Are You a Tour Operator? A Trans Caledonia Case Study
Posted on in Business News , Cycles News
Some cycling businesses that think they're running an "event" are in fact, legally, operating as a tour operator. Joanna Evans, Head of Bikmo for Business, sits down with Chris Hutchens, co-founder of Trans Caledonia, in the next instalment of a series of articles.
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A while back, I wrote about a pattern I kept seeing: cycling businesses that think they're running an "event" when, legally, they're operating as a tour operator. It's not just a technicality. It changes what you're liable for and what your insurance actually needs to do.
Rather than talk in hypotheticals again, I wanted to show what this looks like in practice. So I sat down with Chris Hutchens, co-founder of Trans Caledonia, Scotland's first and only multi-day mountain bike enduro race, to talk through how they arrived at the right cover, and what they'd underestimated along the way.
A Quick Recap
If you're organising more than one element of a package, be it accommodation, transport, meals, or guided activities, you could be a tour operator under the Package Travel and Linked Travel Arrangements Regulations (2018). It doesn't matter how small the group is. The moment you bundle these elements together and charge for the experience, the regulations apply to you.
Meet Trans Caledonia
Trans Caledonia is a six-day blind enduro that moves riders across some of Scotland's best trail destinations, from Aberdeenshire to the Highlands, Perthshire and the Scottish Borders. The 2026 edition ran 6-13 September, with 80 riders from 19 nationalities racing stages they haven't seen before. The package is all-inclusive: transport and uplift throughout, accommodation every night, full race timing, bike wash and mechanic support at each stop, and a finisher's ceilidh to close it out.
As Chris put it:
"Trans Caledonia is six days, 80 riders, and a full operation moving the length of the country with them: trails, transfers, hotels, meals, the lot. Partnering with Bikmo means that operation is properly covered, not just the bit that happens on the trail."
Why Standard Event Insurance Wouldn't Have Worked
If you're organising two or more parts of a package, standard event cover isn't built for you. With Trans Caledonia, that's accommodation, meals, guided activities and the race itself, all under one roof. In cases like this, it's vital to have an events policy running alongside tour operator cover, with each providing the right protection for its part of the operation.
Tour operator cover brings in Public and Products Liability, protecting against customer injury, illness, or property damage while clients are in the care of your subcontractors or suppliers – hotels, transport providers and the like – though this can be arranged with or without cover for the event or activity itself, depending on risk. It also brings in Professional Indemnity, defending your business if a client claims financial loss due to incorrect booking details or mistakes in your promotional material.
Chris found this out through his own broker conversations:
"Standard event cover simply doesn't touch things like a hotel cancelling on us mid-week, or a transfer failing between venues, because it was never designed to. We needed someone who'd actually price the risk of the whole trip, not just the racing."
What Could Go Wrong
For Trans Caledonia, the risks that felt most real weren't on the trail. They were everything happening around it: driver hours, the potential for vehicle breakdowns moving 80 riders and their bikes between venues, a supplier not turning up and leaving riders without a meal.
"We need to be ready to react with other options on the spot, not scrambling to work out who's liable after the fact."
This is the part organisers tend to underestimate most. If tour operator regulations apply to you, you're ultimately responsible for the performance of the whole package, including your third-party suppliers. Food poisoning at the hotel might be the hotel's negligence, but if it stops your customer from riding the next day, that's suddenly your problem to resolve.
How Tour Operator Cover Responds
Beyond liability and professional indemnity, two things are worth specific attention.
The first is bonding. If the Package Travel Regulations apply to your business, you're required to safeguard customer money, a financial guarantee provided by an external insurer or surety so that, if the worst happened, the bond would cover refunds or bring customers home.
The second is crisis containment, included as standard in our tour operator policies. It's there for situations that aren't about liability at all: a fire at a hotel with no one hurt but everyone shaken, or an incident that needs careful handling to protect the brand.
As Chris put it, working with a specialist changed the conversation entirely:
"With a generic broker, you spend most of the conversation explaining your own event to them before you can even get to the cover. With Bikmo, we skipped a lot of that entirely. It's the difference between an insurer who covers you and one who understands what you're running."
Questions to Ask Yourself
If any of this sounds familiar, it's worth checking:
- Are you organising more than one element of a package? If so, the Package Travel Regulations likely apply to you.
- Do you have a bond in place to safeguard customer money if the worst happened?
- Does your policy include crisis containment, or are you on your own if something goes wrong that isn't a straightforward liability claim?
- Have you mapped your full operation, not just the racing or riding element, to see where your responsibility for the package begins and ends?
As Chris put it, the trail days are the visible, fun part. The transfers, hotels and contingency planning are what actually make or break the week, and that's exactly where the right cover needs to be doing its job.
If you're not sure where you stand, that's exactly the conversation to have with a broker who understands what you're actually running, not just what you're calling it.
Want to know more? Fancy a chat with me or the rest of the team? You can speak to us directly at forbusiness@bikmo.com