There’s a temptation, when you start running cycling tours in a country, to want to show people all of it. We started in Taiwan in 2018 with one ten-day route. Eight years later, we still run that route, and very little else.
People ask us about this. The reason isn’t that we couldn’t add others. There’s a perfectly good two-week loop around the south of the island; there’s an excellent four-day ride in the central mountains. It’s that running fewer routes well is a different kind of business than running many routes adequately, and the second kind makes worse tours.
The case for one route
A guide who has ridden a route nineteen times knows where the bad coffee shops are. They know which restaurant to take you to in Hualien on a Tuesday night, because the Wednesday-night special isn’t as good. They know that the gradient at kilometre 78 of the Day-9 climb is the part that makes everyone consider quitting, and they know how to stand at exactly the right place on the road with exactly the right tone of voice when you come round the corner.
A guide who has ridden a route once, the way you do when you’re scoping a new destination, knows the route. They don’t yet know the place.
The economics push you the other way. New routes are how a tour operator grows. Adding a second country doubles the addressable market, sort of. Adding a fourth doubles it again. By the time you have eight countries you’ve stopped really knowing any of them, and the brand quietly shifts from “the guides who know X” to “the operator who happens to run X.”
What we do instead
When we add a new destination, we add it slowly, and we add one route. Pedal Japan, which we’re launching in 2026, is two seasons in two regions: Hokkaido in the spring, Tōhoku in the autumn. We’ve ridden each of them three times before we’ll run a paid tour there. Pedal Sicily is one nine-day loop around the eastern half of the island. We’ve ridden it more than three times — we’ve been riding it informally for years and have just been waiting for the right moment to formalise it.
The network gets to seven destinations not by spreading thin in any one of them, but by keeping each one disciplined.
What this means for you, if you’re booking
You’ll get a guide who has been to the same restaurant maybe forty times and is still excited about it.
That’s the whole essay, really.
