DuVine Bets Luxury Travelers Want the Effort Back

The company was built by Andy Levine over nearly three decades around a single proposition: that the day should cost something before the reward arrives. Its itineraries move travelers by bicycle through Burgundy, Tuscany, Mallorca, the Dolomites and dozens of other regions, with very good hotels, long meals and plenty of wine waiting at the end of the route.

Getting there involves weather, climbing and physical work. Dinner, in this construction, has to be earned — and the exertion is presented as the thing that fixes the trip in memory long after the scenery fades.

That runs counter to the way the top of the travel market has traditionally been designed. Luxury spent decades building a sealed, frictionless bubble meant to remove every inconvenience, and the argument now is that a growing share of premium travelers want out of it.

What is drawing interest instead, according to the case being made, is nature, physical effort and sensory experience that is difficult — sometimes impossible — to reproduce. The scent of trees on a forest ride toward lunch counts for more than another polished lobby.

The underlying observation is that beauty alone guarantees nothing: a traveler can stand in the most spectacular places on earth and register almost nothing at all. Friction, on this reading, is a feature of the product rather than a flaw to be engineered away.