All Press is Good Press

I just returned from a long 3.5 week trip to France that was both business and personal in nature to find a nice long feature story about Discover France in the latest issue of Adventure Cycling magazine. We have been written about several times before in feature pieces for a number of small niche magazines; and we have been mentioned in countless pieces in countless magazines and articles of all stripes. So, press is nothing new for us, but this story was a bit different.

To start, the magazine is a cycling magazine devoted to a readership that is supposed to be about Adventure Cycling. In my knowledge, this means for the most part, people who take their own bikes and head off down the road. They travel by bike preferring to take this method of travel in order to discover. Their trips are usually long to very long by most measures covering anything from a week to months or even years circling the globe. I have attended the leadership course Adventure Cycling organizes and learned all about leading their tours. These people are seasoned riders and travelers and for the most part take care of their own travels.

Therefore, it seems only natural that the readership would be very interested in our type of tours - self-guided cycling. We invited the author Mike McCoy, a regular contributor to Adventure Cycling, to come along on one of our trips and hopefully write about his experiences in a feature piece. He did, and the story is very good. We have the good timing to be featured in the annual Tour Operater/Travel Guide issue as well!

As I am not an author, but just a hack who occassionally writes a blog, I can't begin to understand how to condense everything he may have experienced into the space given; but there are a number of points about the story that need further exploration and coverage. So, I go on the record to add just a bit of commentary and additional information to supplement the article.

Mr. McCoy's story begins with information about studying the French language and his flight to France that includes a gratuitous slap at French culture because ice is a rare commodity in drinks served at restaurants. He follows on with a lot of nice information about his time in Paris and his TGV trip to Avignon and subsequent time visiting there as well as info about the sound and light show at the Palais des Papes in Avignon. All this is nice but has nothing to do with the bicycle tour and the main point of the article. Though our company did arrange his Paris hotel, Avignon hotel, and train travel, nothing of this service was mentioned.

Next it was on to the bicycle tour part and in order for Mr McCoy and his wife (who also came along invited at no cost)to experience both our challenging tours operated by our sister company Cycling Classics, we gave him a day and night at Mont Ventoux/Bedoin. The facts that Cycling Classics operates this challenging program and the obvious fact that we catagorize the tour as very challenging were omitted.
For the big climb on Mont Ventoux and the subsequent tour the McCoys completed, we provided top quality Eddy Merckx road bikes (Gara model) at no cost. Practically, no mention was made of the bicycles, their quality, their performance or other at any point in the story. This is a big ommission from our point of view since we know that these bicycles are among the best any tour company makes available to its cycling tour clients. It is a noteworthy issue that clients can have such high quality bikes available and can leave their expensive road bikes at home safe from airline baggage handlers!

Next, an error needs to be corrected. Mr McCoy mentions that our local support person, David Renvoise, was our employee. David went to transfer the McCoys from Avignon to Bedoin, gave them an orientation, and then transfered them on to the next week long tour by private car. David is NOT an employee of Discover France. Instead, he is an employee of our partner company Sud Travel of France. All of our orientation guides and logistics support people in France and elsewhere are employees of our partners and under contract for services. They are not employees of our US company.

The main part of the overall program is what comes next, our Carcassonne Countryside Tour. We rate this tour as challenging because of the hilly terrain on parts of the trip and some days of longer distance. It can also be hot in this part of France during certain months and so another factor adding to the challenge. This tour is operated by Discover France, not Cycling Classics and so it has a different set of criteria for determining challenging. Among the tours offered by Discover France, this rates as one of the more challenging. Compared to the tours offer by Cycling Classics, this is a cake walk! All of these facts are omitted from the story.

As this tour is the main part of the story, and as this story is for an adventure cycling oriented audience, we would like to have read more about the geography and topography of the region. More about the rides, the sites on the rides and so forth would have been appropriate in our opinion. The story does however make mention of a few sites including a lot about the medieval cite of Carcassonne which is a key site on the tour. There is also a lot of space devoted to the author's experience picking grapes for an Irish couple that owns a nearby vineyard to one of the hotels. This experience seems to be a central and possible highlight of the trip and it came about because of a problem at the hotel. The hotel oversold its rooms and had to move the McCoys to a nearby B&B. Referred to as "spooky" in the article, it was this aspect that became the grape picking day off and a highlight for the McCoys.

I would like to point out that the mixup at the hotel is a fact of life in travel that can happen but obviously is not something we enjoy to have happen. Several systems are in place to avoid such problems, but in all cases we do have an Emergency Service that is on call at all times for our self-guided tourists to be able to call and speak English to get any such items or other situations of an emergency nature or otherwise resolved. That is what David and our other contractors are providing in addition to orientation, transfers, bag transfers, route planning, and so on. The McCoys did not avail themselves of the service; and though the story indicates that it was not a problem for them and the fact that it led to such a highlight of their trip is lost in the comment reserved by the author for his closing line: This is not a hand holding type of tour.

Indeed, anyone needing hand holding will not find it on a self-guided tour. But support is included and available. Defining hand holding would be important, but for the Adventure Cycling crowd, I think it is exactly what they don't need nor want. Therefore, the story wraps up nicely for its audience. I am pleased with the story and based on the personal feedback from Mike McCoy, I know he enjoyed himself very much. I hope the additional information above gives the story more clarity as well as a better context for the narrative.

To learn more about the Adventure Cycling Association and to become a member, visit http://www.adventurecycling.org/

As they say in French, bonne route!

L