A quick search:https://www.pactour.com/



https://tdaglobalcycling.com/



https://cycleoflifeadventures.com/



https://crossroadscycling.com/



https://timberline-adventures.com/

This does not include a sizable number of charity operators all providing long distance tours some tenting some with accommodation.

Again the sports participation is very healthy whether it’s touring or events. Just touring in NA sucks when compared to other countries, which the ACA could have help improve through effective lobbying. Furthermore, they could’ve offered similar services to the tour providers, which give older people a sense of safety and security.

That life expectancy table may show some big revisions in the next year or two, as that table says it is based on 2022 data, thus vaccines were available but a lot of covid deaths were still occurring.

I spent five minutes trying to find out if AARP is growing or not, with help of Google I could not find a document that said what their membership trend is. But I suspect they are growing.

AARP would be a good candidate for an American membership organization that might be growing, what with all us pre-death boomers cluttering up the place.

But, like you, i can't easily find anything that says so. Including their 2024 Annual Report, which does not appear (after a quick text search skim) to mention anything about how many members they have, or if this number is growing or shrinking- this seems like a kinda notable omission; many other stats are given.

So they are not looking great as an answer to my challenge. And if not them, who?

The first one I clicked on was not a loaded touring organization. Do any of these even have "members"?

That's the point - ACA is an organization that supports largely independent loaded touring. Not RAGBRAI. Not credit card touring.

Also my point, touring in NA sucks and ACA has been totally ineffective in making it better or more popular. Relying on the same people who cycled across America for the bicentennial to continue to pay a membership in perpetuity was a business model with a fixed lifespan. Why pay a membership for nothing other than nostalgia and guilt? Yes I acknowledge it was demographics in one sense, their existing legacy members aged out. The inability to attract new members is purely on them by refusing to acknowledge nor adapt to where the adventure cycling community was heading.

I asked Google Gemini to do a deep research on AARP membership. It gave me a report with a bunch of insights. It is difficult for me to share in entirety but let me summarize some key takeaways I got from the report...

1. AARP membership did grow rapidly in the past but since at least 2018 it has stagnated at around 38 million members. This means while the total population in their target demographic has grown, their share of that demographic has dropped.

2. AARP has a "leaky bucket" problem with membership. About 2 million members die each year. So they need to keep recruiting ~2.5 million new members each year (the difference is because members might quit AARP for reasons other than passing away). They've gotten pretty sophisticated in how they do this including different media for different age ranges, Spanish language publications, digital marketing, etc.

3. The largest financial source for AARP isn't the $16 membership. Instead almost 2/3s of their revenue comes from royalty licensing of their database to other companies. E.g. companies then sending offers or selling to AARP members. The share of revenues from royalties has been growing.

4. A key challenge recently has also been a fracturing of some members along political lines, particularly since the ACA was passed. AARP was a strong proponent of the ACA leading to some on the political right viewing the organization as too liberal. Rival organizations such as AMAC were created and compete for some of the same members.

My overall perception was that AARP has needed to continue to adapt to a changing senior market - to keep filling their leaky bucket.

I seriously doubt this ever was the business model...

On the subject of middle class labor, affluence, and the value of a college degree:

I have to ask... what degree? When I obtained my technical degree, a corporate big-wig came in to talk about the value of a good liberal arts education, which I was required as part of my degree, and I am thankful for that, those were some of my most enjoyable and elightening classes. This fellow said that 70% of graduates end up working in areas outside their degree of study. To which I say... ***not for technical degrees for which there is demand***. (In decades past)

A relative got a bachelor's in economics, with honors, completed in 2-1/2 years, they were brilliant. Ended up working low pay in sales. Went back to school to get their PhD, got a good job as... a college professor teaching econ.

However, a tech degree doesn't guarantee easy employment. There are times I went for years between jobs. But when working, top pay. I told my dad's former boss long before graduation, "I read there is a shortage of engineers." and he said "They always say that. There is not a shortage of engineers. Employers say that because they want a glut of supply to keep pay down."

There was a segment on the PBS newshour with Judy Woodruff looking at voting patterns before the 2024 elections. One blue collar dad said "Why should I pay for college for my kid to just party for four years, and have their head filled up with (woke stuff, I don't recall how he stated that). And his low-20s male kid is working minimum wage, married, already has a kid IIRC, just poor prospects. I can't recall attending a single party in school, working my way through over 9 years to get a 4-year degree. What a moron that dad is. I could understand if he said, "Gee I wish I could afford to send my kid to college", but no, thinks it's all partying, no value.

THEN, Judy talks to a young woman, college grad in tech, was doing some sort of engineering in the same county, who explained how she and others like her make decisions based on DATA. And clearly this woman was making probably 2-3X what those uneducated were. Beautiful work environment. A really good life.

But getting back to WHAT degree... there are technical schools, liberal arts schools, and what I call liberal-liberal arts schools where you can formulate your own area of study. Well in recent decades, one local school of the latter has seen its enrollment cut in HALF, my guess is because, with the cost of college, people are placing a greater emphasis on "return on investment" in terms of future employment.

