Tourpreneur Tour Business Podcast

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407

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Nov 2026

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About the show

Tourpreneur is a community of passionate tour business owners eager to improve their skills and increase their profits. Our community is passionate about helping each other. As small tour business owners, we understand it’s a lonely job, a daily grind, and easy to become a busy fool… working harder but not smarter. The Tourpreneur 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 our hundreds of free articles, podcasts and other resources, or join our Tourpreneur+ community, we’re here to help!

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60 recent

November 9, 202649 min

Sell Trust, Not Tours: Winning B2B Contracts, Pricing for Profit and Building a DMC That Delivers

This episode is sponsored by Aloja AI , dynamic pricing software to earn tour operators more revenue, automatically. In student travel, the person you sell to is rarely the one who travels. It's a teacher, a group leader or another travel company, and once they trust you, they can send you every group they have for your country. Earning that trust takes a long time, and keeping it depends on what happens on the ground. Harry Alvarez co-founded Offbeat Travel, which runs student programs in the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and Puerto Rico for other travel companies, and now sells trips directly to travelers as well. Harry's conclusion is that you're selling a relationship, and that bending on price to win or keep one has cost him money and left guests less happy. Listen to this one if you sell through partners, or if you've thought about going after school and group business. You'll come away knowing how these buyers decide, how to price for a partner versus a direct client, and when a partnership has stopped making sense. Resources: Offbeat Travel

November 2, 202641 min

Selling What Your City Isn't Known For: How Orlando Got Its DMO Behind Local Culture

This episode is sponsored by Aloja AI , dynamic pricing software to earn tour operators more revenue, automatically. Every city has the thing it's famous for, and the DMO's marketing follows the crowds there. If your tours sit outside that, you're competing for attention with the biggest names in town, and a busy DMO rarely goes looking for you. Orlando, a city the world knows for its theme parks, is about as clear a case as there is. Thali Sugisawa leads cultural tourism at United Arts of Central Florida, the local arts agency that set out to get the city's DMO talking about local arts and culture alongside the parks. Her conclusion is that a DMO gets behind you when you show up with something it can use right away, tied to goals it has already written down, and then keep showing up. Thali learned that by building the partnership from nothing, tours included, and testing what visitors actually buy. Listen to this one if your tours aren't what your city is known for and you've wondered how to get your DMO on your side. You'll come away knowing how to approach them and what to bring. Resources: Arts in Orlando

October 26, 202653 min

Collaboration over Competition: Why Atlanta Tour Operators are Selling Their City Together

This episode is sponsored by Aloja AI , dynamic pricing software to earn tour operators more revenue, automatically. There is a third way to sell tours, somewhere between fighting for your own search rankings and handing your bookings to the OTAs: selling your city together with the operators around you. In Atlanta, a group of operators who tested it this past summer is now talking about turning it into a company of its own. Stephen Chester, who runs ATL Cruzers and Peachtree Trolley, is one of them, and he built his business without paying for online marketing in a city where visitors usually come for something other than sightseeing. The conclusion is that a small operator's reach comes from relationships, and those relationships multiply when operators stop treating each other as competitors. A group of complementary operators can answer a big group request that none of them could take alone, and it carries more weight with the buyers who move volume into a city. Listen to this one if you run tours in a place people visit for work, family or a ballgame. You'll come away knowing who in your city you should be working with, and why the slow early years are part of the deal. Resources: ATL Cruzers Peachtree Trolley

October 19, 202638 min

A Travel Trends Preview with Dan Christian

This episode is sponsored by Aloja AI , dynamic pricing software to earn tour operators more revenue, automatically. Dan Christian talks to more of the travel industry than almost anyone, from CEOs to small tour businesses, and after two years of conferences dominated by AI, he wants to change the subject. For this year's Travel Trends summit, he built a full day around a different question: where are humans still relevant? Mitch, who leads that session, makes his case here that the industry has spent too long chasing the instant, on-demand service customers now expect, when what travel offers is the chance to be with other people again. Dan describes executives in an off-script room admitting they have no idea where AI is going, and he explains why he wants the industry's conversation to shift going into next year. Treat it as a preview of the summit, from two people who think the human side of this business deserves more of the conversation. Resources: Register free for the Travel Trends Summit, October 28 and 29 Dan's invitation to the summit Travel Trends Monthly Report About Dan Christian Travel Trends Podcast

October 12, 20261 hr 6 min

Google Business Profiles: Everything You Need to Know in 2026

This episode is sponsored by Aloja AI , dynamic pricing software to earn tour operators more revenue, automatically. 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

October 6, 20261 hr 0 min

The Last Free Booking: What Works Now With Creators, Social Search and AI

This episode is sponsored by Aloja AI , dynamic pricing software to earn tour operators more revenue, automatically. 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

September 28, 202623 min

Pete & Mitch Are Angry About: A.I.

This episode is sponsored by Aloja AI , dynamic pricing software to earn tour operators more revenue, automatically. 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.

September 22, 202640 min

Small Operator, Overtouristed Island: How Maria Petrenko Competes in Santorini

This episode is sponsored by Aloja AI , dynamic pricing software to earn tour operators more revenue, automatically. 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.

September 14, 202631 min

Ultra Luxury Is Ultra Personalization: How Secret Journeys Grows Through Relationships, Not Ads

This episode is sponsored by Aloja AI , dynamic pricing software to earn tour operators more revenue, automatically. 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

September 8, 20261 hr 3 min

How Culinary Adventure Co. Built a Food Tour Business Nobody in Toronto Can Copy

This episode is sponsored by Aloja AI , dynamic pricing software to earn tour operators more revenue, automatically. 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