The walled Old Town of Dubrovnik is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and ultra-popular place to visit on Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast
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Active travel (cycling, hiking, paddling, etc.) has been a red hot growth sector of the travel industry for the past several years and continues to surge. At the same time, Croatia has been a fast-growing emerging destination for Americans going abroad. But while several foreign countries have seen significant growth of U.S. tourism, Croatia combines these two trends in a big way, and the country’s most popular tourism region, the Dalmatian Coast, is exploding with group active travel, especially cycling. There are suddenly a lot of options, but this is one place where it is more important than many others to know what you are buying when you book, and one place where it’s worth a splurge. Why? Because a high-end operator will make for a much better trip and much less wasted time. That’s why if you want to go active, you should choose a luxury cycling trip in Croatia.
Why Croatia Is So Hot
Long before White Lotus became every travel blogger and self-proclaimed “influencer’s” main reason to exist, there was Game of Thrones, many scenes of which were filmed on the Dalmatian Coast. This remains a big draw, and to put it in perspective, despite all the media buzz about White Lotus travel, Game of Thrones was a much bigger show, with its season finale setting an all-time HBO record with 19.3 million live views, more than three times as many as the most-viewed episode of White Lotus, the season three finale. But the reason to go to Croatia is not to see where Game of Thrones was filmed, it is to see the settings that inspired filmmakers to shoot it here in the first place. Just as the epic landscapes of New Zealand set the stage for the visual wonder of Lord of the Rings, it is Croatia that is the star, with its preserved walled medieval cities, castles, jagged mountains and especially its endlessly stunning coastline and myriad islands, all surrounded by the crystal clear, ultra-blue, beautiful—and warm—waters of the Adriatic. The region has long been a Bucket-List paradise for sailboats, and now it is a paradise for cyclists as well.
Korčula is a historic fortified town on the island of Korčula, famed for its white wines and stunning setting on the Adriatic
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From the first half of 2024 to the same period in 2025, visits from the U.S jumped 16%, a huge increase in the world of tourism, and the U.S. for the first time moved into the top five visitor markets for Croatia, which otherwise draws heavily from its many drive market neighbors. Anecdotally, I work regularly with a lot of top travel agents and everyone I speak with is suddenly visiting Croatia and sending customers, far more than ever before. Overall visitation just passed its pre-pandemic record high, but unlike the well-publicized overcrowded hotspots of Venice, Kyoto and Barcelona, there is still plenty of room on the Dalmatian Coast for guests. In fact, since the pandemic, Dubrovnik, a popular cruise port, more than halved the allotment of ships that can visit at any one time to make the visitor experience more pleasant.
Dubrovnik, the “Pearl of the Adriatic,” is the main attraction for tourists, its old city completely encircled with a wall you can stroll the circumference of the old city on top of, and it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site for almost half a century (and yes, features prominently in Game of Thrones).
The mountainous islands of Croatia’s Dalmatian coast have epic switchbacks— and often little traffic.
Gwen Kidera for DuVine
The cuisine is a mix of the Baltics region and the Mediterranean, with plenty of pasta, pizza, olive oil, figs, cheese and gelato for those who love the foods of Italy, plus heartier meat dishes and tons of seafood. It is a well-established (Roman era) wine region that has excellent wines, especially indigenous varieties you are unlikely to encounter anyplace else, with a flagship white, posip, that is great on its own at the beach as well as with all that fresh local seafood.
While great food and great wine may not exactly be a shocker for the Mediterranean region, what surprised most American visitors I spoke to the most were too very important elements of Croatia’s tourism appeal. First, English is very widely spoken (literally everyone we met), and most Croatians speak it very well, making it as easy as you can imagine to get around, order food, book things, ask questions, and get anything you need resolved taken care of (including in the worst case, medical issues).
Secondly, it is very safe, and according to the official website of the European Union (EU), has the lowest rate of locally reported crime, violence or vandalism of any country in the Union, less than a quarter of the EU average, a sixth of that for Greece or the Netherlands and a fifth of France. My wife and I were on a city walking tour when we saw a local park his scooter, shut the engine, and walk off, leaving the key in the ignition and the scooter unlocked. My wife, being from New York City, expressed surprise to our tour guide, who shrugged that it was totally normal.
More empty roads—and more epic Adriatic views.
Gwen Kidera for DuVine
The most popular circuit for visitors runs from charming seaside Split, Croatia’s second largest city (after its very appealing but less touristed inland capital, Zagreb) to Dubrovnik, spanning about 140 miles of stunning coast. But just about everyone stops on the key islands in between, especially Brac, Hvar and Korcula.
For cycling, each of these has well maintained roads without too much traffic, with routes passing through charming villages, port towns, olive orchards, vineyards and featuring endless, ever changing, dramatic sea views. It’s becoming one of the hottest destinations in guided active travel for some very good reasons.
