Once upon a time, before huge commercialisation of bike tours in Croatia, (there was only bike and sail type of tour – big boats, big groups, cheap price), definitely before one way tour from Split to Dubrovnik (now a golden standard) and while Meridien Ten was doing typical incoming travel business, yacht charter and outbound ski holidays, I was living a very different life – three lives, really, all at once.
Where it all started: sailing boats, ski slopes, and the old office in Split. (Before we started with cycling tours the company was called Meridien Blue.) The office looks a lot better now, but we still work in the same place.
Winters, I was a ski instructor in Austria. Summers, I worked as a skipper along the Croatian coast. In between, whenever I could, I was in Zagreb studying economics.
It was a good life – fast, outdoors, a little chaotic – until a ski accident at the end of one season tore my ACL. The surgery meant a full ACL reconstruction, and the rehab that followed meant one thing above all: I couldn’t work as a skipper that summer. My body needed low-impact movement, something steady and repetitive that wouldn’t put weight through the knee the wrong way. My physiotherapist suggested cycling. So, while I recovered, I started working with my parents at Meridien Ten instead – based, that season, at an all-inclusive hotel on the island of Brač.
That season on Brač gave me two very different educations, running in parallel. On my rehab rides, I saw the island properly for the first time – not from a boat deck or a hotel balcony, or from a night club,but at the pace of a bicycle. The quiet inland roads. The stone villages. The way the smell of the countryside changes as you climb, and the way a five minute conversation with someone at a village konoba tells you more about a place than a week in a resort ever could.
At the same time, working inside the hotel, I saw the other side of Croatian tourism up close – the all-inclusive model, guests who never really left the compound, a version of the coast that could have been anywhere in the Mediterranean. It wasn’t a bad hotel. It just wasn’t Croatia. Not the Croatia I’d grown up loving as a kid, as a teenager, as adult, as a skipper and a ski instructor who couldn’t wait for the next contract to bring him home.
Recovering on two wheels while watching mass tourism operate at full scale, side by side, made the contrast impossible to ignore. I made a decision that season that I’ve never really walked back from: I was going to build something that worked against that model, not with it.
Cycling tourism isn’t just “a way to see Croatia.” I’d argue it’s close to the best way there is, and after more than two decades in this business, I still believe that.
When you cycle somewhere, you’re not sealed off from it. You feel the gradient of the land instead of watching it pass through glass. You smell the pine and the sage on the way up to a lavender field before you ever see the flowers. You stop because you’re thirsty, not because a schedule says to, and the person who hands you water is a local, not a rep. You eat what’s cooked in that village, not what’s on a buffet designed to please everyone and taste like nowhere. You meet a guide who grew up on these roads, not one reading from a script.
Sport, culture, food, people, landscape – cycling asks you to engage with all of it at once, at a pace slow enough to notice and fast enough to cover ground. I’ve spent twenty years looking for a better way to travel, and I still haven’t found one.
So that’s what we set out to build: a bike route from Split to Dubrovnik, down through the islands, at a time – around 2001 to 2002 – when nobody else in Croatia was offering anything like it. We wanted to give travellers chance to “cruise” and explore their way from historic Split, then show them the traditional values and beauties of our islands of Brač, Hvar and Korčula and finally finish in the “pearl of the Adriatic” – Dubrovnik. We were the first to run it, and the first to build private boat transfers into the itinerary, so guests could island-hop by bike and by sea instead of being stuck on the mainland roads and lose time on ferry transportation (which can be very complicated and time consuming here).
It wasn’t an obvious idea at the time. Cycling tourism in Croatia barely existed as a category. We were guessing, adjusting, learning the ferry timetables and the quiet backroads and which villages had a konoba worth stopping at, one season at a time. We made mistakes, and we learned from them. We checked every road ourselves, either by car or by bike. This was before Google Maps — before that little yellow man you can drop into the map to scout every pothole from the safety of your screen at home. It was a time before so much information lived on the web. Those were great days.
Today, an estimated 97% of bike tour companies in Croatia offer some version of that same Split to Dubrovnik route. I take that as a compliment, honestly — it means we were right about something. But it also means the route itself isn’t really the differentiator anymore. What still is: we’re the ones who built it, we’re still based here in Split, still run by the same family and friends, still riding these same islands ourselves, still loving all the locals who welcome us and our traveller with traditional food and we still believe cycling is the better way to see this country than any resort or cruiser ship ever could be. And we still believe Dalmatian coast with its islands is beautiful place definitely worth discovering.
If you’re planning to ride the Dalmatian coast, you’re welcome to do it with the company that mapped the way.
