Become a supporter
cycle.travel’s mobile app remembers where you’ve been, and lights up hexagons on a map. We call these ‘Travel Tiles’. It’s a fun way to challenge yourself to ride in new places.
Choose Travel Tiles in the map menu (top right) to show or hide travel tiles. They’re still recording even when they’re hidden, so you can either ride with the standard map display, or watch the tiles light up as you ride into a new area.
If you’ve accidentally lit up a tile where you didn’t ride, just hold down your finger in the affected area, and choose Clear this hexagon.
By default your travel tiles stay on your phone. If you want to see them on the cycle.travel website too, then open the Settings menu on the app, and choose Upload travel tiles.
The first time you do this, you’ll be asked if you want this to happen automatically from now on. (You can change this at any time in the App settings screen on the app.)
You can then see your tiles on the website by going to My bike and Tiles. To choose whether other people can see your tiles, change the setting in Profile on the website.
You might have been sent a route by a friend, or found one on the web, and want to use it in cycle.travel. No problem – you can do that.
From the website map page, click Import GPX on the left.
On the mobile app, simply find the GPX file in your phone’s Files app, and then choose Open with cycle.travel.
For best results, when importing, tell cycle.travel what sort of route it is: Standard (cycle.travel’s usual mix of quiet lanes and traffic-free paths), Paved only, or Gravel/Off-road. This will increase the chances of an accurate import.
When cycle.travel imports a GPX file, it tries to recreate that journey by planning it with via points, just as you would if you were planning it manually. This way you get full turn-by-turn directions, elevation profile and so on, even though those aren’t in the original GPX file.
If the route follows busy roads, private tracks, or paths that cycle.travel doesn’t know about, then it won’t be able to send the journey that way. Consequently, there might be differences from the original GPX at these locations.
If this is an issue with a GPX you have, then on the cycle.travel mobile app, you can additionally choose the option of just Show line on map. This will simply display the line on the map without any via points or turn-by-turn directions. You won’t be able to edit it or save it, but can simply follow the line.
Our maps are made using open data from OpenStreetMap, licensed under the Open Database Licence; with additional elevation data from Sonny, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; additional UK data from Ordnance Survey and the Department for Transport, licensed under the Open Government Licence (© Crown copyright and database right); additional US data from federal and state sources; additional French data from départements under Licence Ouverte and the Open Database Licence; additional Canadian data from StatCan (Geography Division, Statistics Canada); additional Australian data from the governments of NSW, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.
If you find something missing or misleading in our maps and directions, head over to OpenStreetMap to fix it. But if OSM’s right, and cycle.travel isn’t doing what you’d expect with the data, we want to know. Post in the cycle.travel site forum and let us know what you think.
We have thousands of hotels and campsites listed on cycle.travel.
You can find accommodation along a route by clicking Near route on the left, which will look for accommodation all along your planned route. Or if you’ve added overnight stops and want to find accommodation near those places only, click At overnights. To look at specific places along a route, click anywhere on the route and choose Nearby accommodation from the popup.
Use the tickboxes at the top of the screen to filter the type of accommodation you want.
Clicking on a campsite will bring up contact details, while clicking on a hotel will take you to an online booking page. We get a small amount of commission from hotel bookings, so any bookings you make all help to support cycle.travel!
When you’re planning a trip, you might identify a bunch of possible places to stay. You can save these in your cycle.travel shortlist. (You’ll need to have registered a free cycle.travel account.)
When you find accommodation you like, click Add to shortlist. It’ll be saved for future use, and the hotel icon will change to a red one with a heart.
Next time that you open the map, you can see your shortlisted accommodation by just clicking the Shortlisted button.
You can also view the shortlist by clicking My bike then Shortlist.
Campsite listings come from OpenStreetMap and Archies Campings. Please always email, check website, or phone to check availability before turning up.
Hotel listings are from online accommodation providers. Some listings may be old so please check with the online booking site rather than relying on the location of an icon on cycle.travel. We are currently working to update our accommodation listings.
cycle.travel makes it easy to plan routes split across multiple days (and you don’t have to pay any extra to do so!).
Set overnight via points at the places you want to stay. These act just like any other via points, so you can drag them around, but they appear with a special moon icon.
To set an overnight point, just click anywhere on your journey (whether an existing via point or not) and click Overnight stop in the popup bubble.
The yellow distance markers will reset from then on. You can also see each day highlighted on the elevation display.
cycle.travel can place overnight points at a pre-determined interval, so you can easily split your route into days of the same distance. You can then fine-tune the suggestions by dragging the points around to towns with hotels/camping, evening out the daily climb, etc.
Click the Suggest overnight stops text link on the left (under Route summary). Choose how many days you want to split into. As you adjust the number of days, the daily distance is updated. You can choose shorter start/finish days to allow for travelling time to/from your ride.
We’d strongly recommend using the elevation display when planning multi-day routes, because it gives an all-in-one display of distance and climbing for each day.
You can just save the journey like any other, and the overnight stops will be preserved.
But once you’ve settled on your overnight stops, you might want to split it into a single journey for each day. This is particularly useful when following routes on a GPS unit or the cycle.travel mobile app. To do this, when saving, click Split into multiple days.
Made in the Cotswolds. Published by Éditions Système D Ltd.
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