Taking the back road: how one CEO's love of travel inspired a company that offers vigorous activity with all the comforts of home - Executive Life - Tom Hale of tour operator Backroads - Company Profile

Chief Executive, The, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Catherine Fredman

Jim Bildner used to organize his own bicycling vacations. He would plan the itinerary and book accommodations, make reservations at restaurants, hire guides and arrange for equipment. But as chairman and CEO of Tier Technologies, a Boston-based consulting firm, he no longer had time for such details. Then he heard about the trips offered by Backroads.

"I have to confess, the first time I signed up, it was a large leap of faith," Bildner recalls. "It's very difficult for me to take any time off, so when I do, I want to maximize the experience. Heretofore, I'd done all the planning. Now, I was ceding everything to them."

After a week of pedaling 500 miles through southern Alaska, Bildner was hooked. "They do a wonderful job in the planning, and the bikes are great. It turned out to be a perfect decision," he says.

The path to Bildner's decision began nearly 26 years ago in another man's dream. Tom Hale woke up at 2 a.m. on a spring night in 1979 with the then-unheard-of idea of making a living by guiding people on bicycle trips. He bounded out of bed and scribbled his thoughts, eight pages of chicken-scratch that ultimately created a company and pioneered an industry. "I had a respectable career as an environmental planner and I threw it all away to ride my bike," Hale recalls. "My friends and family thought I was crazy.

When Hale founded Backroads, the active-travel market was defined by extremes. At one end were luxury safaris to exotic destinations; at the other were rough-and-ready camping trips. There was no middle ground of tour companies that linked inn-to-inn itineraries, provided a support van and enhanced the trip with meals at good restaurants, stops at points of interest and guides chosen as much for their knowledge of local culture as for their ability to fix a broken sprocket. If you wanted to pedal through Provence or hike the hills of Vermont, you had to make all the arrangements yourself. "We quickly established a niche as a company offering the nicer hotels and cuisine and diversity of experience," Hale says. "We introduced the notion that you could have a physically active vacation but still have creature comforts."

Nearly 26 years later, Hale's dream has become the model for an active-travel vacation, and Backroads, based in Berkeley, Calif., is the world's leading active-travel company. With more than 1,500 annual departures on 134 different bicycling, walking, hiking and multisport trips to 105 destinations around the globe, Backroads tops the charts in market share, in revenue and in number of guests, many of whom are executives looking to make the most of their prized vacation time.

Plenty of other tour operators offer similar trips to Burgundy, Tuscany, the great national parks of America's West, the Canadian Rockies and other perennially popular spots. Backroads doesn't gravitate to the ultra-luxurious hotels that are de rigueur on a Butterfield & Robinson trip, for example, nor does it match the lower prices of The World Outdoors. It differentiates itself through a combination of planning, people and personal choice.

"You experience a place in a lot more depth than you would if you were planning your own trip," says Michael Brown, a Backroads three-peater and chairman of Quantum, a $1 billion data storage company in Milpitas, Calif. His cycling trip in Burgundy was marked by private wine tastings in candlelit caves, a customized tour of the cathedral in Vezelay and a stroll through the 12th-century Clos de Vougeot vineyards guided by local wine experts, interspersed with afternoons pedaling along lesser known byways. "Backroads is in an area so frequently that they can make all the local connections," says Brown. "You'd never be able to know exactly where to go to find that on your own.

Fellow cyclists are another perk. The self-selecting nature of active trips ensures that group members--the average group size is 18--are people with similar interests and diverse backgrounds. "What I like about Backroads is that it isn't just a bunch of CEOs," says Bildner, who has five Backroads trips under his belt, including hiking and biking in the Swiss Alps with his 16-year-old daughter. "It's not a country club experience."

Managers especially like the fact that no one manages them on a Backroads trip. "There's a lot of choice, so you can customize each day to fit whatever you're looking for," Brown says. "If you want to bike 100 miles a day, you can do it. Or you can do 30 miles and spend more time at lunch or seeing some site along the way. If you want to sit the day out in the hotel, you can do that, too. You don't feel the rigidity of having to get 10 miles done in the next hour. And they have a sag wagon, so if that hill is a lot tougher than you thought, you can hitch a ride in the van."

David Pottruck expected that kind of choice--it's now the norm on most active-travel trips--but the president and co-CEO of San Francisco-based Charles Schwab was surprised by how readily the guides accommodated spontaneity, which is usually sacrificed to the demands of the itinerary. When someone spotted a golf course en route through Italy's Veneto region, Pottruck and a bunch of fellow cyclists had no problem stopping for nine holes before dinner. "You're really the master of your own destiny," he says.