Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Tourpreneur Tour Business Podcast

A Google Business Profile does a different job than it did a year ago. Travelers now describe the exact trip they want in long, specific searches, and Google answers with AI that draws on what it knows about each business, trusting what comes from the business itself first. A profile set up years ago and left alone is feeding those answers with whatever it said back then. Lisa Landsman, whose job at Google is explaining it to small businesses, takes Mitch through the questions tour operators have been asking for years, and a lot of the answers have changed.

Things are moving fast enough that some of it may be outdated by the time you hear it. The upside is real for anyone running something specific: you no longer have to sound like every other tour in your city to show up. Listen to this one if you set up your profile once and haven't opened it since. You'll come away knowing what Google wants from your profile now, what its review rules allow, and where to spend your next hour on it.

Resources:

• Lisa Landsman on LinkedIn
• Gemini connected to your Google Business Profile
• Ask Google Help, in the Google Business Profile Help Center

Tony Carne has lived the whole arc of how day tours get sold. He started as a guide, built Urban Adventures into a global day tour brand for Intrepid, and watched the channel that built it disappear when the platform changed its rules. He has spent the years since working out what an operator can count on instead.

His answer starts with accepting that the free booking is gone. What works now is getting found through other people, because travelers search for and trust what real guests share far more than what a business says about itself. The same idea shapes how he and Mitch see AI. Listen to this one if you resent the OTAs and aren't sure what the alternative is. You'll come away knowing where to put your effort, and more convinced that the human being at the front of your tour is the part that lasts.

Resources:

• CollabsMap
• Everything AI in Travel

Operators keep asking Tourpreneur co-founder Pete Syme to automate their customer communication, and he tells them to stop.

Pete Syme and Mitch Bach open a new monthly series, Pete & Mitch Are Angry, with AI, whose noise has grown too loud for a small operator to sort through without hours to spare. Pete's reason for saying stop is that talking to guests is an operator's biggest chance to learn what they want, and that knowledge is where the upsell, the cross-sell, and the second and third booking come from. An operator who hands that seat to a chatbot learns none of it. Supplier work, invoicing, and pricing are where the automation belongs. Requests for a workforce of AI agents get a similar reply: agents built on a broken business break it faster.

AI amplifies whatever business it is pointed at. A solo operator with 12 tours wanted them all automated, and Mitch's advice was to cut the list to three, aim each at one specific customer, and skip the tech needed to serve 12 tours in 12 locations with different vendors and transport. Pete reaches the same place from the other direction: AI agents on top of broken processes speed up the breakage, so the foundations get fixed first. With sound foundations, the question that matters is what AI cannot do for the business. The answer differs by operator because geography, market, and economics differ, and no consultant can supply it. Automate the repetitive work around that answer, leave the answer itself untouched, and start every AI decision there.

Maria Petrenko runs a private guiding business on Santorini, one of the most visited islands in the world. Cruise-ship crowds and a mounting overtourism backlash have turned the destination's own reputation into a liability for anyone selling tours there. Petrenko pitches that same reputation to prospective guests as the reason to book her instead of a mass tour, leading with it rather than avoiding the subject or apologizing for it. She builds every trip around one early conversation instead of a fixed list of stops. She asks a guest open-ended questions until she hears what they actually want to feel: a family reconnecting after a hard year, a stranger rediscovering a late brother's honeymoon. She designs the day around that feeling rather than the postcard shot of the blue domes that floods the island's most photographed corners.

Petrenko backs the pitch with something operational. Living on Santorini means she catches problems, a blocked viewpoint, a cable-car delay, a scheduling collision with another guide's group, before they cost a guest their day, in a way a company managing tours from Athens cannot match. She argues that small, local operators absorb this risk constantly, and that they deserve more of the reward for it. Credit for a smooth trip too often goes to distant companies with less on-the-ground involvement. Her case is that local reliability is a real differentiator, one operators should be recognized and rewarded for.

Philippe Hertzberg has never bought an advertisement aimed at a traveler.

Hertzberg is the CEO of Secret Journeys, a company that designs private access experiences inside landmarks like Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe. Most tour businesses expand their bookable services to capture more revenue per client. Hertzberg does the opposite: Secret Journeys turns away hotel, ground transport, and flight bookings, even when clients ask for them, to stay a single, uncategorizable thing. Most tour businesses also try to reach travelers directly. Hertzberg doesn't advertise to travelers at all. He sells exclusively through travel advisors, and a single pitch to Virtuoso's CEO in 2022 put him in front of that network's 20,000 advisors.

Three other decisions run the same direction. Hertzberg turns down press coverage that would put Secret Journeys in front of the traveling public, free exposure most businesses would take, because he wants the advisor, not his own company, to stay the one the client trusts. He casts storytellers the way Disney casts characters, and the trait he's actually hiring for is curiosity about the guest, not guiding credentials or destination expertise. Landmark access gets negotiated the same patient way: opening the Arc de Triomphe at night took two years of solving the administrator's actual objections one at a time, including agreeing to cover security staff's cab fare home. The episode also covers how a storyteller turned a five-year-old's obsession with bells into a private treasure hunt through the towers of Notre Dame, and which cities, Amsterdam, Seoul, and Prague among them, Hertzberg is looking to expand into next.

Resources:

• Secret Journeys: secretjourneys.travel
• Philippe Hertzberg on LinkedIn

Kevin Durkee owns Culinary Adventure Co., which runs six food tours in Toronto. Eighty percent of his guests are local, 99.9 percent book direct, and in fifteen years he has never run an ad, fought for SEO, or opened a Google Analytics account. The industry mantra is that locals do not take tours and that the OTAs own the demand, so Mitch spends much of the hour asking how the business actually works. The short answer is that Kevin sells celebration rather than sightseeing: gift cards, Christmas presents, and a birthday program that gives a guest a free seat when three friends book alongside them.

Kevin also refuses to discount in either direction. He pays full price at every one of his forty vendor stops and quotes corporate groups higher when they ask for a break, with a setup fee and built-in gratuity, since the food costs the same in front of four people or forty. Private corporate work now runs thirty to thirty-five percent of annual revenue. He explains the retreat in Madrid that finally pushed his best tour from $119 to $199 with less food on it, and it has since sold better than in any prior year. Operators leave with a way to build a local repeat audience, a position to hold when a buyer pushes on price, and the three years and five cities Kevin spent learning what to cut.

Resources:

• culinaryadventureco.com
• thiscityisdelicious.com
• Instagram: @culinaryadvco

Airbnb spent ten years swearing it would never be another OTA. It just started buying its experiences from Viator.

For twenty years the industry has argued about whether anybody can build a real marketplace for experiences. Mitch Bach and Pete Syme think the Airbnb deal settles it. The companies with the deepest pockets have looked at the category, done the arithmetic, and decided to rent someone else's supply rather than build their own. The ones still committed to building are running on economics that get worse every year, even while the market underneath them grows. None of that stays inside the marketplaces. A business under margin pressure has only so many places to find money, and the commission operators pay is the one that moves the dial.

Pete's answer for operators is not a new tactic, and he says so plainly. What has changed is the price of ignoring the old ones. Discovery sits underneath every other question an operator has, and more money flowing into the platforms meant to solve it has made it harder, not easier. His argument is that operators keep chasing discovery where it costs the most to win while walking past the customers already sitting in their own city, the corporates and schools and universities that book fifteen times instead of once. Mitch pushes on what that leaves for anyone running a general tour for a general audience. They land in the same place: the only bagel tour in New York gets found, and the two hundredth walking tour in Madrid does not.

Resources:

• Peter Syme on LinkedIn, where he posts his breakdowns of the Viator and GetYourGuide numbers
• Tourpreneur business retreats in Porto
• Tourpreneur CONNECT

Mid-America Productions builds five-day tours around one thing: getting a choir on stage at Carnegie Hall.

James Redcay and Stephanie Tiboris run Mid-America Productions, a company that takes amateur choirs, church groups, university ensembles, community singers, on tour to perform at major concert halls: Carnegie Hall, Paris's La Madeleine, and venues in Vienna, Stockholm, and soon Reykjavik. Each residency runs about five days, split roughly in half between rehearsal and free time. Hotels and sightseeing are handed off to local partners and travel agents rather than run in-house, because James says the company sticks to what it knows: producing the performance itself.

For operators, the transferable move isn't about music. It's about identifying the one thing a trip has to deliver, then building everything else, pacing, free time, what gets outsourced versus kept in-house, around protecting that centerpiece instead of spreading attention evenly across a checklist of activities. James and Stephanie talk through what that discipline produces: choirs return decades later, first-time travelers get their first passport through the company, and revenue has grown every year since the pandemic on repeat and referral business rather than new-customer acquisition. They also cover what it took to keep that formula intact after founder Peter Tiboris passed away in September 2024.

Resources:

• Website: midamerica-music.com

Two five-day retreats in Porto and a conversation-first event in Louisville, and none of the three have a keynote on the agenda.

Tourpreneur is running two five-day retreats in Porto, October 21 to 25, in parallel. One is a growth-strategy retreat led by Peter Syme, split into outbound and inbound tracks. The other is a design retreat led by Kyle Campbell and Mitch Bach. Both cap at ten operators and cost $1,499 for PRO members or $1,799 for everyone else, including a year of PRO membership.

Tourpreneur CONNECT runs November 16 to 18 in Louisville. It's built around conversation instead of keynotes or breakout sessions, with attendees moving between hosted tables rather than sitting through a fixed schedule. Tickets run $199 for PRO members and $299 for everyone else.

Resources:

• Multi-Day Huddle: tourpreneur.com/retreats/porto-multiday-2026
• Design Huddle: tourpreneur.com/retreats/porto-design-2026
• Tourpreneur CONNECT: tourpreneur.com/connect

Tour operators are told locals won't buy tickets to see their own city. They're usually right. Jeanette Pierce built a twenty-year business by selling the tour to someone else instead: the employer, the university, the city government that already has that local on a list. The product isn't sightseeing. It's attraction and retention.

Jeanette Pierce is the founder of Detroit's The City Institute, formerly Inside Detroit, which she launched in January 2006 after leaving a job at United Way, frustrated that outsiders were the only ones talking publicly about her city. Detroit was still years away from bankruptcy when she started and deep in it a few years later, and City Institute grew through that entire arc, not around a single moment of good press. Mitch and Jeanette break down how she built the business almost entirely on private, custom "learning journeys" sold to corporations, universities, and local governments, rather than tickets sold to the public.

Jeanette explains her "peanut" method for customizing a single tour into dozens of different themes for different institutional clients, why she deliberately kept her team small after burning out at eight full-time staff and forty part-time, and how she chooses which community partners to feature and pays them for their time. She also lays out why locals discover tours through Eventbrite and HR departments instead of TripAdvisor, and how City Institute turns university orientation and corporate onboarding into recurring annual revenue. This is a full playbook for selling to a market everyone else assumes doesn't exist.

