Tourpreneur Tour Business Podcast
Tourpreneur is a community of passionate tour business owners eager to improve their skills and increase their profits. The community helps you get advice from your peers as well as experts in the areas you need to grow your business and make it more profitable. Whether you explore hundreds of free articles, podcasts and other resources, or join the Tourpreneur+ community, they are here to help.
Episodes
Google Business Profiles: Everything You Need to Know in 2026
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
The Last Free Booking: What Works Now With Creators, Social Search and AI
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 get
Pete & Mitch Are Angry About: A.I.
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
Small Operator, Overtouristed Island: How Maria Petrenko Competes in Santorini
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 avoidi
Ultra Luxury Is Ultra Personalization: How Secret Journeys Grows Through Relationships, Not Ads
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 fligh
How Culinary Adventure Co. Built a Food Tour Business Nobody in Toronto Can Copy
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 wo
The State Of The OTAs Today & What It Means For Tour Operators
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 e
Building Tours Around A Single Unforgettable Experience
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
Mitch and Pete on What Could Change Your Business This Fall
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 a
How Jeanette Built a Local Tour Business … Only For Locals
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, f
How 'New Scientist' Turned a Media Brand's Readership Into a Multi-Day Tour Audience
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 t
From Coco Chanel to D-Day Beaches: Building Pilgrimages Around Characters
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 Mont
An Anthropologist's Operating System for Running Day Tours and Multi-Day Tours Without Diluting Either
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 Archaeol
I Know A Guy Tours: A Six-Figure NYC Tour Business Built Around One 'Guy'
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 priva
The VAWAA Story: Building a Niche Tour Business on Human-Centered Design
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 pr
How The Chef Tours Built a 70% Referral Rate by Never Running the Same Tour Twice
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 obsessiv
What Do You Stand For? Why Taking a Position Is Good Business
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 ke
Be Weird, Be Personal: Storytelling as a Competitive Advantage in the Age of AI
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
Understanding DMOs: How Tour Operators Can Build Real Destination Partnerships
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 DM
Embracing Your Inner Pirate: How to Build a Passion-First Business
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
Tour Guiding in Contentious Times: Designing Conversations, Not Just Commentary
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 her
Invisible No More: Busting Myths About the 50+ Woman Traveler with Carolyn Ray
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-changi
15,000 Guests in Three Years: How Carlo Leverages Tech and Creativity to Grow
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 h
An Ex-Human Rights Lawyer's Uncomfortable Questions for Adventure Tourism
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 commun
From Solo Engineer to 26 Guides: The Unorthodox Growth Strategies behind Rainbow Tours
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 h
Stop entertaining tourists. Start making meaning. (w/ Dr. Anu Taranath)
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 ki
WeRoad: Building a Tour Operator Where Technology Enables Human Connection
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
Growing Without Scaling: Christy Hunter's Strategy for Building Photo Walk
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
Champagne at an Active Volcano: Selling Luxury Tours in Remote Places
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. Rya
Building a Cross-Border Motorcycle Tour Business in East Africa
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: impor
“The Riches are in the Niches”—2026 Group Travel Trends & Events
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 C
Vibe Coding for Tour Operators: No‑Code Tools to Save Time and Grow Revenue
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, w
Designing High‑Repeat, High‑Value Wine Tours Off The Beaten Path
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 takeaways1) Repeat guests keep coming back. About 75% reb
How to Turn Great Tours Into 50,000 Five-Star Reviews
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 d
Multi-Day Brand & Growth Strategies from Intrepid Travel
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 th
The Financial Fix: Bookkeeping Tips to Keep Tour Operators Profitable (w/ Purple Sapphire Business Solutions)
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
Growth Series: How World Tours Italy Scaled While Keeping Everything In-House
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
Growth Series: How Arzu Tutuk scaled her European walking tour business to 160,000 customers
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 Di
From MasterChef and Video Games to Market-to-Table Tours: How Emotion Became the Secret Ingredient (w/ Joseph Szakács)
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 a
Tour Design as a Defensive Moat for your Tour Business
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 cus
GetYourGuide’s COO Tao Tao: On Platform Curation, Competition, Innovation, and Anthony Bourdain
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 direc
The Future of In-Person Events at Tourpreneur: Shindigs & TourWeek
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
Improving Guest Experience Through the Art of "Conscious Photography"
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 educato
Supporting a London neighborhood through a deeply personal food tour
**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
Three Grumpy Old Men Rant About AI to One Pro-AI Weirdo
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.
