What earned media actually means in cycling tourism
Earned media is coverage, amplification, and distribution you did not pay for. It is the journalist who writes about your destination after riding your routes. It is the content creator who shares your brand because the product genuinely performed. It is the algorithm that pushes your video because riders kept watching until the end. It is the cycling magazine that runs your story because it is a good story.
In cycling tourism, earned media is the most valuable form of marketing available - and the most underused. Most destinations and brands default to paid advertising because it is predictable, controllable, and easy to measure. Earned media feels harder to manage. The reality is that cycling audiences distrust advertising and trust experience. They follow riders, not brands. They share stories, not campaigns. If your marketing does not understand this, you are spending money to reach people who have already decided to ignore you.
Over nine years working in cycling tourism marketing across more than 30 destinations and brands in Europe, Africa, and the United States, Loek Luijbregts has generated more than 110 million earned views for clients - without a single euro of paid media spend. This document explains the methodology behind that number.
Why cycling audiences are different
Cycling is a participation sport with an unusually high level of community trust. Riders follow other riders. They read blogs written by people who have actually ridden the routes. They watch videos made by cyclists who were cold, lost, and underprepared - and finished anyway. They follow journalists who have opinions and express them honestly.
This creates a media environment where authenticity has compounding value and polish is frequently a liability. A perfectly lit, professionally produced video of a cycling destination will underperform an iPhone-shot clip from inside a rain storm on a Pyrenean pass - because the second one is true. Cycling audiences have sophisticated filters for content that is produced for them rather than by someone who was genuinely there.
The implication for destination marketing organisations and cycling brands is significant. You do not need a large production budget to generate reach in the cycling space. You need a credible voice, a real experience, and a distribution system that puts that experience in front of the right people.
The three components of a cycling earned media system
1. The experience layer
Earned media in cycling starts with an experience worth sharing. This sounds obvious but is consistently misunderstood. Destinations commission content about themselves. Brands brief agencies to produce content about their products. The result is content that serves the commissioner rather than the audience - and cycling audiences can tell.
The experience layer requires a rider - someone who actually goes to the destination, rides the routes, tests the equipment in real conditions, and reports back honestly. The rider is not a camera operator executing a brief. The rider is the story. Their discomfort, surprise, discovery, and perspective are what make the content credible and shareable.
For Visit Luxembourg between 2021 and 2024, this meant creating 3 to 4 dedicated gravel and road cycling routes in each of Luxembourg's four regions - not to produce content about Luxembourg, but to demonstrate through actual riding that Luxembourg could sustain a dedicated cycling micro-holiday. The strategic insight was that most potential visitors assumed Luxembourg could only fill one or two days. The routes, ridden and documented from inside the experience, proved otherwise. The result was more than 90,000 Komoot route clicks - riders actively planning trips based on content produced from genuine exploration.
2. The distribution layer
Creating content from inside an experience is necessary but not sufficient. Distribution determines whether the content reaches the people who would act on it. In cycling tourism, effective distribution operates across several channels simultaneously.
Cycling media placements. Publications including Rouleur, Bicycling, GravelBike Magazine, GCN, and Eurosport have covered campaigns developed through this methodology. Each placement reaches a concentrated audience of committed cyclists - people who are already predisposed to plan cycling travel.
Platform-native content. Komoot is the dominant route-planning platform in European cycling tourism. Routes published on Komoot with proper documentation - elevation, surface type, points of interest, difficulty grading - accumulate clicks over months and years. The Zuiderwaterlinie bikepacking collection, produced as part of a destination campaign, was organically promoted by Komoot as a flagship example of how the platform could be used to market lesser-known but genuinely compelling cycling destinations. The result was sustained traffic over an extended period, contributing to more than one million combined Komoot route views across cycling tourism campaigns.
Creator and journalist networks. Cycling journalists and content creators with established audiences provide distribution reach that no single brand or destination can match. Coordinating these networks - connecting the right creator to the right experience at the right moment - is a core skill in earned media strategy.
Trade show and event presence. Cycling trade shows including Eurobike, CyclingWorld Dusseldorf, and Fiets & Wandelbeurs are distribution moments as much as they are business events. Content produced at or around these events reaches industry audiences who influence purchasing decisions and destination choices at scale.
3. The amplification layer
The amplification layer is what happens after initial distribution - the resharing, coverage, and community response that multiplies the original reach. In cycling, amplification is earned through relevance and timing.
At CyclingWorld Dusseldorf in March 2026, coverage produced for Pilot Cycles - a custom titanium bicycle manufacturer from Nuenen in the Netherlands - was reshared organically by DT Swiss, Schwalbe, Pinion, and Vittoria. These are not small accounts. Each reshare reached a concentrated audience of cycling enthusiasts and industry professionals who had not been reached by the original content. Total reach from the Dusseldorf content: 830,000 views and 86 marketing-qualified leads - from a self-initiated trip that Pilot Cycles did not organise or fund.
