A group of four students selected the EcoVeloTour related topic “Sustainable and barrier-free cycle tourism offers in urban and rural regions” for their interdisciplinary project of the bachelor programme “Environment and Bio-Resources Management” at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences.

The core research question was “Which tourism and infrastructure offers are needed to enable sustainable, barrier-free cycle tourism in urban and rural regions?”. The students developed two novel touristic products combining eco- and bicycle tourism. One product focuses on the topic of bicycle tourism offers for blind and visually impaired persons using tandem bicycles. The other product focuses on combining city tourism with bicycle and eco-tourism.

Part of the latter was a brief web-based survey assessing the potential of such a product. The sample consists of 198 fully completed interviews. About two thirds of the respondents are female. With a share of about 60% 18-30 years is the dominant age group. Nearly halve of the respondents live in cities with more than a million residents. About 28% of the respondents don’t make regular city trips (Figure 1). A further 28% of the respondents already combined city trips with cycling tourism. The remaining 44% of the respondents can imagine to combine these two elements in the future.

Figure 1: City trips and cycling tourism offers

Respondents were asked to assess the attractiveness of different cycling offers in combination with city trips (Figure 2). The least attractive offer are racing bike tours, which are not interesting at all for nearly 60% of the respondents. The most attractive offer are tours visiting natural habitats, which are very interesting for slightly more than half of the respondents.

Figure 2: Attractiveness of different cycling tourism offers in combination with city trips

The results of the interdisciplinary project were presented online in form of a poster on the 25th of June 2020. The German version of the poster is available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342716147_Nachhaltige_und_barrierefreie_Radtourismusangebote_fur_Stadt_und_Land

Acknowledgements:

We would like to thank Hannah Barnes, Katharina Graus, Maja Naimer and Victoria Soto Moreno for sharing the results of their interdisciplinary project with us.

References

Link to poster (in German):

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342716147_Nachhaltige_und_barrierefreie_Radtourismusangebote_fur_Stadt_und_Land