Lastly, I asked a friend who knows tons about college and knows details about nearly every college in the USA, "How come, 6 months before graduation, hard to get a good paying job, despite my knowing all my tech stuff" (I only needed to finish my liberal arts classes at that point), but after graduation, much more employable."? and he said, "They want to see you know how to FINISH something." Like for air force or navy pilots, you need a bachelors degree; Can be anything, not even tech, can be french literature, but it's a degree.

In recent years though, the gig economy, a lot of employers in tech only care you can do the job and make them money, even if you learned computers on your own. Might be hard to advance up the latter, but a guy I started out college with, only a couple years in, he started working at GM and never finished his degree, went far, took a buyout when offered, then started his own tech business. Sharp guy.

But now, even tech graduates are having difficulty finding jobs. Letting in floods of foreign tech graduates (who come here with zero debt, their home country paid for university), offshoring of jobs, plus now AI, and the prospect forward, even for qualified tech graduates, does not look great.

No, you said that other organizations that were similar didn't have the ACA's problems. And then you provided links to businesses that are nothing like ACA.

You can complain that a hat company doesn't realize they should switch to making shoes, but that doesn't mean the resulting shoes are going to be as good as the hats.

You can't just be thinking about the Boomers who are alive today. We are talking about life expectancy at birth for a cohort, not life expectancy at X age for the currently surviving members of that cohort.

Have a look at the graphs below. The average Boomer is 70 years old as of 2025. You and downtube24 are both missing the part where approximately 25% of Boomers have already died (past tense dead). These are people who toured during their younger days and have already croaked early for one reason or another.

So if this thread is assuming that Boomers are the ACA's core paying customer base, and we're considering the question "is Boomer death affecting the customer base?" Then the answer is inevitably yes: because 25% of the customer base is already dead. The remaining 75% is dropping like flies (check out that steepening slope). And don't forget that people experience declining health in the final years of their life, so the touring ceases years before the actual croaking.



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https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...b18c320e44.png
Source: Social Security Admin. Actuarial Life Table, 2014 https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html#fn2

You were born in 1953 so you turned 18 in 1971. In 1971, the median house cost 7 year's minimum wage income. Today, the median house costs about 30 years' minimum wage income.

https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...861ec538ef.jpg

I see where the misunderstanding is coming from. I never ment to say that there were similar organizations but rather there were many people still active in the sport of adventure cycling and that the ACA missed the boat relying on a cohort which no longer existed.

Self supported touring still exists but it’s diminishing in NA and those that do are tech savvy and see no value in the ACA.

Supported touring is very popular and the ACA missed the opportunity to serve those individuals even though they had a first mover advantage.

Lobbying for touring cycling in NA is a very important activity and the ACA has been both ineffective and unable to convince people to support this activity.

Self supported touring has moved off road and the ACA has played an ineffective role in this trend adding no value worth a membership.

The ACA is dying, not as a result of overall demographics but rather their own members demographics and inability to retain or attract new participants.

"We are"? You just do not understand how life expectancy works, despite having it explained to you more than once now. Only currently living folks are likely to join organizations or ride bikes.

So what you are saying that, when ACA did their actuarial planning from 1946 to 1964, they failed to allow for the fact that the boomer generation then being born would eventually die? This is the only context in which the claims you make about "life expectancy at birth for a cohort" would be relevant. Weren't they founded in the mid-'70s? Many boomers were already dead by then due to infant mortality, accidents (no seat belts!), crime, and Viet Nam.

And of course you have your facts very wrong, and misunderstand the data you do cite. In fact, about 85% of boomers are currently still pre-dead; we are 25% of the US population. This remaining huge majority of boomers are not "dropping like flies", please review the Social Security Admin actuarial tables i linked to above (or the charts you provided) for actual facts as to US life expectancy. Note that the youngest boomers are turning 61 this year; people in their 60s have many years of riding in front of them. The oldest boomers turn 79 this year; men can expect to live 8.64 more years, women 10.09 more years. People 80 or older, who might be said to be "dropping like flies", are not boomers.

And one more time: what is really probably going on with ACA is that it is a dues-based membership organization, that, like all such organizations, is declining in membership. And it is an organization providing services that are no longer in demand because of technological change.

Minimum wage income is an arbitrary number set by politicians and varies across the country.

How many square feet was a median home in 1971 compared to in 2025? I am guessing that the square footage increased by quite a bit, thus you are comparing oranges with grapefruit.

Affordability of a house varies a lot based on mortgage rates. When I bought my condo, I felt I was quite lucky in the early 1990s to get a 7.5 percent mortgage, many of my soon to be neighbors had paid over 9 percent. My niece has been paying below 4 percent for quite a few years. A 30 yr fixed mortgage rate has been fluctuating quite a bit this year, thus it is a moving target, just as it was when I bought my condo in the early 90s.

I can see this is a topic where an argument can keep going forever, so I will not respond to any more posts on this topic.

