Outfitters can better prepare clients for travel.

Here’s how and why it matters.

By: Cassandra Brooklyn

I’m in love with active travel, and I try to get in as many hiking and biking trips as possible (if it’s a good year, I’ll also get in a rafting trip and some camping).

Over the past few years, I’ve hiked Scotland’s 96-mile West Highland Way, plus hundreds of miles through Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Slovenia, and Spain (where I also biked 100+ miles). I’ve spent 7-10 days at a time hiking Italy’s Dolomites, Montenegro’s mountainous national parks, and rugged Alps trails in Italy, France, and Switzerland. All of these hikes were part of organized group hiking tours led by half a dozen different tour operators. During them, I enjoyed spectacular hiking, had excellent guides, and made good friends along the way. I’ve also encountered quite a few people who I don’t believe should have been on these tours (including numerous travelers who admitted they never would have signed up had they known how hard it would be).

Travelers underestimate their fitness. What do operators do about this?

Most outdoor tour operators send guests information about trail distances and difficulty prior to the trip, and these metrics are also typically included in the online trip description. Travelers are often asked to complete a survey to give the operator and guide an idea of how fit they are, how much they hike, and whether they have any injuries or health concerns. While these are important steps, I think they are insufficient. Why? Because people like to overestimate their abilities and underestimate their shortcomings (myself included).

By nature, many of us are optimistic, so we believe we are fit enough to tackle these trips. In some cases, it’s naivete, though I’ve heard from quite a few hiking and biking guides that “people lie all the time.” It’s also not limited to hardcore outdoor trips. I once interviewed a doctor on an adventure cruise (where several hikes were offered throughout the trip), who told me he constantly sees injuries and overexertion among travelers of all ages. He told me that many travelers are largely sedentary all year, and they push themselves too hard on vacation because it’s the only big trip they’ll do that year and they “don’t want to miss out.” Unfortunately, this mindset often leads to injury.

Who decides who gets to go on a trip?

On one of my previous mountain hiking trips, the trip leader told me that he had fielded a question from the main office as to whether a certain client would be able to handle the hike. This particular trip had been rated 3 out of 5 on the company’s difficulty scale, and during the trip, I clocked numerous steep, rocky, challenging hikes that were over 8 miles long and with 2,000 feet of elevation.

Apparently, the client – an 80-year-old man – was already signed up for the hike, but he had just broken his arm and still wanted to join. The company wondered if the tour leader thought it was a good idea, so he posed the question to me to see what I thought. “ARE YOU F’ING KIDDING ME?” I blurted out. “Absolutely not!” I’m half the other client’s age with two fully functioning arms, and I still found myself slipping here and there. While age itself isn’t always a determinant of fitness, it often contributes to it, and balance becomes more of an issue in older adults.

There were quite a few times when my foot slipped on a rock or I lost my footing. I was able to catch myself, but I saw others slip and fall onto their butts. What happens when an 80-year-old man falls and only has one arm to catch himself? Not only could he further injure his broken arm, but he could also break a hip or a knee. If he falls on a steep incline, he could tumble down a hill and seriously injure himself or worse.

(Side note: I also saw an 80-year-old man fall several times during a two-week rafting trip in the Grand Canyon. He injured himself so much that it took several people to get him in and out of the raft numerous times per day. Had we not been so remote, guides say they would have called a helicopter to airlift him out.)

Should it really be up to an individual tour leader to decide if it’s safe for someone to participate based on their age or a specific injury? What if he or she makes the wrong call? A lot of pressure is on their shoulders for that person to make it through the trip safely, especially considering said traveler may have grossly overestimated their fitness and dangerously underestimated their physical concerns.

Balancing safety and business

So, how do we balance safety and ethics with business and profitability? If we are being honest with ourselves, we know that a huge chunk of adventure travel clients are 60+ (as are cruise travelers) simply because that is the demographic with the time and money to travel. Were there more 30- and 40-somethings with enough vacation days and disposable income to join the group hikes I’ve been on, I’m certain many would also have overestimated their fitness and joined trips that were unsafe for them. I don’t mean to imply that younger travelers are automatically more fit (or more honest when it comes to evaluating their own physical health); there simply are fewer of them on many outdoor trips that don’t specifically cater to that demographic.

Profit margins are slim and many companies may worry they can’t afford to place tight restrictions that could prevent healthy paying customers from coming on board, so there is a bit of a tightrope to be walked.

Is it possible to walk that tightrope with a safety net below us and a travel insurance policy in our pocket?

One hiking tour guide of mine shared that he believes everyone over the age of 60 should provide a doctor’s note clearing them for participation. The three women in their late 60s who left me in their dust during that 96-mile Scotland hike might balk at such a suggestion, but considering how many 60- and 70-somethings I’ve seen with dangerously fast heart rates struggling to catch their breath on steep Alpine hikes (including one who had to be airlifted out after a back injury), I believe the point is worth considering.

I’m not sure it is necessary, practical, or ethical to set an age at which clients must provide a doctor’s excuse, but I think a panel of doctors is better suited to answer that question than a travel writer, hiking guide, or tour operator.

Training for outdoor adventures

Many of the people I meet on trekking trips are avid hikers who don’t need special training because their lives are already so active that they can drop into the Alps or Dolomites and hike with ease. In other cases, travelers may be generally fit, but they trained for the trip by hiking in forests, state parks, national parks, or mountainous areas near their home to help them prepare for the elevation they’d encounter on the trip.

I live in New York City, a largely flat destination with no nearby mountains to climb, and even if there were, I don’t own a car, so I can’t reach them anyway. So when I need to train for a big trip, it’s not realistic to count on wilderness areas and high-elevation trails that can mimic the environment I’ll be visiting. I need to work with what I’ve got, and what I’ve got is a lot of concrete.

