Travel Trends with Dan Christian
#1 B2B Travel Podcast. If you are looking to stay ahead in the travel industry, this new podcast hits all the highlights! The Travel Trends Podcast is where industry leaders converge to share & shape the future. Whether you're an emerging entrepreneur, a seasoned industry executive, or a dedicated travel professional, you’ll be able to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Uncover valuable insights, innovative strategies, and meaningful connections that will elevate your travel business or career to new heights.
Travel Trends with Dan Christian
Transforming Travel Experiences with Tourpreneur
Learn how Mitch, Chris, and Pete from the Tourpreneur team are redefining the art of travel. Their collaboration showcases the exciting potential of immersive travel and how it’s reshaping the future of the industry. Through their expertise and passion, they reveal how to create unforgettable journeys, explore strategies to convert interest into bookings, and elevate the travel experience.
The focus of this episode highlights the critical role of blending technology with authentic human connection in the travel industry. It emphasizes the growing demand for genuine and meaningful experiences. Tour operators are encouraged to go beyond algorithm-driven interactions by cultivating deeper customer engagement and fostering a sense of community.
Key Takeaways from This Episode:
- Understanding the Power of Human Connection in designing impactful travel experiences.
- Tourpreneur’s Influence on the Industry and their continued growth.
- The move away from rigid itineraries toward custom, experiential travel options.
- The value of social and shared travel experiences in today’s market.
- Insight into the challenges tour operators face in a dynamic industry.
- How emerging technologies are transforming marketing strategies and customer relationships.
This episode is packed with candid insights and actionable tips, using real-world examples to help tour operators and travel marketers balance the use of cutting-edge digital tools with the irreplaceable human touch. Join the conversation and learn how to adapt to the ever-changing travel landscape, creating deeper connections and more meaningful experiences for your customers.
Season 5 Launched Jan 15th. New Episodes Every Weds! Check out our first 4 Seasons.
https://www.traveltrendspodcast.com/
So we need to create things that sustain attention, that get us enraptured in a place and I'm sorry but that's not going to be you holding up a phone and seeing some animatronic like return to the 18th century as you look at a work of art. We actually need guides that know how to facilitate conversations where we ask open-ended questions.
Speaker 2:Hello everyone and welcome to Travel Trends, season 5, episode 6. This is your host, dan Christian, and on today's episode we're going to be talking to the amazing team at Tourpreneur. It's a fascinating conversation and I'm going to introduce you to the three of them in just a moment, but before we do, I just wanted to recognize all the amazing guests we had as part of our deep dive into influencers, which was sponsored by our friends over at Flytographer, and then next week we're going to kick off our deep dive into safaris with my friend, sherwin Banda, who's the CEO of African Travel, and that series is brought to us by our friends over at Cloud Safaris. Now, before we start our safari series, we're going to share a couple of event highlights. We have an itb profile special coming up and then a recap from the quebec city conference I attended a few weeks ago. We've actually updated our events page on travel trends podcastcom slash events with all the latest events they're going to be going to in 2025, and I just wanted to call out a couple new events that we've added to our schedule. One One is the Educational Travel Consortium in Mobile, alabama, which is coming up in March, and then I'm off to the Aviation Festival in Miami and then the Focusrite Conference in Europe in Barcelona, which I've not been to before, and our friends over at Focusrite were very kind to offer all of our Travel Trends listeners 100 euros off any of their tickets if they use the promo code TRAVELTRENDS25. So that's Focusrite, europe and Barcelona. Use the promo code TRAVELTRENDS25 and you'll get 100 euros off. Thanks again to all of the event organizers for bringing us in as either a keynote or recording podcast, and I look forward to sharing a lot of those highlights and meeting you on those journeys. And one of the ones that we'll be launching in the next few weeks is going to be our Forbes travel guide, a special hospitality series that I'll be shooting the next week in Monaco before attending ITB, and I look forward to seeing many of you there. We'll be right back.
