The husband and wife team Warren and Esther Sanders have spent four years travelling the world with only pedals to power them. The pair are self-proclaimed cycling fanatics, or bike bores and have announced that they have found their ideal cycling destination in the form of the Scottish area of Dumfries and Galloway.
This Scottish location has already been voted as one of the top ten places to visit in 2018 by GEO.de, the German online travel magazine. Following their cycling experiences, and their opinion that they have found an ‘absolute gem’ of a location, the couple took over the cycling company Galloway Cycling Holidays. The couple made this decision after they were approached by the company’s previous owner after hearing the couple talk of their worldwide adventures. The receipt of the prestigious accolade of featuring in the top ten list of places to visit by the German magazine will be of great benefit to the newly launched company when looking to attract German and other international visitors.
Galloway Cycling Holidays re-launched in November and has already joined seven other tourism businesses as a part of VisitScotland’s business development mission to Germany. The tree day mission that has was arranged by the national tourism body allowed industry partners to travel to Hamburg and Stuttgart in order to partake in one-to-one meetings with 16 key tour operators working in the German market.
Germany is considered to be a major international visitor market for Scotland and it is great news that GEO.de has featured Dumfries and Galloway their Top Ten Places to Visit in 2018 collections and that Visit Scotland is working hard to draw even more tourists to the country and the region. Research has shown that Germany is a significant international visitor market for Scotland and was the second largest source market for visits and expenditure in 2016, with a total recorded 355,000 trips. The volume of these trips amount to around £212 million in visitor spending.
