A new review of cycling tourism and leisure riding brings together evidence from France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. It shows that travel by bike supports spending on places to stay, food and other services. In Germany, cycling tourists and day excursionists generated €18 billion in gross revenue in 2024. That figure describes the scope of the German study; it is not a total for European cycling tourism.
The role of nearby visitors is particularly striking. On seven tourism cycle routes studied in France, only 14% of cycling tourists came from abroad. A route’s value therefore cannot be judged solely by its appeal to long-distance visitors: people travelling from closer to home use the same paths and spend money along them. Electric bicycles also feature prominently in the national evidence, accounting for 51% of German cycling tourists and 44% of Dutch leisure cyclists in the respective studies.
The figures still need careful handling. The review combines national studies from different years that define and measure cycling holidays and leisure rides in different ways, so their headline numbers are not directly comparable. Its strongest lesson is a call for consistent, regularly updated data, rather than a single grand European total. Better evidence would help planners judge investments that serve both longer trips and shorter rides close to home.