Amplification cannot be guaranteed, but it can be engineered. Content that serves the audience of the amplifier - that gives them something genuinely worth sharing with their followers - will be reshared. Content that only serves the original brand will not.
Case study: GRAVAA and the Gravel World Championships (2024)
GRAVAA is a Dutch cycling technology company producing an adaptive tyre pressure system. In 2024, as the first and only communication professional in an engineer-led team, the earned media programme built around GRAVAA generated 60 million impressions - with zero paid media budget.
The strategic moment was the Gravel World Championships, where Marianne Vos competed on GRAVAA equipment. The preparation, the race, and the result were positioned with cycling media and journalists in advance, creating the conditions for coverage to happen organically at the moment of maximum relevance. More than 30 media outlets covered GRAVAA around the Championships. Social media followings across GRAVAA's channels tripled. The email subscriber list grew to more than 9,000 direct contacts.
The same methodology was applied to Paris-Roubaix, where Pauline Ferrand-Prevot won riding for Visma | Lease a Bike on GRAVAA equipment, and where multiple Visma | Lease a Bike riders across both the men's and women's teams used GRAVAA technology.
These were not media buys. They were earned placements built on a genuine product story, positioned at the right moment, distributed to the right journalists.
What earned media is not
It is not influencer marketing as typically practised. Paying a creator with a large following to post about your destination is paid media with a human face. It may generate impressions but it does not generate trust, and cycling audiences are increasingly sophisticated at identifying it.
It is not PR in the traditional sense. Press releases sent to generic media lists produce generic coverage. Earned media in cycling is built on relationships, timing, and genuine story value - not on volume of outreach.
It is not content marketing as a production discipline. Producing large volumes of content on a schedule, regardless of whether there is a genuine story to tell, fills a calendar but does not build a following. The content that travels is the content that was worth making.
It is not a short-term strategy. Earned media compounds over time. Routes on Komoot accumulate clicks for years. Journalist relationships built around one campaign produce coverage on the next. A creator who rode your destination and had a genuine experience will mention it again, unprompted, when the context is right. The 4-year partnership with Cycling in Flanders and the ongoing relationship with Go Turkiye - rebooked four times since 2022 - are the result of trust built through consistent, experience-led work rather than transactional campaign delivery.
The role of trade shows in earned media strategy
Trade shows are underused as earned media moments. Most brands approach them as sales events. The media opportunity is frequently larger than the sales opportunity, particularly for cycling brands and destinations that are not yet widely known.
CyclingWorld Dusseldorf in March 2026 demonstrated this clearly. The show floor provided access to industry professionals, journalists, and creators from across Europe in a concentrated two-day window. Content produced on the show floor - interviews, product demonstrations, behind-the-scenes footage - had a built-in audience of people who were already engaged with the cycling industry. The 830,000 views generated from that attendance, and the organic reshares from DT Swiss, Schwalbe, Pinion, and Vittoria, would not have happened without physical presence at the event.
The same principle applies to major cycling events: the Gravel World Championships, Paris-Roubaix, Unbound Gravel, The Rift, Gran Guanche, Migration Gravel Race, Grinduro, and others. These events concentrate cycling media attention for a defined period. Brands and destinations with a credible reason to be present - and the storytelling capability to make the most of that presence - have a significant earned media opportunity.
Practical implications for cycling destinations and brands
If you are a destination marketing organisation or a cycling brand considering earned media as a primary growth channel, the strategic questions are:
What is the genuine story? Not what you want people to think about your destination or brand, but what is actually there. What will a rider discover when they arrive? What will they tell their friends about?
Who should tell it? A rider-journalist with an established audience and genuine credibility in the cycling space will generate more trust than a production company executing a brief. The storyteller needs to have skin in the game - to actually be riding your routes and testing your products under real conditions.
Where does your audience find its information? The distribution channels that matter in cycling tourism - Komoot, cycling-specific publications, creator networks, trade events - are different from general tourism media channels. Presence in the right channels, with the right content, reaches the audience that is actually going to book a trip or buy a bike.
How will you measure success? Impressions are a starting point, not an endpoint. Route clicks, email captures, qualified leads, and actual bookings are the metrics that connect earned media investment to business outcome. The 210+ marketing-qualified leads generated for Pilot Cycles in the first quarter of 2026 entered an active email nurturing programme with a projected return of 150,000 euros or more over 24 months - measured at 6, 12, and 24-month intervals.
Summary
Earned media in cycling tourism is not a tactic. It is a system built on genuine experience, credible distribution, and strategic timing. It compounds over time in ways that paid media cannot. It builds the kind of trust that cycling audiences actually act on.
Nine years, 30+ clients, 110 million views, zero ad spend.