Resources:

• thecityinstitute.com

New Scientist Discovery Tours runs 100 tours with a team of four, works with six operator partners worldwide, and has guests putting deposits down on a solar eclipse in Australia in 2028. The entire operation is built around one idea: go to the same places as everyone else, but tell a story nobody else is telling.

Kevin Currie, Director of New Scientist Discovery Tours, joined the company in 2019 to build what three journalists had started off the side of their desks. The pitch was simple: curate an itinerary around a science story, not a destination, and put an expert on the tour who can actually tell it. Kevin spent months in due diligence before signing on, looking at guest feedback, partner relationships, and industry data. Experiential travel was growing at 19% annually, roughly double the rate of standard travel. He built a business case, launched 20 tours, sold most of them out, and then lost everything to the pandemic. New Scientist kept him. He's been building since 2022 with a team of four.

The episode covers how New Scientist structures tour development from the inside of a media company, what Kevin looks for when he chooses scientists to accompany tours, and how the team manages a supply chain of partner operators, DMCs, and tour leaders without becoming a tour operator themselves. Kevin explains why they work with only six partners and why the pre-departure briefing between the expert and the tour leader is one of the most important things they do. He describes the 4.6-kilometer walk in the Brecon Beacons where every hundred meters represents 100 million years of Earth's history, and the moment a guest looks up and realizes the last 20 centimeters represent all of human existence. The episode is also a case study in how a niche operator competes not by being cheaper, but by doing the thing competitors literally cannot copy: getting the science right.

Elyrea sells a kind of tour no traveler would think to search for, and Jean-Vladimir Deniau built the whole company around that fact.

Jean-Vladimir Deniau is the founder of Elyrea, a French company that builds character-based immersive performances for the tourism market. The format is specific: a professional actor embodies a historical figure, Coco Chanel near Place Vendôme, Hemingway around Montparnasse, a GI on Omaha Beach, and walks a small group through that figure's neighborhood telling the story of their life. Deniau does not call himself a tour operator. He calls Elyrea a "Lego brick" that DMCs and tour operators build into the experiences they sell. The company has 15 of these performances running, almost all in France, and there is a structural problem at the center of it: nobody knows to ask for a tour with Coco Chanel, so the business cannot wait for B2C search demand. That one fact shapes how Elyrea picks its characters, how it sells, and how it funds itself.

Mitch and Deniau cover the business behind the tours. Why Elyrea sells to the trade first and keeps its strongest tours off OTAs entirely. The capital-light model that built 15 tours with no outside investor. The four design rules behind a 90-minute performance, starting with the claim that you win or lose the audience in the first minute. And the recruitment problem of training an actor who learns the whole show, performs twice, and quits because the street is not the theater. Deniau also names the advice he would give any operator building an emotional experience: stay true to the place, do not overplay it, and keep the technology out of the way.

Resources:

• Elyrea: elyrea.com
• Live actor booking for trade partners: elyrea.com/booking
• "The Colossus of Marousi" by Henry Miller, the travel book Deniau cites as the original spark

Most tour operators benchmark pricing against competitors and copy the playbook of the loudest voices in the industry. Mary Collins runs two businesses by ignoring both and starting from the question an anthropologist asks first: who benefits.

Mary Collins is the founder and CEO of Blue Fern Travel, a DC food tour company she launched with her husband in 2014, and the owner of Far Horizons Archaeology and Cultural Tours, the 40-year-old multi-day company she acquired in 2022. Both businesses sit on the same foundation: an anthropologist's instinct for community, story, and the economics of who benefits from a tour. Blue Fern pays full price at every restaurant, tips every server 20 percent, and routes a portion of every ticket back to a local nonprofit. Far Horizons travels with a PhD scholar from morning to night, caps at 14 guests, and spends two hours at sites where most competitors spend 30 minutes.

This episode is a working session on running two very different tour businesses from the same operating philosophy. Mitch and Mary go deep on hiring for personality over knowledge, pricing into demand instead of against the competition, building DMC relationships that survive a 20-year operator transition, and the specific moment Peter Syme had to tell her twice to raise her prices. She walks through what it took to inherit a beloved 40-year-old brand from its 80-year-old founder, the FileMaker-to-WeTravel tech overhaul, and the donation model that has routed half a million dollars to archaeological sites worldwide. Operators running food tours, scholar-led tours, or any business with a returning customer base will find concrete, actionable material here.

Resources:

• Blue Fern Travel (blueferntravel.com)
• Far Horizons Archaeology and Cultural Tours (farhorizons.com)
• Bread for the City (Blue Fern's donation partner)
• WeTravel (Far Horizons' booking platform)

Adam Guy runs I Know A Guy NYC Tours, a solo private tour business he started after quitting a 25-year fundraising and marketing career during COVID. Mitch and Adam unpack what it actually looks like to refuse the standard playbook of growth, hiring, and operational scale, and instead build a six-figure business around one person and a defined niche. Adam stays in New York City. He runs only private small group tours, half day or full day, averaging about three and a half guests. He's raised his prices five times in four years and has zero plans to open a second city.

The conversation digs into the mechanics that make this work. Adam treats the pre-tour phone call as marketing, drops a handwritten welcome kit at the hotel before the guest arrives, posts personal stories about guests on Facebook every day with a four to five week delay, and writes guest personas before he writes copy. He breaks down his actual numbers: 252 tours, 88 percent margin, 75 percent of business from word of mouth and social, an SEO channel that grew from 1 percent to 11 percent. He explains why he says no to food tours, comic book tours, and a second city, and how he refers those guests out without taking a commission. Operators will walk away with a working model for building pricing power, brand gravity, and repeat referrals as a one-person business.

Resources:

• I Know A Guy NYC Tours (Instagram and Facebook: @iknowaguynyc)
• Trip School, where Adam credits the bootcamp as part of his start

There is no itinerary. No promised outcome. And a 98 percent five-star review rate.

Geetika Agrawal is the founder and CEO of Vacation With An Artist (VAWAA), a platform connecting travelers with master artists in 42 countries for multi-day, one-on-one apprenticeships. The business does not sell tours. It sells access to process: five to six days in an artist's studio, working directly alongside practitioners of pottery, calligraphy, natural dyeing, quilting, shoemaking, and dozens of other craft traditions rooted in place and culture. There is no itinerary. No guaranteed finished product. No group of strangers to manage around. Just immersive making alongside people who have spent decades mastering their practice.

Geetika brings 20 years as a human-centered designer, including work at Disney Imagineering, L'Oreal, and Lincoln Center, to an operation run by a team of four with artists across 42 countries. Mitch and Geetika talk through how she vets artists (the internal bar: is this worth flying that far?), how she designed onboarding systems and feedback loops to maintain quality at scale, and why VAWAA has grown 25 to 30 percent organically for two consecutive years, hitting 50 percent growth this year, without a dollar in paid advertising. She also walks through the decision at the center of everything: sell the process, not the outcome. That decision, she argues, is directly why 98 percent of reviews are five stars.

Resources:

• VAWAA: vacationwithanartist.com or vawaa.com
• Geetika Agrawal on LinkedIn

Karl Wilder started The Chef Tours with 300 euros, no advertising budget, and a radical premise: spend the majority of your ticket price on food and wine, not marketing, and let your guests do the talking. It worked: 70% of his bookings now come from referrals.

Karl spends upwards of six months developing each new city, walking streets with his dog Milou, watching how vendors cook, tasting obsessively, choosing unique neighborhoods that other operators avoid. No two tours are the same: every tour shifts based on who's in the group, what's in season, which stand is having a great day. Groups are capped at six. There are no scripts. Chefs — not guides — run every experience, sharing their own lives, kitchens, and relationships with the city.

In this episode, Karl and Tourpreneur host Mitch Bach dig into why this model works, how to develop tours through deep neighborhood immersion rather than clipboard research, why he's selling a "development tour" as he explores the next city Buenos Aires, what operators get wrong about food storytelling, and why the messiest, most human, most unrepeatable experiences are the ones people can't stop talking about.

• Visit The Chef Tours
• Follow Karl on LinkedIn

Most tour operators know they should stand out. Very few are willing to say something specific enough to actually do it.

Yulia Denisyuk is a journalist, storyteller, and independent trip operator who has spent years watching the travel industry default to the same itineraries, the same highlights, and the same cheerful marketing, while the travelers who might actually connect with something real keep looking for it elsewhere. She and Mitch don't spend much time on tactics. They spend most of this conversation on the harder question: what does it actually mean to build a travel business around something you believe, and what does that require you to give up?

The conversation covers the rise of creator-led trips and why personal trust has effectively replaced brand trust for a growing share of travelers. Yulia makes a practical case for why a narrow, specific position, one that tells potential travelers what you won't do as clearly as what you will, is a more durable business strategy than chasing broader appeal. She also shares a framework for pitching your business to media that has nothing to do with your destination and everything to do with the larger conversation your trips are part of. By the end, the episode lands somewhere most travel business podcasts don't: the question of whether the goal is a five-star review from a self-actualized traveler, or something that actually changes the relationship between the people on your trip and the communities they're visiting.

