We at Zephyr Adventures have been offering self-guided tours for decades but in 2025 are focusing on them by offering eight new self-guided hiking and biking itineraries.
Self-guided tours are very popular among Europeans. What is a self-guided tour? We make your hotel reservations, provide route directions via GPS, bike rental on biking tours, and transfer your luggage from hotel to hotel each day. On most tours, our local representative meets you on the first day. What we don’t provide are guides and van support – you are on your own to hike and bike through a spectacular destination in Europe.
The benefits of these tours are you can choose your own date and travel companions and travel at the speed you want each day. Plus, the cost is lower than for our guided tours.
To introduce these tours, we wanted to introduce you to Lisa Mingo. Lisa traveled with us in 2024 on a self-guided biking tour in Tuscany along with her husband and another couple. Here is Lisa’s experience.
“Everything worked out exactly as it was supposed to. Michela met us on schedule to deliver our bikes along with additional info about our trip. The GPS app guided us to each of our destinations. Our hotels were conveniently located on the tops of hills (ha ha), right in the city centres, which made exploring really easy. Our bags were picked up on time and delivered to the next accommodation as promised, always arriving before us and usually waiting in our rooms!
The routes were all excellent, and I particularly liked the day trip from Montepulciano and also the ride from Cortona to Sansepolcro with its beautiful views and incredible downhill section to the flat valley (which is why I gave those two sections an ‘outstanding’ rating). The mix of roads/bike paths/minor highways was really great.
The accommodation was great and also diverse, with slightly different experiences in each location, which made for a more interesting trip, I think. Having the routes planned and mapped out for us, knowing that other people have done the same, was REALLY valuable – it would have been much more difficult for us (or anyone else for that matter) to do that on our own. Great job in organizing this tour and making it flow very nicely for us!”
So if you are confident traveling through Europe via foot or bicycle and want the structure of a self-guided tour, consider joining us!