How To Find Alternative Active Travel

For four decades, national outdoor gear retail giant Recreational Equipment, Inc., better known as REI, has had a travel division called REI Adventures offering guided hiking, cycling, multi-sport and active trips. In 2024 alone, some 40,000 customers traveled with the company. I was planning to be one of them and had booked a cycling trip last fall in Canada’s Banff and Jasper National Parks, but the region was inundated with wildfires and all local trips were cancelled. Now it looks like I will not get a second chance, at least not with REI Adventures.

The company just announced the end of an era, and in a release and letter yesterday from REI’s president and CEO Eric Artz, explained that they are leaving the travel business for good. His letter began, “Team, I have an important update to share today. Earlier this morning we shared with our Experiences team that after a thorough review and careful consideration, I have made the difficult decision to exit the Experiences business altogether, effective this week.”

For customers who have already booked trips, the REI Experiences online landing page will be updated today, Thursday, January 9, with customer communication and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), including details for full refunds. Specifically, Artz’ letter read in part: “This week we will also begin updating customers and partners. Customers currently booked on trips and day programs will receive a full refund of all costs paid to REI and we will work to address any associated non-refundable expenses as appropriate.”

Active travel is a space I have been participating in and covering in great depth for many years. It has also been growing rapidly in recent years, as interest in fitness, adventure, participation in cycling and hiking, and demand for experiential travel have all grown, especially since the pandemic. It is very likely that more Americans have booked or are planning to book an active travel trip than at any point in history. The good news is that there are still lots of other high-quality options.

If you have already booked a trip, one possible solution is to look for another active travel operator in the same destination with the same dates, but that will require quite a bit of luck. For airfare, in general, if you booked anything but a bargain-basement fare on a low-cost carrier, or one of the terrible new “economy light or “economy basic” fares from major carriers (I don’t ever recommend this) you should be able to at least roll over the cost of your flights to a future ticket someplace else. Then it’s time to start shopping for another active trip.

REI Adventures was a bit different from its main active travel peers in a few ways. It offered more options for shorter trips, such as 4-days, whereas the industry norm is five or more, sometimes much more. For lodging, they offered a broad mix of price points, from camping to rustic lodges to more luxurious hotels. They also offered an unusually high number of women-only departures, a trend that has been growing, but REI was largely ahead of that curve. For more on the trend of women-only trips in active travel, read my recent Forbes feature here.

But REI Adventures biggest differentiator was its geography. While most major players in active travel are global, their trips were limited to North America, mostly the U.S., with a high degree of focus on National Parks. If someone came to me and said they wanted a guided hiking trip to the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Acadia, Bryce Canyon, Zion or similar, I would immediately suggest REI. This is exactly the reason I chose my first trip with them to be cycling in Canada’s oldest National Park.

So, for those looking for alternatives, the first company that comes to mind and most closely replicates REI’s areas of expertise is Backroads. This is America’s oldest, best known and by most estimates largest active travel company, established in 1979 and still owned and operated by its founder, Tom Hale (and his family). However, Backroads is definitely a luxury company, and across the board is more upscale than REI Adventures—don’t expect camping trips, unless you count luxury glamping on African safaris.

Backroads is widely considered one of the very best active travel outfitters in the world and has won spots on Travel + Leisure Magazine’s coveted annual World’s Best Awards Tour Operators list—including the most recent one in 2024—a list open to all sorts of tour operators, not just active travel. They also offer a lot of things REI never did, including a global slate of exotic destinations, and were pioneers in boat-based active travel, with dozens of trips on European river cruises and ocean-going vessels.

But Backroads does overlap with REI a lot, especially in terms of offering shorter tips, from 4-days; many women’s-only departures; and a lot of U.S. destinations, including National Parks. They also offer a full mix of hiking, cycling and multi-sport trips, often with different options in the same National Parks. In fact, they have a near-perfect substitute for my trip, the Banff to Jasper cycling tour. The REI version covers 236-miles in six days of riding and costs $4,299. The Backroads itinerary offers four daily options with myriad permutations of distance options between 133-297-miles. But it stays in the highest end lodging in the region, three standout luxury hotels, all of which I have been to and all of which are fabulous, the Fairmont Banff Springs, Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge and the exquisite Relais & Chateaux Post Hotel in Lake Louise. For $5,199 it is probably a better buy than the trip I chose, given the increased white glove treatment.

G Adventures is another well-established, large active travel specialist that covers many National Parks in the U.S. and Canada and does offer camping in addition to hotels, with a price point substantially lower than Backroads. However, many of its trips are less active focused, and often mix exploring National Parks with more sedentary tourism elsewhere, such as combining visits to the Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree, Yosemite and Zion National Parks with Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

Where G Adventures is more purely active and has the most direct overlap with REI Adventures is in Alaska, where both companies offer several different hike and multi-sport trips including Denali National Park.

A final comparable option is offered by sister companies Country Walkers and VBT Bicycling Vacations, which also overlap with the REI Adventures market for hiking and biking respectively. Country Walkers has guided hiking trips to Bryce & Zion National Parks in Utah, Olympic NP in Washington, Acadia NP in Maine, and Canada’s Banff, all REI classics. VBT offers cycling trips to Acadia, Bryce Canyon, Zion and other parks, as well as Banff.

There are a lot of other standout active travel companies I often recommend for hiking and cycling vacations, but most of them do not specialize in the areas REI Adventures was known for, especially domestic National Parks, so I have focused above on those that are the best substitutes.