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Speaker 2:And now back to the show. Now for today's episode, we're going to talk to the team from Tourpreneur and I have been a big fan of them for many years and in fact, as you'll hear in this interesting conversation, the backstory of how Shane Whaley actually created this community and then our three guests that now run Torpreneur Mitch, chris and Pete how they took this on and really have brought it to a whole other level. It is essential to our industry that Torpreneur exists and it is a massively engaged community. I certainly experienced that by being on their podcast recently. The number of follow-ups and reach-outs I had afterwards was just amazing. Their community is so active and they're not only engaged on their Facebook channel. They have events, they've got their newsletter and, of course, their podcast and they just come together like Voltron, as far as I'm concerned, that they each have their three impressive backgrounds Mitch runs Trip School, chris runs a tourism agency and is also an author, where he just updated his book.
Speaker 2:Lookers to Bookers, which I encourage everyone to purchase. Mitch, with Trip School, also runs a series of events, and I think it's really important for our community to bring tour leaders together and showcase how these magical experiences are brought to life and learn from each other. So that's part of what his background is and what he brings to the table with Tourpreneur. And then, of course, we have Pete, who is and you'll get this amazing backstory as well in the episode but he actually started in the military, so he's actually traveled all around the world in that role, but he retired and started in tourism. He's owned a number of businesses, he's a successful entrepreneur and he's a very effective public speaker too. So you see him a lot of the conferences and as they come together to form Voltron, their importance in our industry has just continued to grow. So let's jump in and meet them now. So, mitch, peter, chris, welcome to Travel Trends.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having the gang.
Speaker 2:Now you guys are all together in California. You guys have had an incredible week of training. So, yeah, tell everyone where you guys are at the moment and what you guys have been doing. This week.
Speaker 1:It's been a wild week, so we were really excited to launch a partnership with Get your Guide for the next 12 months. And what we've been doing with Get your Guide, as we work with tour operators, we're trying to help them get more data, get more insights to improve their businesses, make new connections. And Get your Guide has been graciously sponsoring road trips. Our first road trip just wrapped up just a few minutes ago. We're here in Los Angeles and the idea of it was let's marry their data, their insights, all of the mountains of actionable insights that they have as an OTA that touches tens of thousands of customers and suppliers and let's use that to provide granular insights and then also our own business consulting insights for groups of tour operators up and down the California coast. So it's been workshops, taking tours, meeting individually with operators, hosting a lot of socials, of course, and it was a fantastic success. It just shows the power of in-person connection.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2:You've always been a big advocate for that, not only of tour guides, tour operators, in-person events, and obviously that is the experience.
Speaker 2:And when we've talked before, of course, mitch, we've talked about AI, and you have been a very vocal advocate of the need for humanity, and not technology, to drive this industry forward.
Speaker 2:So we'll definitely talk about that, but I think one of the things that I want to call it to our listeners is that the three of you have come together really to form Voltron. I mean, that's one of my favorite shows from being a kid, and I think most people should get that reference, because that show has been resurrected, and so I love the concept of when you have a group of really talented people that come together and form something even greater, which is what you do with Tourpreneur. So I'd like to explain to our audience first what Tourpreneur is for those people that listen to our show that may not be familiar and then I also want to get into each of your backgrounds, because not only have you brought a lot to Torpreneur, you also each run your own successful businesses over and above Torpreneur. So why don't we start, though, by giving our listeners a bit of a background of Torpreneur and an understanding of what that business actually is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, to put it really really succinctly, it's about connection, community connectivity. So the connection community really happens both online and in person. We do events. We do a very, very frothy Facebook group where we're just coming together and having peer-to-peer learning, and so we are offering business coaching, we're doing business retreats, we're doing a lot of virtual events.