Balancing Soul, Scale & Authenticity in Food Tourism (w/ Lauren Aloise of Devour Tours)
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
Sell More Tours with Social Video and Creator Partnerships
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 design
Demystifying AI for Tour Operators (w/ Janette Roush of Brand USA)
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 effectivel
Tourism as a Force for Good: The Untours Foundation's Mission
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
Selling Tours Through Guide Platforms: Advice, Trends, and Challenges
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 the
Sell More Tours through Partnerships (w/ Nicole Mahoney of Travel Alliance Partnership)
Nicole Mahoney runs Travel Alliance Partnership, a small group of tour operators banding together to create more buying power with suppliers, resell each others' tours, and much much more. In this Tourpreneur episode Nicole talks with Mitch Bach about how powerful these kinds of B2B partnership models can be when it comes to growing your tour business.Watch the video, show notes, and more at tourp
Streamlining Your Customer & Team Communication Flows (w/ Ben Sann of Tour Optima)
Benjamin Sann is the CEO of Tour Optima, a communications platform and white-labeled app solution that offers streamlined messaging between your business and your guests, guides, and internal team.Communication is everything. How are your guests receiving the itinerary and important updates? How are they being prompted to review and tip the guide at the end of the tour? How do you handle group com
Building a Next-Generation Multi-Day Tour Brand through Community
Katalina Mayorga is the powerhouse founder of El Camino Travel, a multi-day tour company reimagining the group trip experience for a new generation.But she's also much more than a tour operator. To sell her trips she's leaned heavily into community, creating a membership that serves not only as a customer base, but a space for likeminded 'bold women' to share recommendations and advice. And to pow
GetYourGuide analyzed 3.1 Million Reviews. Here’s What Tour Operators Need to Know.
We all know good reviews are important, but what deeper insights can reviews give us about our tour businesses, and our industry?To answer that, Anna Cashman, Head of B2B Brand & Insights for GetYourGuide, led an effort to analyze 3.1 million reviews with comments. Her team parsed the data to understand trends and takeaways for tour operators. She joins Peter, Chris and Mitch on the podcast to
A Look at the New Airbnb Experiences Reboot
Well, the new Airbnb 2025 Summer Release is upon us. The just hosted a big, splashy launch event for its reboot of Experiences, and also introduced Airbnb Services, featuring dozens of categories of new bookable offerings, from nail care to personal chefs. What does this mean for the future of Airbnb, for the tours & activities sector, and for Experience Hosts? Let's dive in!Mitch Bach and Pet
The Transformational Power of Walking (w/ Joao of Walking Mentorship)
Mitch Bach sat down with João Perre Viana, the founder of Walking Mentorship, to talk one thing we tour operators are all familiar with: walking.But not many of us design week-long trips where all you do is walk. Sometimes alone. Sometimes in a group. That's it. Beyond some shared meals and moments, there isn't much of a plan. Each group takes on a different spirit, but it's all guided by a mentor
Connectivity Series: Multi-Day Tour Connectivity - Past, Present & Future
Kelly Tompkins is the Founder & CPO of ReserveX, building software infrastructure that connects the components of our whole industry: Multi-Day tours, Day tours, Travel Advisors, OTAs, Meta-Search, and more.He's also been in the industry for a long, long time.Together with Tourpreneur host Peter Syme, Kelly talks about where the industry has been, and where it's going. He specifically looks at
Connectivity Series: Demystifying APIs, and Why Tour Operators Should Care
TP team members Mitch Bach and Peter Syme talk to Chris Mark, Head of Connectivity for GetYourGuide.As we continue our Connectivity Series, we're looking at the people building the plumbing that make our industry work. When you list your tour on GetYourGuide, you might not understand the way in which it gets shared on other platforms, and how it integrates with your booking software, to bring you
TP Exclusive: Chris Torres sells Tourism Marketing Agency (TMA) to the Trikon Group