As a New Yorker, I walk 4-6 miles each day, much of it built into my daily life of running errands, walking to and from the train, and up and down subway platforms. Still, there isn’t a lot of elevation in there, and I live on the ground floor, so I could go days or weeks at a time without walking up more than a few flights of stairs if I wanted to. As such, I need to go out of my way to work in elevation.

Though we don’t have any huge forests or mountains in New York City, we do have parks, and some of the largest ones have forests. These forests are small enough that rural residents would laugh at them, but large enough that you can hike several miles of trails without running into any cars. At my favorite park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, I hike 5-10 miles at a time, 2-3 times per week when I’m training. To get in those miles, I’m often hiking in circles or re-walking the same paths over and over, but so be it. The elevation on these mostly flat hikes would only be about 100-300 feet, so to get in elevation, I become that crazy person running up and down staircases and up and down steep trail sections over and over and over until I am completely out of breath. I walk it off, follow some flat paths for a while, then hit the hills and stairs again. I live in a 10-story apartment building, so my training also includes “hiking” up and down dingy stairwells.

Sometimes, I use the fitness tracking app, Strava, to track my distance and elevation, and sometimes I’ll just rely on the metrics my iPhone automatically tracks. I’m a big fan of going tech-free, so I often leave my phone at home and don’t track at all. However, having done these hikes long enough, I have a pretty good idea of how far I’ve gone, and even if I don’t, if I’m out there for 90 minutes or two hours and I’m exhausted, I know I got in a good workout.

Preparing clients for travel

As mentioned previously, most tour operators share distance and elevation profiles with clients before a trip. Still, I think most could do a much better job of communicating exactly what travelers should expect, how to determine if they are up for the trip, and if so, how to train for it. I’m speaking with at least one tour operator about exactly how to do this, so they can better educate and prepare clients for successful hikes. After all, stunning scenery is harder to appreciate when you have to stay back at the hotel because you pulled a muscle or twisted an ankle.

For instance, many tour operators will say something along the lines of “most hikes will be from 5-8 miles with 1,800-2,200 feet of elevation.” Great. As an avid hiker, I know exactly what that means, and I know I’m prepared for it. However, if someone doesn’t hike that much (or if they do hike, but they don’t track their distance and elevation), those metrics mean absolutely nothing to them.

How far is 6 miles (or even better, how far does 6 miles feel when you add elevation)? How high is 2,000 feet? Is most of that 2,000 feet of elevation at the beginning of the hike – or worse, right at the end of the hike? – or is it evenly spread out?

For people with bad knees (like me), going downhill is actually much harder, and I find that very few operators do a good job of communicating how much downhill there is. Add in unexpected slippery gravel on a steep decline and a trip gets exponentially harder. Many tour operators rate their outdoor trips on some internal scale, often from 1 to 5, with 1 being the easiest and 5 being the hardest. However, these ratings are somewhat arbitrary, and they’re also not consistent across brands. Furthermore, difficulty ratings may only take into account distance and elevation gain – not steep declines or trail conditions, which matter more to some hikers. If someone considers themselves in good shape, they may automatically assume a level 3 trip would be easy simply because it’s in the middle of the spectrum.

How does someone prepare for a hike if they don’t fully understand how long, far, steep, and difficult the hike is to begin with? One strategy that I’ve discussed with tour operators is breaking down distance and elevation into more easily understood increments. Many cities have tracks with measured distances to give travelers an idea of how far they are walking, and some park trails display distances on signage.

Apps like AllTrails can also help identify local trails, their distances, and elevation profiles. Fitness apps like Strava measure a lot of these metrics, as do smartwatches and smartphones, which often have these trackers built in. I recall trying to “get fit” in college, well before the smart device revolution, and I measured the distance I wanted to walk by driving my car that route and watching the odometer.

Understanding and preparing clients for elevation is often more important than distance, since elevation gain usually exhausts people (especially when hikes take place high above sea level). Again, telling a traveler that hikes will include 2,000 feet of elevation doesn’t mean anything if they’re not used to tracking elevation. If they just walk in the park (or, as some group hike participants have told me, they are “just avid dog walkers, not really hikers”), they likely have no idea how steep or flat their walks are. I suggest breaking that information down by estimating how many flights of stairs someone would have to climb to reach the elevation on typical hikes.

Breaking it down into easily understood metrics

If you tell someone they would have to walk up 200 flights of stairs to reach the elevation on most hikes on the tour, several things could happen.

  1. People who are not fit enough to safely do such a hike will realize this and opt out (in which case you can steer them towards an easier trip).
  2. Those able to get in good enough shape will now have a measurable goal for their training.
  3. Some will still sign up for the hike knowing it is likely out of reach and potentially dangerous.

While this third option is a real possibility (remember the hiking guide who told me clients “lie all the time” about their fitness?), I suspect far fewer would fall into this category now that they better understand what’s expected.

Cassandra Brooklyn

Cassandra is a New York City-based freelance writer, content strategist, and product tester. She’s written about discovering state and national parks for The Wall Street Journal and National Geographic; about outdoor adventure in Sri Lanka and expedition cruising in Canada for AFAR; and dozens of outdoor gear reviews for Forbes and CNN.

She ran a small international tour company called EscapingNY, authored the cycling guidebook Cuba by Bike, and contributed to Lonely Planet and Fodor’s guidebooks on Egypt, Costa Rica, and the USA. Cassandra also has extensive experience with grief, loss, and caregiving, and currently writes a Grief & Loss newsletter. To see what she’s working on and to connect about business opportunities, follow her on LinkedIn.