Speaker 1:That all happens online, but the magic really happens in person when people travel around the world to gather as operators, learn from each other, learn from us and really give hands-on direction to their businesses. And then the connectivity part is really where we take what we've amassed, which is 15,000 tour operators, multi-day day tours all around the world, and we sort of mold them together as a community and reach out to big global partners, communities, travel agents, anybody that needs tour operators, because I think we are always seeing, as our industry grows, a need for more connections between these various parts of the B2B community. And so what we're trying to do is help our operators grow their business by connecting them with great partners, and that might be technology, that might be travel advisors, that might be large multi-day operators that are looking for suppliers or DMCs, and just really making that whole network work better.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and just to add a bit of context too, and obviously these are some of the details that we're both across, just in terms of the background, because Tourpreneur was actually founded by Shane Whaley, who many people have known in the industry. He's got a fascinating backstory and journey that he was on from bookingcom and he's played a significant role throughout the travel industry and then not only creating Tourpreneur but also working at Fair Harbor. And when he took that role because it was a podcast it was the Facebook group that you mentioned, but the three of you acquired that business in May of 2022 and it was a perfect. I know he was happy with that Like it was given a great home.
Speaker 2:You, the three of you, have taken it to a whole, uh, another level, um, and you've got more than 15,000 members. You're now, you know, not just doing day, you're doing multi-day, you do events and retreats and business coaching. It's turned into something, but I guess it got off to a great start and then it's obviously on this incredible trajectory now. So anything else you want to add to that? Mitch, just for the listeners, about the origins of Terpener and how it evolved to what it is today.
Speaker 1:I don't know if we should thank him or blame him, but he created a monster. I don't know if we should thank him or blame him, but he created a monster. It was a COVID project that, for him, I think, just grew because people were alone, they were at home, their businesses were going up in flames and the three of us got to know Shane, I think, really during that period because we kept showing up with Shane and just offering advice, offering support, and we got to know him as a really good friend and he's a legend in the industry. I mean, nobody has the type of breadth of experience that he does and the appetite for learning. And so he became just a perfect person to gather operators from around the world and they really gravitated towards his voice, his humble voice.
Speaker 1:He's not an operator, he was just a learner and a great interviewer, just like you, dan. He was just a warm person that people enjoyed talking to and I think for him it wasn't ever going to be what we saw it as being. He just sort of created this project and created this really beautiful home and when it came time to do it, I think Shane at a certain moment was like I think I should get a job, and the problem is he got so many great offers to work because he became so well-known, so good at it, and so. And the problem is, he got so many great offers to work because he became so well-known, so good at it, and so at the moment where he got a fantastic offer to go work for another company, we stepped in and essentially took it and said we're going to try to live up to what you've created and continue it and continue really the mission, which is always just to be as helpful as possible to our operators, who are often struggling for connection and better learning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure, and obviously, yes, to give credit where credit was due, with Shane getting it started. Obviously it came from such a good place, as you mentioned, trying to help operators get through the pandemic, and clearly the travel trends show there's a bit of a commonality there, obviously, with the idea of trying to help our industry understand what the trends were post-pandemic, what was the same, what was changing. And one last comment on Shane, of course, is he runs a new podcast called Spybrary, which obviously a play off the library. He's always been fascinated by James Bond and those thrilling spy movies and so he runs a really fascinating podcast for those people who want to check that out. So but let's get back to the core team now that's bringing this business forward, and I want to bring Mitch, I want to bring Chris into the conversation, because Chris Torres and I have known each other for many years and he's the one that actually the next two gentlemen you're going to hear from have a lovely Scottish accents and so I always like speaking to them and listening to them, and Chris is based in Edinburgh.
Speaker 2:I'm going to try and pronounce that properly, because I got teased by Bruce and Christian for not not saying it properly. But you, you've worked in the industry for many years. You've written a book that I bought my team members. I've worked with you on paid marketing activity some of the brands I've worked with so but tell everyone about your background and how you actually got into the travel space and this agency that you run. That has also been quite successful.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I sort of got into the whole sort of branding and marketing sort of sort of life and agency life. Um, believe it or not, 35 ish years ago, um, I left school at 16. Uh, I didn't go to college or university because I hated school and I didn't want to continue the educational side of things going along forward with that. So I decided to go out and find a job. I'm a fairly talented illustrator and artist in that sort of aspect, so I managed to pick up my first job doing kids' educational books and illustrations for that, working for an agency, and I was basically self-taught my whole life. So just learning design, learning marketing, website building, everything else throughout all the agencies that I worked with throughout my career. But 17 years ago now, I set up what's now known as the Tourism Marketing Agency.