In this episode, Mitch Bach and Pete Syme interview fellow Tourpreneur partner Chris Torres, a seasoned marketing expert, who shares insights from his extensive career in the industry.Chris announces the sale of his business, discusses the evolving landscape of marketing, and emphasises the importance of storytelling and innovation in attracting customers.The conversation covers the differences be
Connectivity Series: Understanding How Travel Advisors work with Tour Operators
As we continue our connectivity series, we look at the landscape of B2B sales for tour operators as it evolves thanks to new technology, connectivity, and companies changing how travel is sold.Evan Frank has been the CEO of a tour company (Context Travel), founder of a short-term rental pioneer (onefinestay), and is no co-founder of Fora Travel, leading the charge at reimagining the role of the tr
Connectivity Series: Leveraging Short Term Rental Partnerships to Sell Tours
This week we begin a mini-series on connectivity: interviews with people helping tour operators grow their B2B partnerships through tech tools that connect with other industry sectors.We start the series off looking at short term rentals. This is often a desired B2B relationship for tour operators, but one that's hard to decipher and connect with.Our guests are Karen Piscitelli, Founder of Explora
Dan Christian's 5 Lessons From Large Multi-Day Tour Operators on Marketing & Scaling
Dan Christian has spent decades in the industry working at some of the world's largest travel brands: The Travel Corporation, G Adventures, Lonely Planet.Today he's the host of the Travel Trends podcast and CEO of the Acceleration Team, helping travel companies achieve rapid growth.Dan knows marketing and business transformation like nobody else, and in this episode he spills the secrets of the wo
GetYourGuide’s Evolving Approach to Curating an Experience Marketplace (w/ Tao Tao, COO)
GetYourGuide has recently surpassed 200 million tickets sold. Co-Founder & COO Tao Tao sits down with Tourpreneur's Mitch Bach, Peter Syme and Chris Torres to talk about the challenges and surprises of 16 years of scaling an online experiences marketplace.As always, we focus on takeaways for tour operators as Tao Tao shares data and insights. We examine the tensions inherent in balancing the n
The 70-20-10 Rule for Preparing for 2025
A Christmas Eve gift for you!We're just days away from 2025, so it's clearly time to start thinking about how you're going to grow and improve your business next year!Tourpreneur hosts Mitch Bach and Peter Syme have a conversation about what Pete calls the 70-20-10 rule for how to spend your time doing business development in the off season. (You'll have to listen to find out).We cover topics such
6 Easy Fixes to Improve Your Tour Business Immediately
TP hosts Mitch Bach, Peter Syme and Chris Torres have just returned from their California Road Show, in partnership with GetYourGuide.We spent a week hosting business development workshops in San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and Los Angeles, meeting dozens of operators in all sorts of verticals. Thanks to everyone who showed up, and to GetYourGuide who shared regional data on travel trend
Scaling a DMC that's Challenging Conventions & Changing Communities (w/ Rodrigo Atuesta of Impulse Travel)
This episode is going to inspire and surprise you. Rodrigo Atuesta is the CEO of Impulse Travel. From humble beginnings as a guide and Couch Surfer, Rodrigo and his partners have built a DMC in Colombia that has now served over 30,000 travelers. But the way he's built it has been extraordinary, challenging assumptions about how DMCs should work, and understanding the responsibility and power that
Rethinking Travel Necessity and Sustainability with Xavier Font
In this episode of Tourpreneur, we dive into the intricacies of sustainable travel with Xavier Font, a seasoned expert in travel and sustainability. With over two decades of experience and a professorship at the University of Surrey, Xavier brings a wealth of knowledge to our discussion.We explore the necessity of rethinking travel for environmental reasons and the potential for combining work and
Strategies to Attract Corporate Clients for Tour Operators
Today, we're tackling a crucial topic for those looking to expand their business into new territories: B2B marketing strategies for tour operators.If you're aiming to attract corporate clients or promote team-building experiences, this episode is a must-listen. Chris Torres provides some quick tips on how to build a strong brand, utilise SEO, leverage targeted ads, and make the most of platforms l
Can Airbnb's Third Attempt at Experiences Succeed?
