Forty-nine million presences. Six thousand four hundred million euros generated in the territory. These are numbers that would make any industry happy, and in this case they speak of bicycles, white roads, and stops in front of a plate of pasta with truffles in an Umbrian village. The 6th “Traveling by Bicycle” Report, produced by Isnart-Unioncamere for the Observatory on the Economy of Tourism of the Chambers of Commerce in collaboration with Legambiente and presented at the Bicycle Tourism Fair in Padua on March 27, photographs a sector that has stopped being a niche phenomenon to become a pillar of national tourism.
Who pedals and how much they spend
The profile of the Italian bicycle tourist 2025 is less stereotypical than people think. The report, built on more than 30 thousand interviews with Italian and foreign tourists, with a specific sample of more than 2 thousand cyclists identified as such by main reason for stay, says 17% belong to Gen Z – under 30 – compared to 9% the previous year. Baby boomers rise to 14%; they were at 8%. The middle group, Gen X between 45 and 60, remains the most represented at 34 percent, but the trend is clear: bicycling is widening its pool toward the generational ends.
This means that cycling tourism is tapping into very different demands: young people are looking for experiences, social sharing, itineraries discovered through the web (60 percent plan online, one in two then recount the trip on social), while older people are looking for slowness, territory, longer stays.
On the economic side, the numbers confirm a trend that has already emerged in past years but is now more pronounced. The average daily expenditure on housing has risen to 69 euros per capita, four euros more than in 2024. But it is the item “other purchases of goods and services” that makes the most conspicuous jump: from 70 to 91 euros, plus 21 euros in one year. Add in the average 22 euros per restaurant, 10 euros for typical products and 17 euros for spas and wellness, and it becomes clear that the bicycle tourist is an attentive, selective consumer, willing to pay for quality-and increasingly attentive to local food and wine, which is often the additional motivation that decides the destination.
Women’s revolution in the saddle
The report’s most resounding figure-the one that surprised even those in the industry-was about the female component. In 2025, women accounted for 47.1 percent of bicycle tourists. The year before, they were 29.7 percent. A growth of more than 17 percentage points in 12 months.
Behind this leap is probably a sum of factors: the spread of the electric bike, which has lowered the physical barrier of access; the growing focus on sustainable and active forms of tourism that do not require the competitiveness of athleticism; and initiatives such as Women in Cycling, the network promoted by the European Cyclists’ Federation to make the cycling, mobility and tourism sectors more inclusive for women. Cultural work that evidently produces measurable results.
36% of cycle tourists travel with partners and family, 17% with friends. And one in two cycle tourists combine cycling with discovering artistic and cultural heritage: 48 percent declare interest in cultural heritage, 33 percent in nature tourism.
The rental that can’t be seen but grows
An entire chapter of the report is dedicated to the bike rental market, which Legambiente calls “a further indicator of the health of cycle tourism.” The numbers from the Unioncamere Business Register tell an instructive story: the number of businesses active in the sector is essentially stable between 2019 and 2025-almost 800 throughout Italy. But service points, so-called local units, grew by 47 percent over the same period, exceeding 1,600.
What does it mean? That existing businesses are multiplying across the territory. It is the “multi-location” model: the same company opens rental points along a cycle route, in multiple villages, at stations, at ferries. It’s a market response to growing demand, but it’s also a sign of maturity in the industry: those who understand the business know that the bicycle tourist needs to find the bike where the route begins and leave it where it ends.
However, the geographical distribution is still unbalanced. Regions with high specialization in rental often coincide with areas where cycleways are more structured and frequented. Where the cycleway is not there, or is incomplete, rental struggles. It is a circularity that the market alone cannot break.
Cycleways: the infrastructure that’s missing
The report includes an initial spatial impact analysis of four Italian cycleways-Assisi-Spoleto-Norcia, Treviso-Ostiglia, Costa dei Trabocchi in Abruzzo, and Volturno in Campania.
In all four cases, supply exceeds demand: there are accommodations, there is capacity, but cycle tourism flows still cannot saturate it. Seasonality remains an unresolved problem, especially in Abruzzo and Campania. On the Volturno, the report admits difficulty even in measuring impact: data cannot be associated with the cycleway with sufficient precision, which says a lot about the fragmentation of the local tourism ecosystem.
The partial exception is Umbria, where the Assisi-Spoleto-Norcia cycle route shows a detectable seasonal adjustment effect and a positive impact of short rentals – a fact that deserves attention, as it suggests that tourists use platforms such as Airbnb to settle along routes where traditional accommodation supply is limited or inflexible.
Italy has the landscape, cultural and gastronomic heritage to compete with the great European cycling tourism countries-Germany, Holland, Austria, France. It also has, evidently, the demand. What it does not have is a system. National cycleways are proceeding hiccupily, with sections open and sections missing, with problems of signage, maintenance, and connection with public transport. The foreign cycle tourist, accustomed to German or Danish routes where bikes board trains without red tape and routes are marked to the meter, in Italy still has to deal with a heterogeneous and often improvised infrastructure.
