44|5 Cycling Tours has a ‘rating system’ for all our tours, which we hope people take note of before booking a tour. Our current labels are:

• Active
• Moderate
• Challenging
• Hors Catégorie

Most of our tours end up being ‘Challenging’ or ‘Hors Categorie’, since the majority of them are 7 days long and always in the mountains. However, we have a couple of tours that we’d like to separate from ‘Challenging’ because a) they are considerably easier, and b) we don’t want to scare people away by calling them something that they aren’t.

Granted, words are subjective, and one person’s ‘Challenging’ is another person’s ‘walk in the park’. We try to give stats to let people know what we mean (see link above).

Anyway, we were thinking of adding one more in between ‘Moderate’ and ‘Challenging’ and had the idea changing the whole thing to a ‘category’ system, like pro races have, i.e. ‘Cat 4’ would be ‘active’ and ‘Cat 3’ would become ‘Moderate’, etc.

I think that any wording would be fine as long as there is a clear explanation behind it, but I’m not convinced we’ve hit on the right ones (words) yet.

Any suggestions creative readers?