• Your trips should reflect your personal lens on a destination, not the consensus itinerary. 6:23 – 8:32 Yulia doesn't bring her Jordan groups to Jerash — one of the most recognized ancient Roman sites in the region — because she personally didn't connect with it, and the trip is built around what she can honestly advocate for. This creates a natural filter: you're not trying to reach everyone, you're reaching people who share your specific way of seeing a place. Operators who copy the standard itinerary end up competing on price and social media polish, and that's a fight most small operators lose.
• Slow, longer trips are a competitive position — not an apology. 5:44 – 6:22 Yulia's Jordan trips run longer than the industry standard for that destination, by design, because real connection with local people takes time. Most group tours to Jordan are built for efficiency; hers is built for depth, which draws a traveler who isn't cross-shopping on price. If your trip length is determined by what the market seems to expect rather than what the experience actually requires, that's worth revisiting.
• The creator-led trip works because personal trust has replaced brand trust. 8:32 – 9:57 Younger travelers have largely stopped trusting institutional brands and marketing, and they're redirecting that trust toward people whose worldview they already follow. An operator who has built any kind of content presence around a clear point of view can convert that trust directly into bookings, without the credibility-building work that larger brands spend years establishing. The itinerary becomes secondary. People are buying the person and the lens.
• Cutting standard highlights from your itinerary can be more compelling than adding them. 9:30 – 9:57 Yulia tells prospective travelers that her groups experience Petra differently than 98% of group tours — rejecting the Indiana Jones angle that most operators default to because pop culture and Instagram demand it. Telling someone what you won't do, and why, signals that you've thought harder about the experience than operators who simply include everything on the standard list. That editorial curation communicates expertise faster than any feature list.
• Distrust in mainstream media is spilling directly into how people choose travel operators. 11:06 – 12:09 The same collapse of credibility that has sidelined legacy publications is operating in the tour space: people want to travel with someone who stands for something, not a company whose primary message is "great experiences await." Yulia draws a direct line between the rise of independent journalists and the rise of creator-led trips, framing both as responses to the same cultural shift. Operators who communicate a consistent worldview — even a narrow or unfashionable one — are building the kind of trust that no ad spend can manufacture.
• "Authenticity" is a dead word. A specific point of view is not. 13:00 – 13:22 Yulia's argument is that the word authenticity has been so thoroughly absorbed by marketing copy that it now means nothing, and that what people actually want is someone willing to say what they believe. For a tour operator, that means your website and social content should state a specific stance on travel — not just that you care about local culture, but what you think is broken about how most people experience it and what you're doing instead. A declared position creates a community. A vague claim of authenticity disappears into the noise.
• Ignoring what's happening in the world right now reads as tone-deaf to a growing share of travelers. 13:44 – 15:24 Yulia describes a tour operator who opened a conference presentation with the words "the room is on fire" as one of the most powerful moments she'd witnessed at an industry event in years — because almost nobody else does it. Travelers who are paying attention to what's happening in Gaza, in immigration enforcement, in the communities they're visiting are looking for operators who are paying attention too. Operators who maintain cheerful, context-free marketing are losing those travelers, and those travelers tend to book multi-day, high-investment trips.
• Most travel experiences are designed for the visitor, not the community — and that gap is an opening. 17:00 – 17:57 Yulia's conversation with Jordanian operator Muna Haddad surfaces a blunt question: who gets to tell the story of a place, and whose voice is actually centered in the experience? The honest answer is that most itineraries are curated around what the visiting traveler wants to see, not what local communities want to share or how they want to be represented. Operators who build trips around local agency — where the community is the narrator, not the scenery — are genuinely differentiated, and they tend to generate the kind of word-of-mouth that no marketing budget replaces.
• Making locals the narrators, not the backdrop, is a structural choice you can make right now. 19:19 – 19:41 Yulia describes her role on her Jordan trips as providing the container through which her Jordanian friends tell their own stories. This is a design decision, not just a philosophy: it shapes the encounters, the pacing, and the framing of the entire trip. Day tour operators can apply this immediately by shifting from "I'll show you this place" to "I'll introduce you to the people who can tell you about it."
• The industry has figured out personal transformation. Collective transformation is still unclaimed territory. 20:16 – 21:15 Yulia names a specific gap: travel reliably delivers personal transformation — the traveler returns changed — but almost never delivers collective transformation, where the relationship between the traveler and the local community actually shifts. Most marketing, including "transformational travel" marketing, focuses entirely on what happens to the individual. Operators who design for mutual exchange rather than one-directional traveler growth are building toward something the industry hasn't yet learned to sell, which means there's real space there.
• Saturated markets don't require you to compete differently. They require you to compete on meaning. 6:23 – 6:35, 37:17 – 39:12 Yulia operates in Jordan, one of the most crowded group travel markets, and the Barcelona-based operator Aborijans runs in one of the world's most overtouristed cities — both have built distinct positions by naming a specific problem (stereotypes about Jordan, fake tapas tours in Barcelona) and presenting their product as the honest alternative. The positioning isn't just ethical; it does the marketing work because it gives travelers a reason to feel good about choosing you over the default. What you're pushing against is as important as what you're offering.
• A specific social mission functions as a self-executing marketing filter. 34:07 – 35:48 Yulia cites Sororal, a tour operator focused entirely on gender violence and women-led travel, as an example of a company whose story closes the sale before any conversation starts: a traveler who cares about that issue lands on the website and already knows this is their trip. The more specific the mission, the less you have to explain yourself — the right traveler self-identifies and converts without a long persuasion process. For multi-day operators in particular, this kind of specificity also makes press outreach dramatically easier, because the story has a hook that editors can actually place.
• When pitching media, your destination is not the story. The larger conversation your tour speaks to is. 41:25 – 43:42 Yulia's framework for a placeable pitch has four components: tie it to a larger trend, bring something genuinely newsworthy, identify a cultural relevance angle (what national or global conversation does your product touch?), and match it to the right publication's actual beat. Her example — a Puerto Rico operator connecting their product to the national conversation about Puerto Rican autonomy — shows what cultural timing can do

When AI bots can generate endless facts and flawless narratives, what’s left for human tour guides? This week Mitch Bach sits down with VoiceMap founder Iain Manley to explore the future of storytelling in travel, from his perspective as a journalist and developer of a self-guided audio tour app powered by human creators. We dive into the power of personal perspective and the new risks of playing it safe with stale, objective facts but no humanity. This episode challenges tour operators to rethink what makes an experience truly unforgettable in 2026—and why being more human, more vulnerable, and even more imperfect might be your competitive advantage.

In this episode we cover:

• Why AI is forcing tour guides to rethink their role
• The difference between information and true storytelling
• How “personal” stories can reshape how people see a place
• Why generic, fact-based tours are becoming obsolete
• The surprising way AI is already hurting mediocre tours
• How to create experiences AI can’t replicate
• The power of subjectivity, emotion, and lived experience
• Why taking creative risks is now essential for tour businesses
• The hidden danger of optimizing for 5-star reviews
• What great storytelling looks like in the age of AI

As always, show notes and more resources on tourpreneur.com

Mitch Bach talks with Jenn Barbee, co-founder of Destination Innovate, about the real inner workings of DMOs, those three letters that every tour operator has an opinion about but few actually understand. Jenn has spent 30 years inside destination marketing, from a shoestring US Department of Commerce team trying to promote America on a $50,000 budget to her current work closing the gap between DMOs and the small businesses they are supposed to serve. The conversation covers how DMOs get funded, why they sit on valuable visitor data, and what tour operators can actually do to get beyond the dead-end website listing.

It goes further than the typical "how to work with your tourism board" advice. Jenn and Mitch get into the identity crisis hitting tour operators and DMOs at the same time: both are losing ground to OTA platforms, both need direct guest relationships, and neither is building enough local partnerships to fight back. They talk short-term rental hosts as untapped referral channels, guerrilla marketing tactics that cost almost nothing, and the hard truth about inbound tourism to the US heading into World Cup and the 250th anniversary.

• Your DMO has expensive visitor data that could sharpen your product, pricing, and ads, but they will not hand it over unless you ask. 06:14 – 07:19 DMOs invest in data about visitor appetite, competing markets, and traveler clusters by neighborhood and interest type. That information rarely trickles down to small tour businesses because DMOs feel pressure to contextualize it or fear judgment on their numbers. Frame your ask around strengthening the destination's tourism product, not just helping your business, and you stand a real chance of getting access to insights you could never afford on your own.
• The single best first move with your DMO is to find the community manager and introduce yourself with specific visitor language, not a sales pitch. 11:48 – 12:58 Audit your tour product against what the destination website is promoting in terms of itineraries or themes, then reach out where you see a match or a gap. Lead with collaboration. Once you have that baseline, you can inch toward higher-value asks like data sharing or co-promotion, but only after you have earned the relationship through showing up and being useful.
• Survey your customers about whether they booked the experience before the hotel, then bring that data to the DMO. 56:29 – 56:39 If you can show a DMO that your tour attracted bed nights, you are speaking their only real language: occupancy and bed tax justification. Most tour operators never collect this data, and most DMOs have never seen it from a small business. It positions you as a strategic asset rather than another name on a listings page.
• DMOs are shifting from marketing organizations to stewardship organizations, and that tension is something you can use. 08:50 – 09:59 Many DMOs now describe themselves as "destination management" or "stewardship" organizations, moving toward what is right for their communities. Their boards and bed tax collectors still want heads-in-beds KPIs. If your tour disperses visitors into underserved neighborhoods, supports local businesses, or tells a more honest destination story, you become the kind of partner that helps a DMO justify its new direction to the people holding the purse strings.
• Getting listed on the DMO website is a win. Stop underestimating it. 13:10 – 13:45 Many operators treat a listing as table stakes, but some DMOs do not even offer that without a paid membership. If you are listed, follow up by tagging the DMO constantly on social media and feeding them content they can reshare within their brand guidelines. The social media managers have more flexibility than the executive staff and will amplify content that feels fresh or on-brand.
• If your local DMO is stuck promoting only the marquee attractions, skip them and go to the state level. 17:38 – 18:32 A DMO locked into bread-and-butter promotion is usually in protection mode, worried about occupancy numbers. State tourism offices have embraced experience-driven programming and are more open to working with operators who tell a broader story. For most small tour businesses, the state governor's conference on tourism is where accessible DMO relationships start.
• Short-term rental hosts are closer to the guest than any DMO, and tour operators should be building direct relationships with them now. 24:31 – 26:00 Short-term rentals nationally overtook hotels in occupancy as of September 2025. Those hosts talk directly to guests about what to do in town. A recommendation from a local Airbnb host is warmer than any OTA listing and costs zero commission. Finding them is manual (social media DMs, local searches), but the payoff is a direct referral channel with no middleman.
• Stop chasing first-time visitors. Loyal, repeat visitors spend more, stay longer, and sustain the businesses that matter. 32:49 – 33:32 DMOs and operators both fixate on acquiring new customers while ignoring the people who already love the destination. Repeat visitors become patrons of smaller, niche experiences and local businesses. For multi-day operators especially, a returning guest who books a deeper or different tour is more profitable than constantly feeding the top of the funnel.
• Identity beats branding. Know who you are and say no to the rest. 38:44 – 41:27 Jenn draws a hard line between brand (what you market) and identity (who you actually are and who you serve). When you lead with identity, you market less because the right people find you. That means turning down some customers and product ideas, which is terrifying for newer operators, but it prevents the bland, generic positioning that makes you invisible on platforms like Viator and GetYourGuide.
• The "book direct" movement matters for tour operators just as much as it does for short-term rentals and hotels. 42:58 – 44:28 Hotels lost roughly 80% of their distribution to OTAs. Tours and activities sit around 40% OTA-controlled, which means there is still time to build direct channels. DMOs missed the OTA boat the first time and are caught in a relevancy crisis. That creates a shared interest: both of you need to reclaim the guest relationship before the platforms own it entirely.
• Guerrilla, person-to-person marketing is the only thing worth betting on in this environment. 34:16 – 35:03 Replace coffee sleeves at a local shop for a week with a message like "next time mama's in town, try this." That costs almost nothing and puts your name in front of a local audience in a real, physical moment. Operators burning money on flashy ad campaigns and agencies are losing to the ones doing the manual work of building one relationship at a time.
• Bring tour operators, short-term rental hosts, and local businesses into the same room. The collaboration that comes out of it is worth more than any campaign. 30:35 – 32:17 A 12-person Tourpreneur meetup in Dallas turned competitors into collaborators planning joint tours before they left the room. Those rooms should include short-term rental hosts, restaurants, coffee shops. Nobody is organizing these cross-sector local gatherings yet. That is the opportunity.
• Rethink the "travel presentation at the library" model. Gather local people around something that is not your tour. 53:23 – 54:46 Jenn pitches a revival of the house-party model for travel: 10 to 15 people, food, conversation, then introduce the experience. For multi-day operators, this replaces the stale slide deck. Book clubs are surging. House gatherings are surging. The sale happens because you built trust in a personal setting, not because you ran a Facebook ad.
• Quirky, unpolished video cuts through. But virality does not equal business success. 36:32 – 37:38 Behind-the-scenes, day-in-the-life content is what is actually getting traction on social right now. The less templated and less AI-generated it feels, the better it performs. Use that attention as a hook, then shift to collaborative content and real relationship-building that converts. A weird 30-second clip of your tour prep is worth more than a polished banner ad.
• The inbound tourism situation in the US is worse than most operators realize, and pretending otherwise is a losing strategy. 48:28 – 50:43 Canadian airlines are pulling US routes for summer 2026. Sixteen countries now have travel advisories against the US. The World Cup and the 250th anniversary are approaching with a damaged international reputation. Operators who depend on inbound international visitors need to pivot hard toward domestic and loyal-visitor strategies now, and the ones who acknowledge reality in their messaging will build more trust than the ones still running sunset stock photos.

