Garda Trentino is preparing to host the International Trail Rating System (ITRS) team during the upcoming Bike Festival Riva del Garda (May 1-3), in an event that marks an important milestone in the evolution of mountain bike destination management.

During the festival, Garda Trentino will be officially presented as the world's first ITRS-certified destination, with a dedicated ceremony during the event.

Specifically, the ITRS system was created to inform bikers about the requirements needed to tackle each trail with confidence, through a model shared internationally that considers four aspects reflecting the appeal and complexity of MTB: technical difficulty, fitness level, exposure, and wilderness factor.

The ITRS system provides three certification levels (Bronze, Silver, and Gold), built on the basis of field trail rating and corresponding to increasing levels of quality, consistency, and governance.

The highest level, Gold, coincides with the Destination Certificate. This recognition certifies the reliability of field assessments and the presence of essential tools and procedures for advanced network management. This includes an organic maintenance system, data collection on usage flows and incidents, as well as a coordinated signage system across the entire network.

The recognition obtained by the APT values work that has been underway for some time on MTB signage, trail classification, and maintenance, with the goal of making the bike offering increasingly clear, reliable, and consistent. From the earliest stages of development, the ITRS project was actively supported by IMBA Europe, which played an important role both in the system's evolution and its international dissemination.

"We wanted to invest with conviction in a new MTB signage system, with the goal of making trail use clearer, safer, and more responsible, both for guests and residents. The added value of this signage lies especially in the adoption of immediately recognizable colors – green, light blue, red, and black – modeled on ski slopes, making it more intuitive to read the difficulty level of the trails," said Silvio Rigatti, President of Garda Dolomiti Azienda per il Turismo S.p.A. "We are particularly pleased to have been pioneers of a standard that has now become a reference at the provincial level and to be the world's first ITRS-certified destination. This is a result that confirms how naturally suited Garda Trentino is to this practice: here, biking is not just a tourism product, but an identity element that the territory lives every day. Receiving this recognition during the Bike Festival represents, symbolically, a circle closing."