Why You Should Choose A Luxury Cycling Trip In Croatia
I have been writing frequently on active travel for many years, and I have done trips at almost every part of the price spectrum, from very high-end to the lowest cost self-guided minimalism (You can read my recent feature on the Top 10 Trends in Active Travel here at Forbes). There’s something to be said for just about every style, but some locations are better suited to different tiers. I did Croatia with DuVine Cycling + Adventure Co., a high-end luxury outfitter I have traveled with before, and I have also traveled with all of DuVine’s key competitors or peers. Buit this was a particularly informative trip because the region has boomed so much that like Tuscany, Provence, Burgundy or Napa, just about every major active travel company has a presence in this concise region, and you cannot miss all the various bike tours, vans, trailers and other cyclists in the ports, hotels and larger towns, though they all use different routes and you don’t see too many others while actually riding. The more other groups I saw, the happier I was that I had chosen DuVine for this itenerary.
Most Croatia cycling trips, including DuVine’s, start in the gorgeous waterfont city of Split.
Gwen Kidera for DuVine
To be clear, a big problem with choosing the best active travel tour for you is lot of people confuse the cost of a trip with value, and that simply is wrong. Cost is cost. Value is what you get for your money. When you buy any product, one that is better made usually costs more, but if it performs better and lasts longer it is a better value. Good food costs more than fast food, but it tastes better and may well help you live longer, and you don’t get much better value than that. When it comes to travel, in some cases, paying more primarily gets you better (or fancier) lodging, and better (or fancier) food and drink. If you don’t want those things, or can live without them, you can save money. However, active travel is much more complicated.
There are many other components of these trips that many consumers overlook when comparing prices, and cycling tours are definitely not apples to apples. When it comes to Croatia, the most notable of these is time. Time is the ultimate luxury, the one thing money cannot buy more of, and the one thing we are all running out of. You can’t buy more, but you can avoid wasting what you have.
Fresh seafood is a daily thing on the Dalmatian Coast
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Just about every cycling company offers this route, from Split to a series of islands and then back to the mainland and Dubrovnik, or in the opposite direction. No matter how you slice it, that requires crossing water, usually around four times, and there are two ways to do that, by ferry or private boat. In DuVine’s case, when we finished riding for the day, one of the guides would take the van and all the bikes and head for the ferry and move on to our next destination. We would then enjoy the rest of the day, maybe take a private guided tour of town, visit a winery, or have time to explore the medieval cities on our own. We could nap, spa, go to the beach, and eventually regroup over a delicious dinner. Then in the morning, we would board a chartered speed boat and head to our next destination, from 15 to 55 minutes away.
In sharp contrast, we saw other lower priced bike tour participants joining their tour vans on the ferries, at one point for a five and a half hour trip that took us less than an hour. As our tour leader explained, those companies had their groups wake up early to hit the road on their bikes by 7:30, when we were sitting down to leisurely breakfasts, making them finish cycling by late morning, then head to the ferry at lunch time, spending most of their day on the slow boat to arrive in time for a late dinner.
Smaller groups work better for many parts of an active trip—like lunch.
Gwen Kidera for DuVine
We had the whole day to enjoy the charms of wherever we were and still arrive in the morning in time to start riding when the other groups did. This adds up day after day, and while many of those groups we saw “saved” money by going with a less expensive outfitter, they got a lot less quality vacation time. Taking an Uber in New York always costs more than taking the subway, and private boats cost more than public ferries, which in turn makes the trip more expensive, but if you can afford it, you might well find it offers you a better value. Yet when people compare trips by prices in brochures they miss this big detail.
They also miss group size, which is a key to your enjoyment and the quality of your experience. Even if tour operators with bigger groups add more guides (many do not) to keep similar guide to guest ratios, larger groups are limited in terms of where they can stay, where they can eat, and the quality of their off-bike tours. DuVine has one of the smallest “maximum” sizes in the entire active travel industry, capping most trips like this one at 14. The last DuVine trip I did a couple of years ago was capped at 10 (I wrote about that experience here at Forbes if you want more in-depth detail on the tour company).
In comparison, Backroads, the largest luxury active travel company—which I have gone with several times and think very highly of—takes up to 26 on its cycling trips. Butterfield & Robinson, the best-known luxury active travel operator, goes to 16. Trek Travel caps most cycling trips between 20-24, though there are some special bigger ones. These are top tier luxury companies, and less expensive operators go even bigger, with VBT Bicycling Vacations operating groups of up to 30. Local European operators often go substantially higher, and I talked to a biking guide in Croatia who worked for a German active tour operator that would do 50 guests with just two guides.