How do you scale a company without losing your soul or passion?

Mitch Bach talks this week with Paul Whitten, founder of Nashville Adventures, about how a former combat veteran, Peace Corps volunteer, UK Parliamentary Fellow, and Amazon project manager translated the learnings from his winding life path into a fast-growing tour company built at the intersection of passion, profitability, and public history.

Paul identified a “Paul-shaped hole” in Nashville’s bachelorette-heavy market by blending deep historical knowledge with an approachable, beer-in-hand delivery style. We discuss why he rejects over-scripted tours in favor of hiring obsessively passionate subject-matter nerds (bourbon, ghosts, coffee, Civil War) and giving them ownership; how early growth came from soft-launching, the power of relentless relationship-building with distilleries, chambers of commerce, concierges, and DMCs (and the power of simply responding to emails!). And why enthusiasm, not hacks or ad tricks, is the true differentiator.

The conversation dives into scaling without losing soul, balancing founder-led guiding with team development, leveraging community partnerships and veteran identity, experimenting with new formats like coffee crawls and XR-enhanced tours, and using books and potential city expansion as strategic next steps. We also tackle the harder edge of the job: the tour guide’s role as a public historian in polarized times, handling contentious Civil War and civil rights narratives responsibly, creating space for civil discourse on tour, and embracing risk, naivety, and “pirate” rule-breaking as essential traits for entrepreneurial success in the tours and activities industry.

• Connect with Paul on LinkedIn
• Nashville Adventures Home Page
• See Reality XR tours mentioned
• More show notes and takeaways on tourpreneur.com

This is an episode all about the hard stuff. Politics. Disagreement on tour. Tour sites where the truth itself is in debate. Confronting places with complicated, dark histories.

Most of the advice out there is: avoid this stuff at all costs. People just want to have fun, they're on vacation. Guides should stick to the script and make sure they don't say something that upsets the guests. I'm not here as a tour guide to shove my opinions down everyone's throats. Can't we all just get along? Can't we just keep the discourse civil?

Our guest this week, Mike Fishback, is a middle-school humanities educator and curriculum designer who thinks this instinct is exactly the problem. "Civil discourse" isn't about keeping things polite — it's about strategies for engaging with and managing disagreement and difficulty in learning situations, like a tour. Mike learned through experience that it's unwise to sit back, cross your fingers, and hope you don't upset a guest. That there are powerful ways to lean into difficult topics that make the whole experience more meaningful — intentionally creating dialogue through artful questioning and participatory techniques. And he has the educational frameworks and two decades of lived experience to back every word of it up.

Mike also happens to have spent years as a client of mine — I was the tour guide for his group of middle schoolers on trips to New York and DC, and I saw firsthand how he engaged his students with really meaty, difficult topics in a way that didn't shut them down but fired them up.

The lessons here aren't for kids. They're for everyone. And if you've ever told yourself that your job is just to deliver the facts and keep things light, this conversation might be the most useful hour you spend all week.

More takeaways and show notes on tourpreneur.com

What if the most powerful segment in travel has been hiding in plain sight for decades?

Tourpreneur's Mitch Bach talks with Carolyn Ray, CEO of Journey Woman, about her transformation from corporate executive to full-time traveler and advocate for the 50+ woman traveler—a demographic that represents half the world's population yet remains largely invisible to the travel industry.

After a life-changing trip to Kenya at age 50, Carolyn sold everything and reinvented herself, eventually acquiring Journey Woman in 2019 and transforming it from a 1990s-era newsletter into a multifaceted platform that includes research, advocacy, a women's travel directory, and speakers bureau.

Through her groundbreaking "Invisible No More" research, Carolyn became the first to quantify this market segment, revealing that operators who only market destinations are "doing half the job" because 50+ women travelers are looking for purposeful, intentional experiences beyond simple safety assurances.

She challenges the industry's obsession paid media and influencer marketing, and urges women entrepreneurs to reject outdated rules, trust their intuition, and put themselves unapologetically in the spotlight—embodying her company's core value to "make your own rules."

• The "Invisible No More" study
• Article mentioned: Is it safe to travel to the US right now?
• The new Women's Travel Directory

This is a story of growth through creativity, experimentation, and using technology to stay lean.

Carlo Pandian (LinkedIn) is the founder of Slow Travel Italia. Four years ago he started with a single wine tasting in Verona, and today runs 160 experiences across 12 Italian cities, serving 15,000 guests a year with a very small team.

In this episode, he talks to TP host Mitch Bach about exactly how he did it: experimenting with neglected time slots (like 6pm) that competitors ignore, launching five tours at once instead of one to multiply his chances of finding a niche, using Airtable and automations to eliminate manual booking assignments and personalize communication at scale, and treating OTAs as a launchpad rather than a long-term home. Carlo shares how he identifies gaps in crowded markets by studying what's missing—not just in Italy but in places like Japan—and why he pulled out of Milan when the math didn't work. He explains his "requirements manifesto" for vetting partners, how he coaches food producers on storytelling for international audiences, and why the biggest trend he's seeing is travelers willing to spend half a day outside the city for a single product done deeply—visiting the olive grove, watching mozzarella pulled from boiling water, understanding one thing fully rather than tasting nine things superficially.

As always, more info and takeaways on tourpreneur.com.

In this episode Mitch Bach sits down with Marinel de Jesus, a former human rights lawyer turned tour operator.

She is filled with questions about the adventure tour industry:

Why do porters on the famous, touristy Inca Trail in Peru carry crushing loads for little pay and even less dignity? Why is it so difficult to find women adventure guides in so many parts of the world? What do indigenous communities actually want from tourism—and why doesn't anyone bother to ask them?

These are just some of the uncomfortable questions and themes she's carried with her as she's lived and trekked around the world. Originally from the Philippines, she became a human rights lawyer in Washington D.C., spending 15 years prosecuting child protection and mental health cases. Then her mother passed away—and she never went back to the office. But Marinel didn't just start a tour company. She moved into indigenous communities. She lived with Quechua porters in Peru and learned the dark truths behind the picture-perfect Inca Trail. She spent nearly 300 days in Mongolia during Covid, co-creating a nomad camp that started with tea and a blank piece of paper—not a business plan. She walked 100 days across Nepal with Mingmar, a female guide she searched for over a year and a half to find, proving that women belong on the Great Himalaya Trail.

This discussion challenges everything we assume about adventure tourism—the colonial narratives baked into our itineraries, the voices we never hear, the scripts we impose on communities who know how to welcome guests far better than we do. She makes the case for showing up with no agenda, listening before designing, and building something that matters more than scale.

Marinel's organizations:

• Equity Global Treks (Brown Gal Trekker)
• The Porter Voice Collective
• Her vision for Himalayan Women Trail Leaders
• Her film KM82 on the Quechuan Porters of Peru
• The Khusvegi English & Nomadic Culture Camp she helped start in Mongolia

More show notes and resources on tourpreneur.com

This short episode was recorded live at GetYourGuide's Unlocked conference in September 2025.

When you meet Arturo Ardao Rivera, the first thing you feel is his energy. He doesn't come off as an engineer, which was his profession until he discovered a joy for tour guiding and running a tour business. Originally from Madrid, Arturo found his true passion when he created Rainbow Tours Stockholm. It has grown from a solo operation to employing 26 guides.

His story is one of rejecting some of his engineering tendencies (choosing feelings over numbers!) and leaning into strategies that appear unorthodox but have worked well for him.

You'll discover:

• His unique "taxi tariff" model for private tours, and his approach to hyper-personalization.
• Why he doesn't ask for reviews
• Why he's not sold on the "get more bookings" industry mantra
• Why he visits guides he's thinking of hiring in their comfort zone, not his
• How guide applicants are asked to become undercover tour takers
• How he leverages running two separate brands for pricing strategy
• How he grow leveraging 10+ OTA partners, and how he's managing his distribution mix

Connect with Arturo on LinkedIn, and visit Rainbow Tours Stockholm!

It's 2026... welcome to a new year of Tourpreneur weekly travel business podcasts!

And we're starting the year off in a slightly different vein.

This episode is a must-listen to help you set a new and hopefully inspirational, deeper tone for your year ahead as a business owner or guide.

Our opening guest is the inimitable Dr. Anu Taranath, a professor, author, and facilitator. She's truly one of a kind. She gave the opening keynote at last year's Tourpreneur conference, and blew everyone away.

So Tourpreneur's Mitch Bach was excited to sit down with Anu to challenge Tourpreneurs to think new thoughts about what they're doing as business owners. Yes, our job is to bring joy and entertainment and storytelling to our guests. Yes, our job as business owners is to show up for the daily grind of practical, nuts and bolts business. That's the spine of many of our lives out there.

This episode will ask you to go deeper.

If you rest on only the level of entertainment, and 'customer service' and professionalism, you're missing an opportunity for greater meaning, both in your business and your guests' lives.

Anu asks you to think of your role as creating not only staged performances, but also spaces and containers to "rehumanize humans" and "normalize the normal"—that is, the kinds of human questions about culture and difference that are normal reactions to a travel experience that stretches people.

It's an invitation to take off the armor — yours and your guests, and create something more meaningful together, something deeply human.

As always, more show notes and links on tourpreneur.com.

• Dr. Anu's Website
• Connect with Anu on LinkedIn
• Anu's Instagram
• Anu's book, Beyond Guilt Trips

Pete Syme interviews Andrea Lamparini from WeRoad, a hybrid tech company and tour operator that's rewriting the rules of group travel for millennials and Gen Z. The conversation reveals how WeRoad has achieved exceptional growth by building a community-first model where strangers become friends through small group experiences, using travel coordinators instead of traditional guides, operating as a curated marketplace where top coordinators design their own trips, and leveraging technology to scale operations with one-third of their 200-person team dedicated to tech. Andrea shares how they maintain quality with 4,000+ casual travel coordinators who each lead just one trip per year, why they leave 30-40% of each itinerary unstructured for group decision-making, how their supply model works across 68-70 DMCs globally, and why they're expanding into B2B channels including travel agencies, employee benefit programs, and corporate partnerships that already represent 17-18% of revenue. The discussion covers their VC backing (rare for a tour operator), plans for US expansion in 2026, the power of their We Meet app hosting 50,000 community members at events this year, and Andrea's key lesson learned: curating their marketplace offering earlier would have prevented the conversion drop caused by overwhelming choice.