Speaker 3:We were one of the very first agencies to focus on tour operator space and we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Alex Bainbridge, because Alex Bainbridge, who was one of the founding fathers of booking software in our industry he created Tour CMS and one of our very first clients was a company called Max Adventure, based in Scotland, who are now a massive global company.
Speaker 3:We built their website, helped them with some marketing and when more people saw what we could do with the Tour CMS API, we get more and more and more tour operators on our books and through the agency and we had a path. We were doing a lot with renewable energy and we were doing a lot with travel and we decided to go down the travel route, literally within a year or two of the agency being born, and because there was only so much you can talk about wind farms and things like that, it was rather boring, so I'd rather talk about travel and everything else. So we went down that route. It was the best decision we ever made. We just completely went down that niche market and, yeah, we were one of the very first to to set up and to help tour operators at that time oh cool, and so you and I have known each other longest.
Speaker 2:I got to know Mitch a little bit later, and Peter we'll come to in just a moment, because Peter and I have actually got to know each other more recently and he also has a really interesting backstory as well. But before we switch over to Peter, I wanted to make sure too, chris, that we share with our listeners the journey you went on to actually create the book, from turning lookers to bookers, because it was before I knew you and had a chance to work with you. I actually knew I'd heard about the book, I was intrigued by it, I downloaded it and then I bought it for all of my team members, because no one else had written a book about travel marketing certainly not to that level of of detail and to be able to come from that position of authority with you know true knowledge, of understanding exactly that.
Speaker 2:How do you turn someone that's just looking into actually um a customer and actually booking that trip? So tell everyone, if you wouldn't mind, how that book came about, because you've, of course, just published an update to that as well, which which I've ordered myself for Christmas.
Speaker 3:Hopefully Santa's kind to you then. So the book really came around during the pandemic. So I've always had the idea of writing one, because there wasn't really anything out there to help advise tour operators in terms of how to market their business. There's been little bits here and there, but nothing really cohesive enough to teach them all the different aspects of marketing. So during the pandemic, when we were talking to so many tour operators and all the help that they needed, I did over a hundred consultations for free and things like that, and out of that I thought, well, I think people just need help and that's why I started writing the book and putting it together. And at that time the book was very detailed in terms of how to set up Facebook accounts and Google accounts, as well as all the marketing aspects of it as well. So, yeah, it was just really born out of what people needed at the time, during the start of the pandemic, et cetera.
Speaker 3:And then the second book, which is I think there's only two chapters that are the same right at the start. Everything else is brand new. We've actually based on a real life client, so it's an operator from the birth of the brand all the way through to what we did and marketing wise, the ideas we created, what we did use and didn't use, and what worked, what didn't work, um, and then the results at the end. So it's actually sort of showing people the full journey how you, how we got that company through the different customer journey that people purchase, etc. So, yeah, just sort of highlighting what needs to be done to to market your business, to get those direct bookings these days, so, um, so yeah, that's why I decided to update the book, because it was a little bit. Another one was four or five years ago, so it's a little bit out of date now.
Speaker 2:So yeah, no, it's fantastic and for those people who are following on at home, obviously, chris uh did mention that uh, it's tourismmarketingagency is actually the website and you you can find Lookers into Bookers on the website as well, and there's a link to purchase it, which I would definitely encourage everyone in the travel industry to to pick up a copy?
