How to plan a motorcycle tour
A practical, step-by-step framework for planning a multi-day ride: from picking the route to prepping the bike, sorting offline navigation and covering yourself on remote roads.
A good motorcycle tour is mostly won before you turn a wheel. The bikers who have relaxed, memorable trips are the ones who did the boring parts (fuel math, bike prep, offline maps) in advance. The ones who don't tend to spend the trip solving avoidable problems.
This is the framework we'd walk through for any multi-day bike tour, from a weekend loop to a Karakoram Highway expedition. Work through it in order.
1. Choose the route and the season
Start with the two decisions everything else hangs on: where and when. The best road in the region is worthless if its passes are snow-closed or its monsoon has washed out the approach.
- Pick the route around a season window, not the other way round. High passes and mountain roads have short open seasons.
- Check when passes open and close, and whether the region has a monsoon or landslide season that overlaps.
- Set a realistic daily distance. On touring roads with stops, 250–350 km is a full day; in the mountains, far less.
- Build in slack days for weather, mechanical trouble and the places you'll want to stay an extra night.
2. Map the days, fuel and beds
Break the route into daily stages and mark, for each day, where you'll fuel, eat and sleep. Fuel is the constraint that catches bikers out on remote routes. Pumps can be 150 km apart and not always working.
- Mark every reliable fuel stop and know your bike's real range with a margin. Carry a spare fuel bottle for the longest gap.
- Identify where you'll sleep each night, or at least the towns with options.
- Note the remote stretches with no services so you start them with fuel, water and daylight in hand.
3. Prep the bike
A tour is not the time to discover a worn tyre or a chain at the end of its life. Do a full pre-ride inspection well before departure so there's time to fix what you find.
Work through a T-CLOCS check (tyres, controls, lights, oil and fluids, chassis and stands) and service anything due within the trip's distance now rather than on the road.
See the full T-CLOCS pre-ride inspection checklist for a step-by-step walkthrough of what to check.
4. Pack deliberately
Pack from a list, not from memory: it's how you avoid both forgetting the important things and hauling dead weight. Prioritise protective gear, documents, a basic tool and spares kit, and layers for weather you don't expect.
Use the motorcycle touring packing list to build your kit by category.
6. Cover safety, documents and permits
Sort the paperwork and the what-ifs before you go. Carry licence, registration, insurance and any required permits, and leave your route and daily plan with someone at home.
Set up your safety net: emergency contacts, crash detection and SOS in your app and, for genuinely remote travel, a satellite messenger, because app-based SOS needs a signal to reach anyone.
Crash detection and SOS are best-effort aids, not a guarantee, and don't work without a signal. On remote routes, carry a satellite communicator as backup.
Frequently asked questions
How do I plan a long motorcycle trip?
Start by choosing a route and season together, then break it into daily stages marking fuel, food and beds. Prep the bike with a full pre-ride inspection, pack from a checklist, download offline maps for the whole route, and set up documents, permits and a safety plan before you leave.
How many kilometres should I ride per day on a motorcycle tour?
On good touring roads with stops, 250–350 km is a comfortable full day. In the mountains, on rough surfaces or at altitude, experienced bikers plan for far less, sometimes 100–150 km, and always build in slack days for weather and mechanical issues.
Do I need offline maps for a motorcycle tour?
For bike riders touring areas with patchy coverage, yes. Download the whole route (tiles, track, points of interest and weather) before you lose signal. An offline-first app like Apex Rider caches the entire tour so navigation keeps working with no signal.
Plan it with Apex Rider
Apex Rider turns this planning into one offline-first app: download your whole tour so navigation works past the last cell tower, run pre-ride checks and a maintenance garage, and set up crash-detection SOS and live crew tracking for the road. Free to download on Google Play and the App Store.