Top Ten Takeaways

1. Travel Coordinators Work Alongside Local Guides

WeRoad uses travel coordinators who are the same age as travelers, depart from the same home country, and focus on facilitating group dynamics rather than delivering local expertise. Local guides are still included for museums, parks, and other sites where specialized knowledge is needed. Travel coordinators create WhatsApp groups one month before departure, balance introverted and extroverted personalities, and coordinate the 30-40% of unstructured time built into every itinerary. WeRoad has 4,000+ coordinators working casual contracts with a commitment of just one trip per year.

2. Quality at Scale Without Full-Time Staff

Coordinators go through online applications, webinars, group interviews, and a final boot camp weekend with 100 candidates. Most visit destinations for the first time, but rigorous hiring and training ensure consistency. Local DMC partners provide backup if logistics fail. Top performers can become "producers" who design and scout their own trips.

3. Groups Decide 30-40% of Their Itinerary in Real Time

Accommodations, transport, and core experiences are fixed, but dinners, half-days, and optional activities are decided by the group during the trip based on their interests and budget. Travel coordinators provide options and handle bookings with local partners, personalizing the experience to match group energy.

4. A Curated Marketplace Scales the Portfolio 5x

WeRoad's internal team creates 200 itineraries while travel producers create 1,000+ more. This model scaled their catalog 5x without adding internal headcount. All producers use standardized supply agreements ensuring every DMC meets centralized requirements for safety, insurance, compliance, and capacity.

5. Supply Quality Is Non-Negotiable

WeRoad works with 68-70 DMCs globally, visits partner sites, and monitors quality constantly. The rule is simple: mess up once or twice and you're out. Because each group makes different choices during unstructured time, suppliers must be flexible enough to support varied activities in every destination.

6. Community Extends Beyond Travel Through We Meet

The We Meet app hosts 10,000+ events across Europe where 50,000 people connected this year. Travel coordinators organize pottery classes, running groups, hiking, pub quizzes, and weekend trips in their home cities. This keeps travelers engaged between their one or two annual trips and drives repeat bookings.

7. One-Third of Staff Are Tech People

WeRoad built their entire platform internally: booking websites, supply platforms for internal operators and external producers, and the We Meet app. They use AI for customer service, machine learning for demand forecasting that gives suppliers 12-month projections, and sentiment analysis to understand feedback at scale.

8. Growth Comes From Digital, Community, and B2B Channels

WeRoad started with digital acquisition through social media and paid channels, building massive accounts that visualize the beauty of trips and community. They recently launched a global partnership program targeting travel agencies, employee benefit platforms, corporate retreats, and associations. This B2B channel already represents 17-18% of total volume.

9. VCs Invest in Tour Operators That Look Like Tech Platforms

WeRoad is unusually VC-backed for a tour operator because investors see them as a tech platform sustaining a brand mission. Strong unit economics in mature markets mean they can self-finance growth, but external investment accelerates new market expansion. The focus remains on sustainable growth, not burning money short-term.

10. Overwhelming Choice Kills Conversion

Andrea's biggest lesson: curate your marketplace offering early. When WeRoad first opened to travel producers, the abundance of trips—including duplicates—confused customers and decreased conversion. They now prioritize how offerings are visualized and presented, not just experience quality. US expansion is planned for 2026 after strengthening European markets, followed by Asia and Middle East. Japan is currently their most popular destination.

Christy Hunter started Photo Walk Nashville seven years ago after discovering Airbnb Experiences, combining her photography skills with local knowledge to create tours that capture memories for travelers. What began as open photo shoots quickly evolved as she learned to segment products for different customer types—bachelorette parties, couples, solo travelers, dog owners, and corporate groups.

The conversation covers her product development journey, including early mistakes like mixing incompatible customer types and learning when to say no. Christy emphasizes the importance of local partnerships, sharing examples like teaming up with cosmetic brand Winky Lux for a home base and an apartment complex for rooftop access.

On marketing, Christy shares her successful TikTok strategy: having team member Gina speak directly to camera as if she were a past guest ("You have to do this one thing in Nashville..."), which drove multiple viral videos and direct bookings. She also discusses influencer marketing from both sides—as a tour operator and as an influencer herself—stressing the importance of clear communication, doing research on engagement rates, and not asking for specific deliverables.

Christy expanded to Charleston this year when a team member relocated, keeping the same operational model rather than franchising. She's also building Go To Nashville, an OTA reselling partner experiences through Tour Base's affiliate system. Looking ahead, she's focused on increasing capacity utilization rather than geographic expansion, and launching a consulting business to help other photographers and retailers enter the tourism space.

1. She learned to segment products by customer type after mixing incompatible groups. Couples from Ohio and bachelorette parties on the same tour didn't work. She created separate experiences for bachelorette parties, dog owners, proposals, and corporate groups. She also had to add rules like no showing up intoxicated.
2. Local partnerships solved operational problems. She partnered with Winky Lux cosmetics to use their store as a tour base. She partnered with an apartment complex to do one event per month in exchange for building access, free parking, gym, pool, and exclusive rooftop access for a champagne add-on.
3. She met business partner Gina through Airbnb host meetups. Gina developed scheduling systems for Photo Walk and now leads their TikTok strategy. They found a part-time scheduling manager who is also one of their hosts to keep operations in the family.
4. Styled shoots solve the content creation problem. Designate one day per quarter or year, hire models (friends and family work), hire a photographer, and simulate the tour experience. Creating content during real tours is too difficult.
5. Their TikTok strategy: Gina speaks as if she's a past guest. She says "you have to do this one thing in Nashville" direct to camera. They had multiple viral videos and saw direct booking surges. They repeat the same hook for different demographics. TikTok shows it to different audiences each time.
6. Influencer marketing is about clear communication and research. Look at engagement rates, not follower counts. Check if they have real followers by looking at views relative to follower count. Don't ask for specific deliverables. Show them a good time and they'll naturally post. Get expectations in writing.
7. She hires photographers who are connectors and storytellers first. Technical skill matters, but being a people person is more important. She uses live view mode to avoid putting the camera between her and the guest. She tells guests upfront she has posing ideas so they relax.
8. She tracks booking sources through Peak's intake form. She asks "how did you hear about us?" Her biggest sources are Google, Facebook groups (Nashville visitors pages), and TikTok.
9. Her growth strategy is "fill the bus" not geographic expansion. Rather than opening in five cities in five years, she wants to get four or five people on tours that currently have two. Same time and overhead, better revenue. She still wants to be out leading tours, not behind a computer.
10. Charleston expansion happened organically when a Nashville team member relocated. They kept the same operational model rather than franchising. She handles scheduling and marketing centrally. Charleston is 40 minutes by plane, so she can support when needed.

Ryan Connolly went from finance analyst to glacier guide to co-founder of Hidden Iceland. In this episode, he shares the numbers behind their most pivotal business decision: cutting small group tours that represented 50% of their departures but only 10% of revenue.

That shift to exclusively premium and luxury private tours helped the company grow by 5% while improving quality and profitability. Ryan explains how relationship marketing drives 70% of their bookings directly without OTAs, why they lead with education when working with travel advisors, and why PR outperforms paid advertising when selling luxury experiences.

Plus, the story of how a three-year journey across 40 countries led him to Iceland, where he met his wife on a glacier tour and built a business with two partners.

1. Cut unprofitable segments ruthlessly

Small group tours accounted for 50% of Hidden Iceland's departures but only 10% of revenue. After eliminating that segment, they grew 5% by focusing resources on premium and luxury private tours where margins are higher.

2. Partner with competitors instead of viewing them as threats

When customers can't afford Hidden Iceland's luxury pricing, Ryan personally introduces them to partner companies that serve the budget segment. This maintains relationships and positions them as helpful experts rather than pushy salespeople.

3. PR drives better ROI than paid ads for high ticket sales

Over 450 articles in publications like Condé Nast, Forbes, and CNN have driven 70% direct bookings. For luxury trips ($20,000+), earned media builds trust better than Facebook or Google ads.

4. Lead with personal story in first customer contact

Ryan's initial email starts: "Hello, my name is Ryan. I'm originally Scottish. I've lived in Iceland since 2016. I originally trained as a glacier guide..." This builds immediate trust and differentiates from transactional competitors.

5. Educate travel advisors. Don't just sell to them

Hidden Iceland runs webinars teaching agents about Iceland's seasons, distances, and what each time of year offers. Not sales pitches. The education first approach builds meaningful advisor relationships that generate 30% of bookings.

6. Vet activity partners on safety and environmental standards

Before partnering with snowmobile companies, helicopter tours, or other providers, Hidden Iceland shares their own safety and environmental policies first, then asks partners to reciprocate. This creates collaboration, not just transactions.

7. Train guides to be themselves, not follow scripts

Instead of teaching guides what to say at each stop, Hidden Iceland tells them: "Be yourself in the most authentic way possible and create genuine connections." This leads to reviews that praise the guide more than the destination.

8. Choose conferences strategically. Avoid the herd

Ryan skips luxury travel conferences if more than 2 or 3 other Iceland companies will attend. Less competition means easier differentiation and more meaningful conversations with travel advisors.

9. Keep the sales process low tech and high touch

Despite having a CRM (LEMACS), Hidden Iceland puts key itinerary details in the body of emails and offers phone calls early. For luxury clients, human connection trumps slick automation.

10. Build the business with partners you trust implicitly

Ryan emphasizes: "Don't set up a company with anyone you don't trust inherently and that you believe will communicate effectively during the hardest times." Through pandemics and volcanic eruptions, Hidden Iceland's three owners have never shouted at each other because they chose partnership carefully.

Kevin and Sylvia launched iRide Arusha in July 2024, offering motorcycle tours and rentals in Tanzania. Within 18 months they scaled across four East African cities through a franchise model called iRide Africa, with partners operating in Rwanda, Nairobi, and Mombasa. The franchise structure allows riders to cross borders and book multi-country tours.

The episode covers operational realities: importing equipment across borders, navigating tourism regulations, managing multi-country payment processing, and running rentals and guided tours as two distinct businesses with different customer profiles and sales cycles. Kevin and Sylvia share how they find customers through motorcycle clubs, price for premium buyers, and use immediate response times as a competitive advantage.

TOP 10 TAKEAWAYS

1. Test adjacent niches when your market is saturated

Rather than launch another safari company in an oversaturated market, Kevin and Sylvia identified motorcycle touring as an underserved adventure niche in East Africa. Consider what adjacent experiences your destination supports that competitors aren't offering.

2. Franchise models can scale faster than going solo

Within 18 months, iRide expanded across four East African cities through franchise partnerships. Partners share mechanics, bikes, marketing resources, and customer referrals. This creates a network effect where riders can start in one country and end in another, adding value no single operator could deliver alone.

3. Target communities, not just individuals

Kevin reaches out directly to motorcycle clubs in major US cities. One Chicago BMW Riders club is bringing eight people in February. Booking one club creates the revenue of eight individual customers with a fraction of the acquisition cost. Find the clubs, associations, or communities that match your experience type.

