Your source for news & insights in the experiences industry

Hi Chris Torres!

Three photos to sum up the last week, from left to right:

• The Tourpreneur team had a fantastic time meeting with hundreds of operators and travel businesses gathered in Berlin for the Arival Activate event. The Arival team did another phenomenal job. (Peter shares his takeaways below.)
• The Experience Economy in full force: delicious local German cheese made with carrot and pumpkin seeds, one of the many foods we tasted at an an in-home Berlin Supper Club experience being developed by two local guides. This was the grand finale of 12 hours of Tourpreneur Hot Seats, where Peter, Chris and I dived deep into tour businesses.
• A wonderful chance to have beers with Shane Whaley in Berlin. He's back in the U.S. after 3 weeks of language study! Herzliche Glückwünsche! (That means congratulations, right Shane?)

Arival highs & lows...

Peter's written an article below detailing all his learnings from the conference. I'm going to focus on just one personal high and one low.

👍 The high: practical business learning for food operators

Bravo to team Arival for creating so many opportunities for small group discussion. One of many highlights was the pleasure to briefly listen to Lauren Aloise, co-founder of Devour Tours, as she led the Culinary Experiences Forum. She shared practical lessons learned from her journey of scaling a global food tour business. It was pure gold. Just some of her advice:

• Why do you want to expand your business? Don't grow and "scale" just because you think that's what you should do.
  
• Do you have standard operating procedures in place? Document everything you do as a business, so you can easily hire.
• Don't try to do everything yourself. Hire the right people instead.
• Automate and digitalize whatever you can. Are you driving around the city to pay your vendors? Find a better, digital way (hot tip: she recommends Spendesk).

👎 The low: are your tours like cans of soup?

One conversation rubbed me and many tourpreneurs the wrong way.

Varun Khona, CEO of the new OTA Headout (10 million customers!) took the stage with Douglas Quinby to discuss his vision for the future of the tour industry.

One small word surprised many in the audience quickly: Khona repeatedly referred to tours on his platform as SKUs, and not tours.

Douglas was quick (and correct) to push back, asking Khona to clarify that unusual terminology. A SKU is well known to anyone who's worked in an American grocery store. It's a stock keeping unit, and usually used by supply chain managers to identify a pair of jeans or a can of soup.

So why not use tour or experience, in a room of tour operators?

The answer is found in what he explained were his company's goals as an online travel marketplace:

• simplify the tour buying experience by creating SKUs of standardized tours chosen and designed by Headout, rather than an operator. Headout's SKUs are more predicatible, profitable, and easily managed than a complex un-curated marketplace, which feature many different tours designed by individual operators.
• use operator partners to fulfill these generic SKUs (akin to Uber drivers responding to demand).
• thus commodify the tour industry, always trying to further drive down prices and make tours as cheap as possible for the customer, allowing more people to travel.

A lot of tourpreneurs subequently wondered, is this model good for my small business? Two thoughts:

• Sure, tour prices are lowered by creating new efficiencies using technology. This isn't in itself bad. But this vision for an ever-cheaper tour marketplace is really hard for many operators to hear in this time of rampant inflation where profit margins are already stretched so thin. The pricing pressure (and risk) will fall disproportionately on the little operator who can't operate at the scale of a museum.
• Operators work hard and take pride to design unforgettable experiences. Turning tours into generic SKUs that can be operated by any number of fulfillment partners will cause those partners to have to compete against each other on price and not value, since they're fulfilling the same SKU. The consumer thinks all Central Park Walking tours are essentially the same.

Of course Headout isn't unique in demanding price sensitivity. And they just raised $30 million, so they're doing something right. But I worry about this as the future of the industry for small operators already feeling the squeeze on their profits and creativity. What's lost in this future scenario are small but phenomenal local operators like the Mott Street Girls, who are left either molding their company to the SKU or being left out. When I search the platform for my city (NYC), I'm greeted almost only by attraction tickets that can offer volume sales at high commissions. And so millions of travelers think New York City is "done" by booking 4 museums and 1 generic Central Park walking tour. Can curation can be done another way? This isn't a sustainable model for my city, or tourism.

At a minimum, as I teach on Day 1 of all my tour guiding classes: know your audience. In a room full of operators working their hardest to craft fantastic experiences, at least call them tours. Leave the soup talk for your investors.

-Mitch

Lessons from the Hot Seat

Before the Arival event, Chris, Peter and I hosted 5 operators for our first day of Tourpreneur Hot Seats.

Yorick from Your Tours Portugal called the experience "great, inspiring, and motivational." Over the course of 12 hours of coaching, we covered every topic conceivable:

• Use price anchoring and make sure you're not selling high-ticket luxury tours on the same website as budget day tours; it confuses the customer.
• The creative economy is changing the game for content marketing. Use the affiliate marketing tools in your booking software to create automated partnerships with bloggers, podcasters and other creators.
• You can grow your business without needing more bookings or more assets (like boats and bikes). Think instead about partnerships (restaurants, other complementary tours, transfers, etc.) that allow the customer to do more with you, solving their needs and bottlenecks along the way.
• You are not your customer. You may not buy your tour for such a high price, but your customer will!

