Pannier website for travelling cyclists goes live

Pannier is a new mapping-based website resource for cyclists to find places to stay and rest along major routes in the UK.

Launched this week, Pannier was created by Stefan Amato, David Rushton and Nick Goodliff. The website intends to make it easy to locate cycle-friendly accommodation along the major cycling routes in and around the UK.

It aims to connect cycle-friendly accommodation connecting local and independent businesses with travelling cyclists, so you can more easily find somewhere nice to stay and eat during a cycle tour.

Born out of a frustration when finding good places to stay Stefan and two friends cycled the 1000 miles from Lands End to John O'Groats, the seed of an idea was planted: Pannier was later born after they realised there was an exciting opportunity to offer a useful service for cyclists looking for good places to stay.

Stefan Amato, co-founder of Pannier, says: "We were always frustrated with listings that weren't visually related to a route or location and there wasn't a site that made the planning of cycle travel accessible or straight-forward.

“For us, Pannier - solves both, and supports local, independent accommodations in the process."

With long-distance cycling a popular and enjoyable past time in the summer months and routes such as LEJOG continuing to be extremely popular, such a resource can only be a good thing. As someone who has done a little touring in the UK, I know it can be difficult to find overnight accommodation that will happily take in cyclists and provide safe and secure bicycle storage.

The website aims to make it easy to find cycle-friendly accomodation. It's simply a case of choosing a route (or soon an event, that's in the next phase of development) and the map will display available accommodation around your current position. Alongside the results will be displayed information on each the available accommodation with their contact details.

At the moment the list of accomodation is limited to a handful along recognised routes,  inluding Lands End to John O'Groats, but Pannier tell us that they're planning to add more routes, events and listings over the coming months until they cover the length and breadth of the UK. They also plan to add the ability to plot your own route and have listings displayed to you along that route.

It's probably easiest to take a look at the map here www.pannier.cc/Map

It's an exciting and ambitious project. We certainly can't think of any other website aiming to do anything like this. We'll leave the last word to Stefan:“We are really excited to get Pannier live for cyclists. We firmly believe that we have created a resource that will make cycle travel more accessible to cyclists of all levels, especially as we continue to grow our library of routes and events."

www.pannier.cc