4. Customer service is a competitive advantage in developing markets

Their immediate response times and willingness to hop on Zoom calls builds trust fast, especially for customers who've never been to Africa.

5. Platform diversification requires testing, not guessing

iRide is on Get Your Guide, Viator, Klook, WeTravel, and fielding Facebook messages, but hasn't found the magic channel yet. Test widely, track what converts, double down there.

6. Price for the experience you're actually delivering, not your self-doubt

Kevin admits they severely underpriced at launch. Beginner business owners often can't see their own value clearly. If you're offering wow moments and authentic connections, charge accordingly.

7. Guided vs. rental requires different marketing and operations

Rental customers (experienced, self-sufficient, quick decision makers) need less hand-holding than guided tour customers (more questions, longer planning cycles, higher price points). These are functionally two different businesses with different messaging, pricing, and customer profiles.

8. Gross revenue and net income are very different

Vehicle maintenance, cross-border parts sourcing, and insurance eat into margins constantly. Build cash reserves and expect hidden costs, especially in asset-heavy businesses.

9. Local language fluency unlocks competitive advantages

Sylvia's Swahili fluency helped navigate Interpol holds on imported bikes, handle tourism police complaints from competitors, and build long-term supplier relationships. Language access isn't just customer-facing—it's operational power.

10. Differentiation isn't just what you do, it's how guests connect

Guests consistently cite the vastness of the landscape and local interactions (like lunch with Sylvia's 88-year-old farming grandmother) as their standout memories. Design for connection points your format uniquely enables.

This conversation with Jeff Gayduk, publisher of Premier Travel Media, reveals an industry at a transformative inflection point where specialized group travel is experiencing unprecedented growth despite predictions of its demise. Speaking from his unique vantage point overseeing multiple travel industry verticals, Gayduk identifies 2026 as a watershed year driven by three major events—the World Cup, Route 66's centennial, and America's 250th anniversary—while highlighting the explosive growth in niche markets from pickleball tourism to multi-generational family trips. The discussion underscores a fundamental shift in how travel experiences are designed and marketed, moving away from cookie-cutter itineraries toward highly specialized, passion-driven offerings that leverage everything from sports tournaments to career readiness programs, with successful operators focusing on authentic relationships and deep expertise rather than trying to compete with legacy brands on traditional offerings.

The group travel market has undergone a complete transformation since COVID, moving from a defensive position of proving relevance to an offensive surge of innovation and growth. Special interest groups, family bonding experiences, and educational opportunities are creating unique travel products unavailable to individual consumers. The pandemic's forced separation actually accelerated demand for meaningful group experiences rather than diminishing it.

The World Cup across 16 North American cities will bring 6.5 million visitors with 40% from overseas, creating massive opportunities for tour operators in hub cities. Route 66's anniversary and America's 250th celebration will generate patriotic tourism and historical programming throughout the year. These events create both standalone opportunities and chances for creative tour operators to build complementary experiences around the main attractions.

Youth sports tournaments drive consistent weekend travel with families spending whatever necessary for their children's athletic participation, creating massive but underserved tourism segments. Adult amateur sports, particularly pickleball, are seeing explosive growth with facilities featuring 32-64 courts becoming destinations themselves. The opportunity lies not in the games themselves but in creating experiences for the downtime between matches, serving families who are tourists without tour infrastructure.

Career readiness programs are emerging as students face AI-driven uncertainty about future employment, with manufacturers and trade schools becoming unexpected tourism partners. Small, specialized STEM groups and performance ensembles are replacing massive band trips, creating opportunities for highly targeted educational experiences. College visit tours have become sophisticated multi-campus experiences as the stakes for education choices continue rising.

"The riches are in the niches" has proven true as operators who focus on specific passions outperform those trying to compete on standard itineraries. Technology now enables operators to reach highly specific audiences globally rather than being limited to local marketing through yellow pages and park districts. The tighter the niche, the easier it becomes to market and the more likely customers are to pay premium prices for expertise.

Older Americans with disposable income are funding entire family trips, from luxury yacht cruises to Disney vacations, often including extended family and friends. These trips require sophisticated customization that big operators can't provide, creating opportunities for bespoke tour designers. The spending on these milestone celebration trips is "mind-boggling" according to industry data, with grandparents willing to invest heavily in family bonding experiences.

Destination Marketing Organizations spend hundreds of thousands on marketing but need tour operators to provide the actual bookable products visitors seek. DMOs possess mountains of data and local insights that operators often don't know to request, creating missed opportunities for partnership. The relationship should be symbiotic: DMOs drive inspiration and awareness while operators deliver the experiences that fulfill that inspiration.

Large traditional operators face the challenge of serving aging loyal customers while attracting younger demographics with different travel styles and expectations. Successful adaptation includes smaller group sizes, slower itineraries with longer stays, and the integration of river cruising as a bridge product. The human relationship element that made these companies successful remains their key differentiator even as they modernize their offerings.

The successful travel advisor model has shifted from selling airline tickets to becoming highly specialized experts in specific destinations, cruise lines, or travel styles. Good advisors serve as client advocates navigating an increasingly complex travel landscape, especially for multi-generational or special interest trips. The question remains whether there's a sufficient pipeline of new advisors entering the field to sustain this specialized, high-touch service model.

Modern travelers seek transformative experiences rather than destination checkboxes, with operators succeeding by creating unique access and authentic local connections. Events from Taylor Swift concerts to World Cup matches are becoming trip anchors, with some operators building entire experiences around events without even including tickets. The shift represents a fundamental change from "where are we going" to "what will we become through this experience."

Pete Syme talks with Drew Falkman about vibe coding, a way for tour operators to build custom software tools using plain English prompts instead of traditional programming. Drew explains how AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude have been trained on code repositories, allowing them to generate working applications from simple descriptions. The conversation covers why this matters for small operators, what you can build, the learning curve, costs, security considerations, and how this technology could shift the relationship between tour operators and the software they depend on. Pete emphasizes that operators already have the same AI access as hundred million dollar companies and encourages spending at least an hour daily experimenting with these tools.

1. You can build tools without coding knowledge. AI tools trained on code repositories can generate working applications from plain English descriptions, making app building accessible to anyone.
2. Most SaaS tools don't fit your exact workflow. You end up paying for applications where 80% of features you're not using because they're designed for other industries, but the things you do use aren't quite refined enough.
3. Start with internal workflows, not customer-facing apps. Build tools for internal processes first. Don't go public with what you build until you have experience, as you can get 80 to 90% correct quickly, but that last bit is more challenging.
4. Map your processes before building. Write down all your processes on paper, rank what's most important, and list what you really don't like doing. This helps identify where custom tools can have the biggest impact.
5. The learning curve has three main steps. First, learn to plan what you want to build (20 to 30 hours). Second, design the workflow and user interface (a few hours). Third, understand data and databases (a couple days). Total time to get comfortable is roughly a few weeks of focused learning.
6. Tools like Lovable cost around $20 per month. There are small monthly fees for vibe coding platforms, plus hosting costs if your tool is public-facing. Tools like Lovable, Bolt, Replit, Magic Patterns, and N8n each serve different purposes.
7. Keep data storage minimal for security. Don't store sensitive information like credit card numbers or social security numbers. Use third-party authentication (Google, Microsoft, Apple) and payment processors like Stripe to handle sensitive data.
8. You can build custom booking flows and optimize conversions. Create your own booking engine where you control every step, then use analytics tools to see where people drop off and experiment with improvements to increase completion rates.
9. This threatens the traditional SaaS industry. Large companies spending millions monthly on SaaS are already exploring vibe coding to reduce costs. What happens at that level will cascade down through the industry to the tools small operators use today.
10. Just try it to understand the possibilities. Go to lovable.dev, run a prompt, and build something. You won't fully understand what you can do until you experiment. You have nothing to lose with free versions, and no one else will see your experiments.

Want to learn vibe coding yourself? Drew teaches courses on building apps without code. Visit drewfalkman.com to explore free resources and paid courses that walk you through the process step by step.

Born from a wine import business and shaped by deep relationships with multi‑generational wineries, Joy of Wine Journeys built a premium, multi‑day model with a ~75% repeat rate. Natalie shares why they skip big cities, how “depth over density” creates value, and how pricing, partnerships, feedback, and tight ops compound into growth.

Top 10 takeaways

1) Repeat guests keep coming back. About 75% rebook, often bringing friends and family. Nail the first trip and lifetime value follows.

2) Win the in between. Don’t try to run Paris or Venice. Guests fly into a gateway, then the tour connects the regions in between where long winery relationships unlock access and stories.

3) Fewer stops, deeper moments. Five wineries in ten days. Hosted visits. Family meals. Time to linger. People remember conversations and rituals, not mileage.

4) Price for the value you deliver. Raise prices as the experience improves. Let booking behavior and guest comments set the ceiling, not nerves.

5) Partners make you resilient. When a bus failed, local partners mobilized vans, cold water, and support within the hour. Good relationships turn problems into loyalty moments.

6) Feedback is the roadmap. Debrief during and after each tour, then keep, change, or cut. Trim bloat, smooth pacing, and upgrade hotels, meals, wines, and transport.

7) Know who you serve. Average age ~63. Well traveled. Hungry for hosted, exclusive experiences without snobbery. Design pacing, teaching, and access for that person.

8) Confirm, confirm, confirm. Book a year out, then reconfirm at six months, three months, one month, and day‑of. Fewer surprises. Smoother days.

9) Help in the cities even if you don’t operate there. Refer guests to vetted guides in Venice, Milan, Paris, Nice, and Florence so the whole trip feels looked after.

10) Use tech to support margins, not as the magic. TravelJoy for CRM, WeTravel for euro payments, Travelfy for itineraries, QuickBooks for the back office. The differentiator is still access, hosting, and relationships.

When Justin Buzzi launched a clear kayak tour in Florida, his goal was to offer something memorable. What he built was one of the most highly rated kayak experiences in the country—with over 50,000 five-star reviews and 30+ franchise locations.

In this episode, Justin joins Dustin Miller of Conversion Assist to unpack how they built a guest experience that keeps working long after the paddles are down. From guide training to personalized automations, they reveal the systems and strategies behind their flywheel of reviews, repeat customers, and referrals.

Whether you run one tour or many, this conversation offers clear, actionable ideas for tightening operations, earning stronger reviews, and building a reputation that scales.