If you want to argue that inequality has grown since the 1980s when federal govt policies started to favor capital over labor, we probably can agree on that too. But, I won't respond on that topic either, as this really is the wrong type of forum for such arguments.

Have a nice day.

Thanks. Now I know why my mailbox is so full of literature from so many companies that see retirees as a target marketing group.

I might spend an hour or two each year reading stuff on their website or literature that comes in the mail, I mostly maintain my membership to get the membership card so I can get motel discounts. Unfortunately, the motel I used that card at in Canada a year ago said they do not offer that discount, but they gave me the Expedia price for the room. Expedia is the AARP travel agent, so in an indirect way I got the AARP member benefit.

And occasionally I shop at a liquor store that cards everyone. They usually accept my AARP card when they do that. Thus, the membership card serves one other purpose.

i would prefer the test someone suggested in the over-50 forum. "Sit down. Now stand up." If you groan at least once, you're old enough to drink.

:D

That test is too easy for the young kids to fake.

That said, if you use a chair without arm rests, you can't use your arms to help push you up after the first few inches. So that becomes a balance test, and faking bad balance would be harder to do than faking a moan.

Yes, minimum wage is set by politicians. That doesn't make the pain any different.

Yes, houses have gotten larger. But have they gotten 4 times larger? Home prices are now 4 times more expensive relative to wage compared to in your days. And that median price statistic includes all types of homes, not just single family homes. More people live in condos now because that's all they can afford.

I'm just glad I'm not graduating college today. Good luck to this generation.

A few immediate thoughts upon reading your post:

A) No, I don't have my "facts very wrong". YOU have your facts very wrong. Did you notice that the article you linked is from 2014? Yes, 85% of you were pre-dead back 11 years ago. That's not the case anymore.

B) I think confronting your own mortality has caused you to have a visceral gut reaction, which has made you emotional, angry, and math-blind (don't blame you for it). Yes, a Boomer born in 1946 and turning 79 this year can statistically expect to live another 8.64 more years. But that's only if you are lucky enough to have already survived to the present day. What you should really be looking at is the number in the chart right next to it, which is "Number of survivors out of 100,000 born alive". As you can see, HALF of the people born that year are ALREADY DEAD. And if you scroll up the chart to the line for Age 61, which is the youngest year of Boomers, you'll see that 18% of people born that year are ALREADY DEAD. And if you look at the line for age 71, which is the middle year of Boomers, you'll see that 32% of people born that year are ALREADY DEAD. And if you look at the charts in post #85 of this thread, you'll see that these deaths are not due to infant mortality (infant mortality rates, even back in the 1950s, was only 3%). These deaths are because once you're past middle age, the death rate begins to climb dramatically. These are people who toured in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, and then croaked early for one reason or another before they ever reached their late 70s. So in conclusion yes, their Boomer generation customers are dropping like flies. A bunch are already dead. Nature is taking its course on the rest.

C) The ACA clearly failed to do their actuarial planning. If they had, they would have realized that foolishly focusing their clientele target on an extinction-bound generation is a sure way to make themselves go extinct alongside their dying customers. What they should have done is UPDATE themselves to become more appealing to newer generations. Things like evolving from paper maps to becoming a digital resource, just like Bikepacking.com is. They never did this and let Bikepacking.com eat their lunch. Adapt or die with the dinosaurs. It is what it is. RIP.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html#fn2

https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...6411002b70.jpg

I saw a test where you're meant to sit cross legged on the floor. Then, without changing posture, repositioning your feet, or using your hands, stand directly straight up. If you can achieve this, statistically you have more than 10 years to live.

I don't know how accurate that last part is, but this movement is indeed not that easy.

Yan- Most of what you say in "b" is refuted by the 2 charts you posted, that you are misreading. There is no point in me continuing this discussion.

And I wish you a long and healthy life. Enjoy your Sunday evening.

I don’t understand why every time an ACA thread gets momentum they become this rambling nonsense. Beginning with the immediate simplistic answer which is demographics are to blame which is crazy because overall the sport is doing fine. Like blaming demographics why the video rental stores all shut down as people aged out of VCR tape rentals!

Then all the bizarre side arguments begin from actuarial analysis of life expectancy to walking to school uphill in the snow in grandpas boots narratives. Standing up test to determine life expectancy, unbelievable.

I don't know about VHS, but the cable business is currently under existential crisis due to aging demographics. The younger generation is not interested in TV. They consume media from the Internet. It says in this article the average TV viewer is now aged 64.6 years. Yikes...

What Is Cable TV in 2024? A Statistical Analysis
Exploring the rapid decline of legacy television
https://www.statsignificant.com/p/what-is-cable-tv-in-2024-a-statistical

Perhaps the younger generation is also not interested in paper cycling maps and paper cycling magazines.

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For what it's worth the standing up test is a real thing that has been statistically investigated by the medical profession.

https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/arti...xt&login=false

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitting-rising_test

To begin with they have been offering GPX digital files since 2020 if not earlier.

You are just showing an example of “spurious correlation”. It would be amusing if you didn’t actually believe it. It’s after reading a thread like this that I wish I had a career as a investment advisor.