Guided biking tours in Italy, France, Greece, Croatia, Slovenia and Spain
Owner & Manager: Brett Naisby has been cycling amongst the vineyards and castles of Europe since 1990, when he guided his first bike tour for Butterfield & Robinson. After graduating from McGill University with a Master's Degree in International Studies, Brett spent three years with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs before being lured back to Europe and the open road. He guided full time for B&R for four years before deciding to establish his own tour company in 1996, called Customwalks, and Mondo Bike Tours is its cycling division. Since then, Brett has been running bike tours throughout Italy and France, and more recently Spain, Greece, Croatia, and Slovenia. He is an avid cyclist himself, and spends six months of the year biking around his summer home in the Chianti region of Tuscany, and the other half at his home in Christchurch, New Zealand. He continues to research and develop new tours, and guides several departures a year. He is ably helped by the wonderful people you see below. Besides the "Mondo Bike Tours" and "Customwalks" brands, Brett also established "Scooterbella" in 2006, which does guided scooter and Vespa tours in Tuscany, Puglia, Croatia, Provence, and Andalusia. Brett divides his time between the Customwalks offices in New Zealand and Tuscany (where he oversees the European summer season) and his home town of Ottawa, Canada.
Brett Naisby, Owner-Director, Speranza Travel Ltd. (at the summit of Mont Ventoux, 2016)
www.mondobiketours.com, www.customwalks.com, www.scooterbella.com
What makes us different?
1 Our guides
Our mix of North American and European managers and guides allows us to understand what our clientele want and expect in terms of service while providing them with a trip that benefits from our intimate local knowledge.
Unlike many other companies, our managers and guides live in the areas where we run our trips.
Although we are a small company, we have been enjoying our work since 1996.
2 Experience
Our guides are dedicated to creating both a fabulously fun and an educational travel experience. All of them are accomplished in their own right and are great company on and off the trail. Many have multiple degrees and our ranks include former university professors, business consultants, successful artists (mosaicists, painters, and ceramicists), actors, translators and interpreters, authors, bike racers, and a master sommelier.
The guides are there to look after you, entertain you, inform you and generally enrich your travel experience. They add a lot of value to the tour.
3 Our History
Twenty-one years after completing our first bike tour in Umbria for one person, we are still pedalling, and loving it. Since that first tour back in 1996, we have created many fabulous tours, often at the behest of repeat clients who want to keep riding with us but to new destinations. You could say that Mondo Bike Tours is a small boutique tour company as we usually run less than 10 bike tours a year, so we put our heart and soul into every one as each tour is a special event. We are not a large travel company with huge overheads to cover; we like to keep it simple and enjoy our work and our passion for travel on two wheels. There are three full-time employees at Mondo Bike Tours in addition to our guides. Our livelihood is dependent on the success of our tours and the repeat business of our customers. Happily, we love what we do, and we believe that shines through in our tours.