Top 10 Takeaways

1. Start with experience. Build with systems. Clear kayaks got attention, but it was the systems behind the scenes—like training, hiring, and guest communication—that turned Get Up and Go Kayaking into a scalable business.
2. Google reviews matter most. While they still collect reviews on TripAdvisor, Airbnb, and Facebook, the team prioritizes Google for its impact on search visibility and conversion. That focus shapes everything from email copy to in-person asks.
3. Follow up with every guest, not just the booker. After each tour, automated messages go out to everyone who attended—not just the person who paid. That alone tripled their review volume in one year.
4. Set expectations before guests arrive. Automated pre-tour texts help guests feel informed, reduce no-shows, and create a smoother arrival. That positive start lays the groundwork for better reviews.
5. Empower guides to own the guest relationship.Top guides build connection, read the group, and ask for reviews in ways that feel natural. Some have personally earned over 2,000 five-star reviews through great service and follow-up.
6. Automation can still feel personal. With name-based SMS, segmented follow-ups, and smart timing, Dustin’s system balances efficiency with a human touch. Guests feel supported without extra strain on the team.
7. Use your off-season to get stronger. Slow months are for updating SOPs, refreshing content, replacing gear, and optimizing tools. When the season picks up again, the whole operation runs better.
8. Your reviews are a roadmap. Use AI to analyze common praise and complaints in your reviews. What guests love should shape your messaging. What they question should inform training or improvements.
9. Bad reviews are a chance to show who you are. Reply quickly, stay calm, and put future guests at ease. Dustin recommends using AI to help write thoughtful, emotionally neutral responses if needed.
10. Great reviews grow more than bookings. Consistent five-star reviews improve search rankings, boost conversion rates, and increase the long-term value of your company. It’s not just a feedback loop—it’s a growth engine.

When Christian Wolters rejoined Intrepid Travel, his goal wasn’t to reinvent the brand—it was to reconnect it to its core. As President for Canada and GM of Marketing for North America, Christian brought a global perspective to a local challenge: how to ensure that Intrepid’s messaging reflected its values, operations, and guest experience.

At the time, Intrepid already had strong credentials as the world’s largest B Corp-certified travel company—but its marketing had become noisy. Christian’s task was to bring back clarity and alignment.

In this episode, he shares how the team rebuilt trust through transparent messaging, simplified their email strategy, and launched bold campaigns—like “Offsetting is not enough”—that prioritized substance over slogans.

We explore how brand credibility starts internally, how even small teams can clarify their voice, and why the most effective growth strategy is simply this: make sure what you say matches what you do.

Here’s what stood out from Christian’s approach to brand leadership at Intrepid Travel—and how you can apply the same principles no matter your team size or marketing budget:

Marketing only works when it reflects what’s real

Before crafting new campaigns, Christian focused on whether the brand’s messaging matched the guest experience. Effective marketing starts with operational alignment, not just creative ideas.

Less content can create more impact

Intrepid eliminated 70% of its email marketing output. By reducing noise and focusing on relevant, high-quality communication, they saw stronger engagement and a better connection with their audience.

Transparency strengthens your position

Instead of promoting carbon offsets as a total solution, Intrepid launched a campaign that openly stated: “Offsetting is not enough.” That honesty sparked deeper trust among travelers who care about sustainability.

Internal stories are the foundation of brand identity

Christian built Intrepid’s external messaging around what employees already cared about and talked about. That made the brand more authentic, more consistent, and easier to rally around.

Clarity attracts the right people

Getting specific about Intrepid’s values helped bring in better-fit travelers, partners, and employees. When you know what you stand for, the right people find you—and the wrong ones self-select out.

Show up with your real voice, not someone else’s

Christian encouraged small operators to speak in their own words. You don’t need slick campaigns to earn trust—just a clear point of view and consistency in how you show up.

Sustainability starts with how you operate

For Intrepid, being a responsible travel company isn’t just a message—it’s built into how trips are run, how suppliers are chosen, and how decisions are made. Marketing simply tells that story.

Internal alignment makes external messaging stronger

Christian made sure every team member could explain the brand’s purpose and values. When your team understands the story, they can embody it and share it more naturally with guests.

Rebrands can help clarify—not just refresh—your identity

Intrepid’s rebrand wasn’t just about visuals. It was about focusing the company’s message and voice to reflect its mission more clearly and consistently across all channels.

Small teams can apply the same approach

Even without big budgets or a full marketing department, operators can build stronger brands by focusing on alignment, simplifying their message, and staying grounded in purpose.

When Kirstin Reeder’s first-ever bookkeeping client turned out to be a tour operator, she didn’t expect it to change the course of her business. But that relationship revealed how often tour operators are misunderstood by traditional accountants. Today, Kirstin and her teammate Amber Call run Purple Sapphire Business Solutions, a firm focused entirely on the unique financial needs of the tour and activity industry.

This episode is packed with real-world guidance on how to set up your books, track profitability, avoid fraud, and prepare for seasonality. Whether you are just getting started or running a multi-day operation, Kirstin and Amber share the habits and systems that help operators build financially healthy businesses and reduce stress at tax time.

• And if you're attending TourWeek 2025, you can come meet Kirstin in person!
• Download their free expense audit calculator

As part of our Growth series, recorded live in Berlin at GetYourGuide's 2025 Unlocked Summit, we now turn to Naples, Italy. Tourpreneur host Mitch Bach talks with Jasmine Palmieri, Commercial & Product Director for World Tours Italy.

World Tours has scaled by keeping everything in-house—from their fleet of vehicles to employed tour guides—allowing them to maintain strict quality control as they grow. Jasmine explains their strategy of offering small group tours in multiple languages daily, staying ahead of competitors through constant innovation, and creating unique experiences like a Roman-era dining experience paired with archaeological tours. She emphasizes the importance of personal connection, having guides proactively reach out to clients and serve as local advisors throughout their stay, turning tourists into enthusiastic advocates who spread the word to friends and family.

Episode sponsored by GetYourGuide. Join Tourpreneur in November for TourWeek 2025 in Charleston, South Carolina!

Welcome to the Growth Series! Tourpreneur hosts Peter Syme and Mitch Bach attended GetYourGuide's Unlocked event in Berlin in September, and recorded several conversations with tour operators who have scaled their businesses to tens and hundreds of thousands of travelers. They share their insights and secrets in this series.

In this conversation, Peter talks with Arzu Tutuk, Founder and Managing Director of Walks in Europe. She shares her journey from being a solo tour guide in Istanbul to running a scaled operation across multiple cities in Europe. They talk about the importance of delegation, leveraging technology, understanding pricing strategies, managing cash flow, and enhancing customer communication. Arzu highlights the need for small operators to expand their partner networks and adapt to market trends, particularly the growing demand for personalized and private tours.

Key takeaways

• Delegation is crucial for scaling a business.
• Your time as a business owner is more valuable than guiding.
• Invest in customer service to free up your time.
• Utilize technology to streamline operations and bookings.
• Pricing strategies should be dynamic and responsive to market demand.
• Cash flow management is essential for business sustainability.
• Effective communication with customers can increase bookings.
• Private and customized tours are becoming increasingly popular.
• Expanding your partner network can accelerate growth.
• Diversifying sales channels is key to reaching more customers.

More on tourpreneur.com

Today Tourpreneur host Mitch Bach goes to Budapest!

When a video game designer accidentally lands on MasterChef thanks to his partner’s prank, he doesn’t expect it to change his life. But that twist launched Joseph Szakács into founding Foodapest, one of Budapest’s most unique food experiences. In this episode, Joseph shares how he turned a surprise phone call into a purpose-driven business built around cooking, culture, and human connection.

The (Hungarian) meat of this conversation focuses on Emotion Design. Joseph reveals how his background in video game development taught him to craft emotional journeys, not just itineraries. We dive deep into his ideas on “vibe guiding,” emotional storytelling, and why frustration and delight both belong on a tour.

• Visit Foodapest
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Good tour design doesn't just help create memorable experiences, it's also a way to build a defensive moat around your business that protects against competitors, copycats, and even AI disruption.

In today's episode, TP hosts Mitch Bach and Peter Syme dismantle the traditional information-based approach to tour guiding and argue for a shift in thinking towards emotional design. They explore how customers drowning in content and knowledge need tours that create feelings rather than deliver facts, introducing frameworks like the "connection triangle" (guide-guest-place), the peak-end rule for memory formation, and the psychology of surprise as a core human emotion. The discussion reveals why designing around emotions like awe, connection, and surprise creates experiences that can't be replicated by competitors or generated by AI.

Mitch and Pete dive into how tour operators can build defensible businesses through unique access, authentic personal stories, and continuous iteration rather than relying on replicable scripts or famous landmarks. Using examples from speakeasy-style walking tours in New York to bonfire dinners with base jumpers in the mountains, they demonstrate how value-based pricing comes from designing experiences that surprise and transform rather than simply meeting expectations.

For more on tour design, join us at our annual conference TourWeek, November 10-13, 2025 in Charleston, SC!

Tourpreneur hosts Mitch Bach and Peter Syme come to you live from Berlin! They attended GetYourGuide's Unlocked conference, where over 300 of their tour, activity, and attraction partners gathered from around the world to have a day-long discussion that will shape the future of the platform, and our industry in part. (Last year's supplier discussions focused on the need for curation, leading directly to a major shift in the platform's direction.)

Peter and Mitch spent most of the day speaking with tour operators there, but when end-of-day drinks happened, GetYourGuide's COO Tao Tao said "let's grab some beers and go have a chat!" And we couldn't resist the chance to pepper him with questions.

In an age of carefully scripted, PR-focused corporate conversations, we appreciated Tao's candor and willingness to answer everything we threw at him. Our questions were a little wacky, a little philosophical and extremely eclectic. But he didn't shy away from anything. And the result really exposes GetYourGuide's vision (and bet) for how an experiences marketplace should look in 2025 and beyond.

This conversation is wide-ranging to say the least, and a good follow-up after our podcast in January (which is also a must-listen).

In this episode we cover a lot of terrain:

• Mitch gets a little wacky with social commentary: Are reviews actually good for our industry? Are we all better off experiencing travel through serendipity and wandering, rather than organized, booked experiences?
• Pete notices an end-of-day discussion on "moods" and asked Tao whether GetYourGuide should be developing mood and feeling filters!
• Tao shares why they created a conference to show up for their suppliers, even when there's tough love in the room.
• We ask how, 9 months later, the shift to a more curated marketplace is progressing. Are we nearing the end of the process, or just the beginning?
• We veer into a strange conversation around which movie or TV show best describes the current OTA situation, and how GetYourGuide thinks about what they're doing as an organization that partially sets the tone for what tours & activities are.
• Tao shares how in the age of AI, product differentiation and curation will only get more important.
• We all agree our industry needs to grow the pie. But how? In what direction?
• New AI reviews and filters point to a future possibility where the right tour is surfaced in a more personalized way, and quality is assessed beyond star ratings.
• Finally, we get Tao's advice for new businesses and how they should position themselves in the industry and the platform for best success.

And GetYourGuide is a sponsor of TourWeek 2025, our global conference with 400 tour & activity industry players coming to Charleston, SC for more meaty, frothy conversations!

More show notes and resources on tourpreneur.com

If there's one thing we at Tourpreneur have learned about running an online community, it's how important it is to have in-person gatherings to anchor the online conversations in the friendships that develop in-person.

So far this year we've welcomed nearly 1,000 people to our small group "Shindigs" (meetups) held all around the world.

And we're planning on more, plus launching a brand new style of conference for the whole industry, TourWeek.

So in this special episode, Mitch, Peter and TP Head of Events Kyle Campbell sit down for a chat about the importance of tour operators meeting up together in-person and how we want YOU to join or host an in-person gathering!

