The Czech Republic is the 9th best destination for an active holiday, joint with Spain. Scoring in the top 10 destinations for hikers, cyclists and skiers.
By considering the number of yoga and wellness retreats, water-sport facilities, cycling routes, hiking routes and ski-slopes in the world’s 50 most visited countries, Gymcatch, a fitness software system, has found the top active holiday destinations.
The study then normalized this by the number of tourists per year, and took into account the average cost per tourist per week, to find the world’s best sporty-vacation spots.
The Czech Republic places 7th internationally and 4th within Europe as a hiking holiday destination with 5,371 listed hiking trails. In fact, the Czech Republic is a multi-category hotspot, and boasts a great variety of facilities for cyclists and skiers too with 134,141 listed cycling routes and over 700 km of ski slopes to explore.
Overall, Australia is 2022’s top active holiday destination, coming top for hiking holidays and scoring in the top 10 countries for number of water-sports facilities and yoga retreats.
Coming 2nd in the study, Brazil scored particularly well for cycling; with the 4th most routes per tourist. Norway ranked 3rd. An alternative to the ski-season favourites, France and Switzerland, Norway offers the 3rd best skiing option for international travellers when considering the length of ski slopes on offer.
Completing the top five were Switzerland in 4th place (which came top for skiing options per tourist) and the United States in 5th position (which came just behind Australia for hiking trails per tourist).
The study can also reveal the best destinations for enthusiasts of each category. Cyclists might guess correctly that Germany, France and Italy have the most listed routes, and when considering tourist numbers, Germany is the world’s best cycling destination, with 40,051 routes per 1 mill tourists. Next is Switzerland which has 18,253 per 1 million tourists, and Poland which has 17,662 per 5 million.
Finally, the study can also reveal which locations are trending for each category and active holidays in general. By using Google Search Trends analytics, we can see that, likely due to travel restrictions, the most searched for destinations for active holidays are the UK and in Europe.
Methodology
To put together the tool, Gymcatch collected the data from a variety of different sources including; Bikemap.net, Alltrails.com, Skiresort.info, budgetyourtip.com and TripAdvisor amongst many others. Once all data points were collected the number of estimated tourists (indexmundi.com) was used to normalise the data and ensure that a fair scoring system was put in place to rank the countries in the study.