In this quick episode, Tourpreneur partners Peter Syme and Chris Torres dive into the latest buzz around Airbnb's third attempt to amplify their experiences offering.Despite previous failures, Airbnb is pushing hard again, proclaiming that experiences represent a massive market opportunity. But can they succeed this time? Peter and Chris weigh in on the challenges Airbnb faces, from curating high-
How three successful TikTokers use social video to sell tours
Mitch Bach interviews three tour guides and operators who have become extremely popular on TikTok:Megan Marod (@themegandaily)David Harry (@the_london_spy)John O'Sullivan (@oneminutetours)These guides have all harnessed the power of TikTok in different ways that suits their personality, goals, and markets. But they have one thing in common: they say the key to success is showing up authentically.I
TP Coffee Talk: What's been happening in the tours & activities industry?
The Tourpreneur podcast is back! After a summer hiatus while operators were busy operating... we're returning to our weekly schedule of conversations and insights for the tours & activities industry.To kick off the fall season, TP partners Mitch Bach, Peter Syme and Chris Torres chat through everything that's been happening in the industry over the past month:What we hear about an industry 'sl
Putting Vulnerability and Empathy at the Heart of Your Tour Business Strategy (w/ Kyle Campbell of Sudden Journeys)
Excuse the length of this episode, but I jealously didn’t want to stop interviewing this week’s guest, Kyle Campbell, who runs her small-group multi-day tour company, Sudden Journeys. For some of you listening, this might be the episode you need to hear to relase yourself from the burden of thinking you have to keep producing more content to sell your tours.At first glance, this episode’s title mi
Maintaining Profit Margins and Growth in High-Demand Destination
Host Peter Syme sits down with Ambrose Bittner, a seasoned operator of private customised tours across Asia. They delve into the intricacies of running a tour operation, touching on key aspects like process engineering, client communication, and the decision to outsource tasks versus keeping them in-house. Ambrose shares his journey through COVID-19, during which he invested in new back-office inf
Content Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Tour Business
Visit tourpreneur.com for more show notes.Tourpreneur is hosting two conferences! Join us in November in Marrakesh, Morroco for CONNECT:Multi-day, and in February in New York City for CONNECT:Profit. More info here.In this episode, Lia Garcia, CEO of Practical Wanderlust and Louisville Food Tours, shares her journey from starting a blog to becoming one of the largest travel blogs in the world. She
Beyond AirBNB: Essential Marketing and Partnership Strategies for Tour Operators
In this episode, we'll unpack why building direct sales through SEO and website optimization, along with embracing paid advertising on platforms like Facebook, can be game-changing, despite being time-consuming. We'll also discuss the importance of feeding Google's business profile and the significance of robust content production for SEO and AI.But the conversation doesn't stop there. We dive int
Charting Growth: Strategies for Growing Your Tour Business - 261
Guests Sherri Brown and Cherrye Moore discuss their experiences and the strategies that have helped them target new markets, focusing on both local and corporate sectors.Host Peter Syme shares his insights on effective pricing strategies, managing business growth, and best practices for training and integrating new team members.Throughout the episode, topics such as adapting to market changes, opt
Scaling Your Tour Business: Innovations and Strategies for Modern Entrepreneurs
Sean discusses his contemplation on expansion strategies, weighing the pros and cons of growing his market in Ireland versus entering new territories like the UK with self-guided hiking tours. Amidst these considerations, Peter advises maximizing existing operations before venturing into new markets, highlighting the complexities of establishing business in new destinations.On the technology front
Best Practices for Building a Healthy & Inspired Team (w/ Peter McGovern)
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