How do we design experiences that use photography to enhance the guided experience, and not detract from feeling engaged and immersed? That's the question Mitch Bach posed in this Tourpreneur episode.

Mikaela Toczek is the perfect person to answer that questions. She's the founder of More to Explore in Slovenia, which combines her background as a documentary photographer and photojournalism educator with her passion for guiding to create tours that explore Slovenia's lesser-known areas.

Having moved to Slovenia with her family and launched her business three years ago, she deliberately focuses on areas without established tourism infrastructure, taking small groups of eight people to places that offer authentic connections with local hosts and providers.

Her approach to tours integrates what she calls "conscious photography" - a philosophy rooted in her experience using medium format film cameras that have only 12 shots per roll, forcing intentional, reflective image-making rather than mindless smartphone snapping. This photographic mindfulness becomes woven throughout her tour experiences, helping guests balance capturing memories with being fully present in Slovenia's stunning natural landscapes.

Don't forget to join us for TourWeek, Tourpreneur's global event for tour operators! More at tourweek.travel

**Don't forget to register for our upcoming conference: TourWeek, Nov 10-13!**

The whole TP gang of Mitch, Peter, Chris and Kyle were in London together recently for a Tourpreneur party. And our friends at GetYourGuide emailed and said—hey, while you're in London, do you want to take a tour?

We said, sure! When we asked what it was, they said: trust us, this is a good one.

They weren't kidding.

It was such an interesting experience that we surprised the owner-guide by asking him to record an impromptu podcast episode right after finishing his 3-hour tour of Afro-Carribean Foods of Brixton, London.

Obi owns Gorgeous Tours UK, and operates African and Caribbean food tours in Brixton, London's historically black neighborhood, sharing deeply personal stories of his Nigerian family's immigration experience alongside the complex cultural evolution of the area.

What began six years ago as a slow-starting venture inspired by his wife's suggestion during a Bangkok food tour has transformed into a thriving full-time business running twice daily, six days a week, thanks to an unexpected boost from Beyoncé's London concerts in May 2023 that brought thousands of American tourists seeking authentic cultural experiences.

His tours combine eight to nine food tastings with intimate storytelling that doesn't shy away from difficult truths about gentrification, historical neglect, and community displacement, instead embracing honest narratives that guests appreciate for their authenticity. Operating as a solo entrepreneur, Obi faces the classic scaling challenges of managing all aspects of his business while maintaining the personal touch and local relationships that make his tours special.

There's no explaining this episode. It's rambling and angry and raw and weird, but probably a very useful episode to listen to.

Mr. AI-is-the-future Peter Syme and Mr. Human-Connection-is-Everything Mitch Bach are joined by two brilliant guys who have made their living creating travel content. Stuart McDonald founded Travelfish to offer true expert insights into Southeast Asian travel destinations. And Matthew Barker is the founder of Horizon Guides, which helps tour operators sell tours by pairing their products with expert content.

Both Matthew and Stuart have spent decades in the travel content business, and have a lot to say about what Google's content updates and the general shift to AI has done to the spirit of travel planning & discovery. But the conversation gets much broader, real quick. Mitch rants about the poverty of fast-food AI tour guide experiences and what it's doing to customer behavior, and Pete valiantly defends technology.

Nothing is firmly decided, but the debate is definite informative for anyone struggling to figure out where we're headed as a tour industry.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Introduction to the Changing Landscape of Travel Content
• 04:29 Understanding Google’s Evolving Algorithms
• 08:35 Creating Quality Travel Content
• 13:40 The Impact of AI on Travel Content
• 18:17 The Role of Human Connection in Travel Experiences
• 25:01 Navigating the Future of Travel and Content Creation
• 44:22 The Impact of Digital Culture on Personal Identity
• 46:15 The Illusion of Choice in a Digital World
• 48:26 Mindless Travel: The Loss of Agency
• 51:48 The Backlash Against Mindless Travel
• 55:00 The Role of Authenticity in Travel Experiences
• 58:48 The Importance of Connection in Guiding
• 01:01:21 Creating Meaningful Content in Travel
• 01:05:58 The Power of Personal Stories in Travel Marketing
• 01:12:12 Designing Immersive Experiences Without Screens

What does it take to grow a food tour company without losing what made it special in the first place? Mitch Bach talks with Lauren Aloise, co-founder of Devour Tours and now VP of Marketing and Guest Experience at Walks-Devour Tours, joins us to unpack the hard-earned lessons of scaling with soul. From cooking classes in her Madrid apartment to managing operations across continents, Lauren shares how Devour stayed grounded in hospitality, storytelling, and meaningful local partnerships—even as it greatly expanded.

Mitch and Lauren explore the tough questions many tour operators face: How do you train guides to host, not just talk? What gets lost when experiences become too polished? And how do you adapt to a tourism landscape shaped by TikTok, AI, and shifting guest expectations? This episode is packed with insight for anyone trying to grow a purpose-driven experience business—without losing the magic.

• Join the 20,000 member Tourpreneur Facebook Group
• More show notes at tourpreneur.com
• November 10-13, 2025: Tourpreneur's TourWeek annual conference

Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction to Devour Tours and Lauren Aloise
• 02:23 The Origins of Devour Tours
• 05:54 Evolving the Business Model
• 11:13 The Challenges of Scaling
• 14:30 Customer Loyalty and Brand Connection
• 16:20 The Unique Qualities of Food Tourism
• 20:57 Creating Connection Through Food Tours
• 25:23 The Future of Tour Guiding and AI
• 25:48 The Impact of AI on Tourism and Hospitality
• 27:59 The Power of Shared Food Memories
• 29:25 Balancing Experience and Product in Tours
• 30:33 Investing in Guide Training and Engagement
• 33:29 Building Loyalty and Company Culture
• 34:38 Navigating the Rise of DIY Food Tourism
• 37:41 Adapting Marketing Strategies for a New Generation
• 39:19 The Value of Webinars in Customer Engagement
• 43:16 Learning from Failures and Defining Success
• 47:39 The Importance of Focus in Business Growth

Madison Rifkin leads Mount, a platform that partners with short-term rental hosts to help them feature and promote local tours and activities to their guests.

But how do you actually get those guests to book? A static landing page doesn’t cut it. That’s where Madison’s “Creator Army” comes in—a vetted network of content creators trained specifically to craft high-performing short-form videos designed for the tour and activity industry.

In this episode, Madi breaks down what’s working on social video platforms right now, how Mount converts attention into bookings, and why your next best sales channel might be Instagram or TikTok. Plus, we dive into the unexpected origin story of Mount—which Madi started when she was just 12 years old.

• Show notes & more information on tourpreneur.com
• Join us Nov 10-13, 2025 for TourWeek, our annual global tour operator conference!

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Introduction to Mount and Its Mission
• 01:25 Understanding Mount's Unique Approach
• 04:04 The Role of AI and Concierge Services
• 05:20 Challenges in the Short-Term Rental Market
• 07:47 The Evolution of Short-Term Rentals
• 10:01 Targeting the Right Audience for Experiences
• 11:37 Mount's Content Strategy and Creator Army
• 15:00 The Importance of Authentic Storytelling
• 18:12 Creating Engaging Social Media Content
• 21:45 Building a Content Army for Tour Operators
• 24:05 Trends in Social Media Content
• 27:13 The Power of Series Content
• 29:15 User-Generated Content and Its Impact
• 32:51 Navigating the Challenges of the Travel Industry
• 36:12 Finding the Right Creators for Your Brand
• 39:11 Gender Dynamics in Social Media and Content Creation
• 42:25 Madi's Journey and Vision for Mount
• 44:50 How to Get Involved with Mount

All we hear about is AI this, AI that. And yet trying to keep up with all the changes can be overwhelming. Many operators are simply rejecting it outright, or knowingly keeping their heads buried in the sand.

So Mitch Bach sat down with Janette Roush, the "Chief AI Officer" for Brand USA, to ask a fundamental question: what are some practical ways a tour operator can get started using AI effectively for their tour business? This isn't a technical, advanced conversation, but rather a clear-eyed overview of the benefits of just getting started and a practical approach to do just that. It's a great first step for those wondering where to begin.

Janette is a master communicator on this topic, and everyone should follow her on LinkedIn!

🔥 Attend our next global conference, TourWeek!

Registration is now open for TourWeek '25, in Charleston, South Carolina. A gathering of day tour operators, multi-day operators, DMCs, travel advisors, guides, tour leaders... all descending on the city to take tours, get inspired, book 1:1 partnership meetings, and of course make new friends. Learn more at tourweek.travel!

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to AI in Tourism

58:51 The Role of a Chief AI Officer

01:00:19 AI's Impact on the Travel Industry

01:03:58 The Future of AI in Travel

01:07:08 AI and Pricing Strategies

01:10:10 The Evolution of SaaS in Tourism

01:14:16 Human Touch vs AI in Business Decisions

01:17:53 Getting Started with AI for Businesses

01:21:32 Mindset Shifts for Embracing AI

01:24:18 The Future of Work and Strategy

01:26:48 SEO in the Age of AI

01:29:30 The Value of Human Connection in Travel

01:33:06 Balancing Automation and Customer Service

01:37:38 Future-Proofing Your Business with AI

01:45:45 Common Pitfalls and Successes in AI Implementation

In this episode of the Tourpreneur podcast, Chris speaks with Jonathan Coleman from the Untours Foundation and Zakia Moulaoui Guery from Invisible Cities. They discuss the transformative power of tourism and how both organizations are making a significant impact in their communities.

The Untours Foundation focuses on impact investing in social enterprises, while Invisible Cities trains individuals affected by homelessness to become tour guides, sharing their unique stories. Together, they explore the intersection of tourism, social change, and community empowerment.

In this conversation, Zakia and Jonathan discuss the importance of networking, partnerships, and financial support, particularly for social enterprises like Invisible Cities. They highlight the significance of building trust and rapport with stakeholders, the milestones achieved by Invisible Cities, and the role of corporate partnerships in supporting their mission.

The discussion also covers future plans for expansion and offers advice for other tourism businesses looking to partner with Untours.

Mitch Bach is joined by ToursByLocals CEO Lisa Chen and Sherif Abiza, Chief Community Officer of Withlocals. Together they discuss a recent incident of guide poaching amongst tour platforms, and talk about what trust and fairness looks like in our industry.

Guide platforms operate differently than other OTAs like GetYourGuide, Viator or Klook, since they deal primarily in solo entrepreneurs who themselves are the face of the tour.

In this episode of Tourpreneur the group discusses:

• what does the platform's commission get spent on?
• how a guide platform acquires a customer
• what goes into a great guide profile
• the rise of video, and social commerce
• what it takes to build trust between travelers, guides and a platform
• how guides need to adopt a 'marketing mindset', beyond delivering a great tour
• what they think of Airbnb Experiences' new reboot

Don't forget:

• Join Tourpreneur's 20,000 strong Facebook Group of tour professionals!
• Join us for TourWeek 2025, our annual conference for tour operators & guides!