France — cross-cutting patterns and seasonality

Pricing architecture — consistent across all fifteen operators

• Twin-share per-person headline, always "from".
• Single supplement is the biggest lever. Headwater £255–£500 (~29–36% of base);
  Discover France €260 standard / €740 upgraded; UTracks AUD $180 (Burgundy 4d) to
  AUD $1,100 (Provence 8d). Discover France and UTracks both distinguish a
  single-room supplement from a solo-traveller surcharge, the latter explicitly
  covering unshared logistics costs.
• E-bike is a modest, near-universal upcharge: Bourgogne Evasion +€35 (day)
  / Active Tours +€40 per bike (multi-day); Discover France +€65; UTracks
  AUD $160–$290. Nobody charges a large premium — e-bikes are a line item,
  not a product.
• Published group-size discount tiers are essentially absent. Every operator
  says "contact us for a quote" at 4+ (Abicyclette) or 6+ (Cyclomundo). The only
  published volume curve in the sector is Détours de Loire's bike repatriation:
  −25% at 4 bikes, −50% at 8.

That absence is itself the finding. Nobody has productised group-size
economics on the customer side, even though every operator's cost base is
obviously per-vehicle. A transparent "the more of you there are, the cheaper the
van gets" price ladder would be genuinely novel — and Détours de Loire has
already proved a French audience accepts one.

• Day-trip vs multi-night: day products €59–€169 guided / €75–€149
  self-guided. Multi-night self-guided in wine regions €195–€490 for 2–4 nights
  at the French domestic end, £869–£1,839 / €1,300–€2,900 at the UK/US packager
  end. The packagers charge 2–4× the French operators for structurally similar
  product.

Support delivery — the state of the art, ranked

1. Abicyclette — 24 h emergency number, greeter guide at start, free transfer
   to next stage in bad weather, mechanical intervention possible but chargeable.
2. Discover France — 7 days/week 09:00–19:00 (daylight only), "back on the
   road within an hour" SLA, and explicit: "support vans are not available on
   self-guided trips."
3. Cycling for Softies — a named Destination Manager per region who is
   simultaneously bag-mover, mechanic and fixer, "always just a phone call away."
4. Active Tours / Bourgogne Evasion — 24/7 helpline on multi-day packages;
   office hours Mon–Fri 09:00–17:00; tired rider takes a taxi at their own expense.
5. Détours de Loire — two-tier triage (can you still ride? / can't ride?), both
   "subject to availability."
6. UTracks, Headwater, Inntravel — emergency hotline / local agent / phone-and-email
   respectively. No van, no SLA, no stated abandonment policy.

Nobody runs a roving van. Nobody promises to pick up a rider who has quit. The
most common answer to "what if I can't go on" is "take a taxi, at your own
expense." Channels are phone-first — [NOT FOUND] any WhatsApp channel,
in-app SOS button, or live tracking anywhere in the French sample.

Wine logistics — four postures, and the sector is remarkably weak

On wineries paying operators: [NOT FOUND]. No evidence of commission, referral
fees or trail passes flowing from wineries to cycling operators. Active Tours sells
tastings as a customer-paid add-on at €17–€25pp, and Bourgogne Evasion's €125
day tour bundles two winery tastings into the retail price. Both are consistent
with the operator buying tasting slots and reselling — not being paid by the
domaine. This is inference from pricing structure, not a verified statement.
No operator publishes its winery commercial terms.

Accommodation

Universally contracted hotels, chambres d'hôtes and guesthouses, often graded
into tiers (Abicyclette's five bands; Discover France's standard/upgraded; UTracks'
3★ with 5★ upgrade). Détours de Loire packages are all B&B.

Zero operators in this sample use Airbnb-type inventory, and three explicitly
refuse to service it. Nobody lets the guest book their own bed and sells support
around it. That combination does not exist in the French market as far as could
be verified.

Bike model

Two clean camps:

• French domestic operators own their fleets — Alsa Cyclo Tours 250 bikes;
  Détours de Loire across 4 agencies; BicyBAGS 600+; Bourgogne Evasion across 3
  locations — and offer delivery to accommodation plus one-way drops between
  their own branches.
• UK/AU packagers include "bike hire" in the price but subcontract it to a local
  agent (Headwater's "local agent", Discover France's bilingual regional offices).

Guest-brings-own is not a mainstream option anywhere in France.

Booking and tech

Overwhelmingly own-site. Named third-party systems verified: Lokki.rent
(Alsa Cyclo Tours), bicybags-app.com (BicyBAGS' own platform), WooCommerce
(Bourgogne Evasion, inferred from /produit/ URLs).

Navigation: Ride With GPS named explicitly by Cycling for Softies; Headwater,
Discover France and UTracks each use an unnamed proprietary app (UTracks
requires Android 11+/iOS 16+; Discover France's loads by QR code and works
offline); Inntravel is the outlier with emailed GPX + printed route notes and
no app at all.

GetYourGuide/Viator/Klook distribution exists in the Burgundy day-tour market — a
Klook listing for a "Burgundy Full-Day E-Bike Wine Tour from Dijon" with
air-conditioned shuttle surfaced in search — but [SECONDARY], and both
getyourguide.com and viator.com returned 403 to fetches, so [NOT FOUND] OTA
pricing or which operators distribute there.

Seasonality in France

The sector converges on a ~6-month season, roughly April to September/October,
with a shoulder into late October in Burgundy.

[NOT FOUND] What operators do with vans and fleets in winter. No operator
publishes off-season redeployment; Détours de Loire simply closes. For a business
whose entire cost base is a van and a fleet of e-bikes, this is the most important
unanswered question in the French scan.

Note the one operator that escapes the season — Discover France runs year-round
and owns no fleet. Asset-light is what buys you twelve months.