One nice thing about hotels in Europe is that they almost always include breakfast in room rates, unlike the U.S., and fancier hotels put on lavish spreads. On the Dalmatian Coast, these almost always involve outdoor seating on a terrace overlong the Adriatic with views to offshore islands over coffee, a great way to start your day. But we stayed one night in the same luxury hotel as another high-end cycling company with a much larger group, and they had to have their breakfast en masse in a conference room on their own, while my wife and I went at our leisure to the hotel restaurant, had a waterfront table, and were just hotel guests, as if traveling alone. I find that a much better experience—one that added value to my trip.
DuVine is known in active travel for its high-level of focus on gastronomy and wine, and is one of the only active tour operators that includes wine (or beer) at every non-breakfast meal (you usually pay extra). But more importantly, we ate at fantastic mom and pop hidden gem hideaways they had discovered and arranged, places that in many cases were not even open for lunch but opened for us, in settings that could not be possible with much larger groups, including dinner on the waterfront terrace of a small Michelin-starred restaurant. The smaller group size also improves the dynamics, and after a few meals, you have sat next to just about everyone and know all the fellow guests’ names, something that doesn’t happen as readily on bigger trips.
Then there are the bikes themselves. I have a friend who has done several cycling trips in Europe, and was early on the Croatia bandwagon, about two years ago. But she went about it by finding a local company online with “amazingly” low prices. Afterwards I asked about her trip and she said simply, “the bikes sucked.” This is why the expression “you get what you pay for” is an adage and not a cliché. All of the top luxury tour operators have large, standardized fleets of better bikes, and in DuVine’s case, the included road bike is a high-end carbon Cannondale Synapse with electronic Shimano Di2 shifting and hydraulic disc brakes, pretty much everything you could want, but they also have a fancier ultra-light higher-performance option as an upgrade. Guests can also choose basic e-bikes or high-performance BMC e-road bikes. One couple who were on their ninth DuVine trip told us they liked the road bikes so much that they bought an identical pair for home use after their last trip. That says something about both the bikes and the company.
Hvar, Croatia is yet another of the gorgeous islands you will visit on this trip.
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Time spent enjoying your vacation, quality of food, group size and better bikes are all very important parts of this kind of trip, but in other countries, few things ultimately impact your experience as much as the guides, and DuVine has a curated pool of local specialists around the world. Many bigger companies have a stable of well-trained guides they send wherever they are needed, and they are nice and good at their job, but sometimes they don’t even speak the local language, let alone know the customs and cuisine and history, or the mom and pop hidden gems.
Both of our cycling guides were not just Croatian but from Dalmatia, spoke perfect English, had worked for DuVine for many years, and when we arrived in every new town they knew the hoteliers, restaurateurs, winemakers, even waitstaff, and we were generally treated like royalty. We also learned a lot about their country. I had the same great experience on my previous trip with DuVine local guides in Turkey and Greece, and these are all places with a rich history and interesting foods where guests have a lot to learn. The standout meal of our trip, one of my favorite memories of the week, was a family owned spot that not only would I never have found on my own, but I doubt anyone other than a local guide could have found it—and then got them to open and cook lunch just for us. And that’s what I will remember.
One of the reasons why DuVine excels with its guides is that it primarily does only cycling, whereas almost all of its top tier competitions are full blown active travel companies offering hiking, multi-sport trips, even winter sports and niches such as safaris. They also have more limited geography, covering most of Europe, the U.S., and just three other countries (Uruguay, South Africa and New Zealand) while most of their peers do much of Asia, Africa, South America and the polar regions. By keeping things simple with an annual slate of bike trips in fewer places (but still a lot of choices) they are able to keep great local guides at home, where they excel.
It’s not just me who feels this way: readers of Travel + Leisure named DuVine the top active travel company on the World’s Best Tour Operator list in 2024 (the seventh time it made the prestigious list).
Just to be clear, I have traveled with the other top luxury specialists in this field, and I have great things to say about all of them and would happily travel with any of them again. They are all in roughly the same price category, and not all of these companies offer a guided Dalmatian Coast cycling trip, but for those that do, I am sure they do a good job, and I know some of them use the same kind of private boat transfers. The key takeaway here is that whoever you choose, I believe this is a trip where it is worth paying what these best-in-class companies charge and ensuring that you get private transfers, better hotels, better food, off-bike VIP tours and special experiences, better guides and good bikes. In some places where all the top active travel companies have been running bike trips for decades, like Tuscany, you may need less specialized insider knowledge to have a great trip, and it’s easy to eat well, but in this case, I feel privileged to have had the expertise of our guides. DuVine did a fantastic job, and I wouldn’t change a thing.
The bottom line is that when you are booking an active travel trip, it’s not about the daily mileage or the list of places you visit or the brochure price. It’s about what is included (and what’s not!), the quality and the expertise of the tour operator, and all the little details. If you are going to go active on the Dalmatian Coast—and I think you should—than in order to make the most of your time and have the best experience, you should choose a luxury cycling trip in Croatia.