The bikies are moving in on traditional grey nomad turf!
According to new Victorian research, motorcyclists aged over 55 are now out-spending retired people in caravans and four-wheel drives. The rise of the grey bikie tourist, it seems, is bringing huge economic benefits to small communities.
Of course, their numbers aren’t as big as the traditional grey nomad but the fact that ‘grey bikies’ are not as self contained as caravanners and motorhomers means they inevitably spend more per person on accommodation and food.
The New South Wales high country is just one area that is well aware of the benefits the two-wheeled tourists deliver.
Tourism Snowy Mountains said it had verified the Victorian research and that the ‘grey bikies’ was a lucrative market that it had been fostering over the years.
“In the Snowy Mountains and south coast all tourism operators in this area understand the market pretty well,” the organisation’s CEO, Peter Sheppard, told the ABC. “They have actually been catering for that market in various ways for a number of decades but we have discovered recently this market is growing … particularly according to that Victorian research, by 12% a year.”
The Ulysses Club, a motorcycle club for riders aged over 40 – and with a motto of ‘Grow Old Disgracefully’ – has seen huge growth over recent years. It has a reputation for friendliness and raises an awful lot of money for charity.
The club’s official website explains why the name Ulysses was chosen like this:
“The name comes from a poem of the same title by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It tells how the great Greek hero Ulysses, now middle-aged and securely in charge of his kingdom of Ithaca, is getting bored with things around him and longs to go adventuring again with his shipmates of old. It describes very well the sort of person who still has enough spark to go on riding into middle and later years.”
And vanning and motorhoming, too!
Are you surprised that grey bikies reportedly outspend grey nomads? Are you a grey bikie and a grey nomad? Comment below.
As a Ulysses member in my mid sixties an just returned to riding after a fifteen absence, I love the companionship and adventure I have found since joining my local branch “Macarthur”. Now following a suscessfull trip from Sydney to Maryborough for the Ulysses AGM in april now thinking about life on the road with my bike and a camper trailer. As they say “Adventure befor Dementia”