adjusted on the pavement while you wait. Saddle height and bar position get finalised at handover — that takes a few minutes and it’s worth doing properly, because a saddle 15 mm out for one hour is nothing and for five days is an injury.

The bikes and the sizing table.

This is the part people worry about and it is the easiest part. The towns on this route are small and close together, they all have places to stay, and outside July and August there is availability. Use whichever booking site you normally use — we don’t have affiliate links and we don’t take a cut, so we have no view on which one.

Two pieces of local advice that are worth more than a recommendation list. Ask, when you book, whether there is somewhere secure to put a bicycle overnight; almost every small hotel in Puglia will say yes, but they want to be asked in advance rather than at check-in. And if you’re on the Trek electric, ask specifically about a power socket the bike can reach, because that battery does not come off the frame.

We don’t move it. There are three realistic ways to handle it and all of them work here: carry it in panniers on the bike (fine on the Checkpoint or the electrics; impossible on the Domane), leave the bulk of it in one place and ride with a light bag if your route loops back, or use one of the local taxi and transfer firms directly to shift a bag between hotels. We’ll tell you who operates in a given stretch if you ask; we just don’t sell it as part of a package.

Selling accompanied cycling tours in Italy is regulated, and the requirements sit at regional level. A guided product done properly means qualified guides and the right insurance behind them. We don’t have that, so we don’t sell it — not as an upgrade, not as an add-on, not “on request”.

We’d rather write that plainly than let you find out by asking. If a guided tour is what you want, several operators in Puglia sell exactly that and do it well; this is not the site for it.

It usually does, and the route is built to absorb it. Ride the stages in a different order, skip one entirely, take a rest day, put the bike on a train for a section, or stop early and have the bike collected somewhere other than where we agreed. Call and say so. Changing a collection point mid-week may change the delivery fee, and if it does we tell you the number before we move.

What we can’t absorb is the length of the hire changing downwards on the day: the daily rate depends on the total number of days, so a hire booked at eight days and returned at five is billed at the eight-day arrangement. That’s in the rental terms, and it’s the only clause on this site with a sting in it.