A huge thank you to these brave businesses and wonderful tourpreneurs: Rewind Dubrovnik, Black Cab Heritage Tours, Mr. & Mrs. Egypt, Your Tours Portugal and Margo & Alex (business forthcoming!).

One of our goals moving forward with Tourpreneur is to create as many opportunities as possible to meet each other in person, in small groups.

RSVP now for any of our upcoming free shindigs, or respond to this email if you'd like to host a local gathering! Next one is June 14 in New York City.

After attending the Self-Guided Tours and Apps breakout session at Arival Berlin, it reaffirmed what I strongly believe in… ALL tour operators should provide a self-guided option of their products, be you a day tour or multi-day operator.

Set aside that the world is changing and digital experiences are and will come more to the fore, by creating a self-guided option you are catering to the largest untapped market in travel. When any of us travel we self-guide for a large proportion of that time. We visit places and look for things to do on our own without booking anything with an operator or an OTA. The opportunities here are quite frankly endless.

Self-guided experiences do not cannibalise your in-person experiences. They can provide a stepping stone for someone to take one of your in-person experiences, help your brand awareness and highlight your expertise, and most importantly generate extra revenue while you sleep.

Read the full article on the TMA Blog

So many operators are reporting massive demand with figures like 20/30/40 -100% higher than 2019. This is excellent news and will help fix those balance sheets quicker than expected. However, do remember it is still very fragmented, with many global destinations not seeing anything like the recovery that Europe and North America are.

Management of this demand is proving very difficult—shortage of guides and trained staff, huge waits on new equipment. Previous supply chains of beds, restaurants and buses that had been developed over many years are broken and are taken time to be re-engineered to fit the new reality. I really cannot figure out any short term fixes to this. Operators have to invest more time restudying all processes, and where it can be done by technology, it should be.

Operators, because of the fantastic passion they have for the experiences that they design and deliver, have to grasp that they are designed for the guests, not themselves. You are not your customer. More involving the guests in that actual design and development process is needed.

Focus is required. Currently, operators have small mountains of work to be done, with most having less staff. Prioritisation is critical here. Everything should be focused on serving the guests in the best way and park internal business projects until the down season. Focus on the 1-3 things that will have the best impact in repairing the business.

Read the full list on LinkedIn

Everyone at Arival was talking about finding, hiring and onboarding guides.

I led a session at Arival with Alex Trimis, CEO of Welcome Pickups. We discussed best hiring practices, which is top of so many operators' minds. One takeaway: while everyone's looking for guides right now, don't forget to ask yourself what your onboarding process is like. Here are some tips that were shared:

• Use a free tool like Notion.so to create a central, sharable dynamic repository of all your standard operating procedures, across the company. Start now, even if you're small with no plans to grow!
• Create an onboarding "course" that streamlines the process of welcoming someone into your company. Embed forms that need to be filled out. Share your company's values. Add training videos and other information. Track learning and completion using an LMS like Teachable, or the mobile-first EduMe.
• The best hiring is retention: create a team group on Slack or Whatsapp to communicate with your guides. Make sure you're interacting with positive feedback and fun team building exercises, and not just when the guide gets a negative review.
• Make sure your About Me page and job description share your story. Every operator has the same guide description, so what makes your company unique? What are your brand values?

• Trendspotting: Intrepid Travel acquires Wildland Trekking and launches 15 new multi-day walking itineraries based on what they're seeing as "dramatically increasing demand" for "immersive nature based experiences." Getting away from the city and closer to nature.
  
• Autonomous vehicles and tour companies: what do they mean for your future? Watch this video interview with Alex Bainbridge of Autoura.
• The Experience Economy has arrived but not as expected. Spending on digital experiences continues to explode. Does your tour company have a digital experience product and sales strategy? 
• The UNWTO has created the Awake Tourism Challenge. As travel rebounds, we need to take actions that promote sustainability on both personal and industry levels.
• Explore the results of Deloitte's summer travel survey. A lot of good key findings. Road trips are down, but people are splurging on their travel.
• Not just for teenagers: don't forget about Grandfluencers who are making a splash on TikTok!
• Everyone's stressed and burned out. How to have a mental health conversation with a staff member.

Our Facebook group of 3,500+ operators is the industry's water cooler. Over a dozen new discussion threads every day.

Here are just some recent highlights:

• Daniel of Alaska Footprints shares lessons learned as an early stage tour business.
• Matt & several other Tourpreneurs seeing a noticeable uptick in Viator bookings.
• Jarrod weighs when to partner with your competition, and when it's a bad idea.
• OT Cassidy celebrates over 70 tour guests and 3 newly hired tour guides in one weekend. 2022 is cause for celebration for many tourpreneurs!

Tourpreneur exsts because of you, and for you. So don't be a stranger if you need help, want to share your experience on the podcast, or connect for some other reason.

Be well,

Mitch, Chris & Peter