Speaker 2:Oh for sure, I mean it's, it's genuine and sincere from, from my experience, because it's it's practical and actionable and it comes from a very knowledgeable person that is doing it every day with his marketing agency and for his clients. We'll be right back. Are you looking for ways to grow your travel business through paid media and optimized SEO? Then you have to check out our friends at Propelliccom. They are the leading digital agency for growth in travel and tourism. Propellic offers bold digital marketing strategies to ensure your travel company's success. They have a remarkable methodology that has actually been implemented by TravelAIcom and they are a leading SEO agency globally and offer a range of resources a podcast of their own, a blog on their website, propelleccom. That's P-R-O-P-E-L-L-I-Ccom. And don't forget to mention Travel Trends for your free marketing audit. Did you know that over 20% of people who purchase a ticket will upgrade to a refundable option when given the choice? By offering Refund Protect, you make it easy for your customers to protect their ticket purchase against emergency circumstances like illness, injury, accidents and more. Whether you're an airline, hotel group, tour operator, ticketing platform, ota or transport solution, when you partner with Protect Group, your customers get peace of mind and you generate extra revenue. With a Trustpilot score of 4.8 stars and over 31,000 reviews. They treat your customers as their own, earning the highest customer ratings in the industry. To find out more, check out Protect Group at protectgroup that's protectgroup.
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Speaker 2:And now back to the show, and let's bring Peter in the discussion as well, because, peter, I wouldn't mind our listeners getting a bit of your backstory, because I actually had seen you before I got a chance to know you.
Speaker 2:I'd seen you on stage a number of times at Arrival and I was always impressed by your background, your experience, intrigued by your accent, but more the content of what you were saying, because you clearly knew your stuff and that stood out to me. And the other thing I would say too is you have strong opinion and views, and I think that's actually important. I think people who follow you on LinkedIn know that and gravitate to you because you take a, you have an opinion and you take a view on something and I actually I respect and admire that, because it's not intended to be adversarial, like it's just, but you are, you're stating your view. But I didn't get a chance until recently, when we're sitting at a pub in london at world travel market, to get to know you much better and I was so intrigued by your backstory. So would you mind because I was asking the number of countries you've traveled to so would you mind telling everyone about what you did before you got into travel and then how you segued into the travel space?
Speaker 4:sure. Thanks for the guinness you. You bought me in that pub in London, by the way. Yeah, I started becoming a bit of a travel junkie in the early 1980s.
Speaker 4:I was in the military at the time British military which by default was sending you all around the world. But my job for a while in the military for about three years was adventure travel, actually training soldiers on climbing, mountaineering, kayaking. So I'm basically acting as a guide within the military. So I ran my first multi-day trips to places like Pakistan and Nepal way back in 1984, 85. So exactly as a trip happens today without the commercial side of it. Then I was in a two-year school of teaching young soldiers on adventure. So I really had three or four years in the military where I wasn't in uniform, I was just bouncing around the world teaching people adventure travel and adventure activities. So that kind of set the bug of adventure tourism travel. I managed to see an awful lot of countries in the world Decided to leave when I had a couple of young kids Unfortunately got a job for six years.
Speaker 4:The only time I've ever really worked in my life was six years in two different worlds. I was a commodity trader for a while and then I was the MD of e-commerce way back in the 90s, when e-commerce was a new thing for a $2 billion business, ended up being the sidekick to the CEO and strategy. We're building chatbots in 1999, 2000. So we were a bit ahead of the time on some of the stuff and going completely and utterly wrong. Those six years taught me that I needed to get back into travel and not just be in offices all around the world. I needed to actually be out doing stuff. So packed that in in 2003, bought a bust rafting operator in scotland, uh, started fixing it, building it, digitalizing it and went from there. We opened another one in morocco, another business in spain, an expedition business that went all over the world and I don't know how many countries I've been to now because I don't really count them, but it's past 140 and I'm still traveling every month that's awesome.
Speaker 2:You obviously, the three of you complement each other very well. You obviously a former operator, but just tell everyone, uh, what you're focused on now beyond, uh, tourpreneur, because this is where I mean. Obviously, chris has his marketing agency. Mitch, who we'll go back to in a moment, obviously runs Trip School. You do a lot of travel tech consulting, as I understand. So tell everyone what else you're active within the travel industry beyond the role that you have at Tourpreneur.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I identified. Once I sold my businesses I identified a lot of the travel tech companies were struggling to connect and understand the industry. So they had a great idea or they'd come up with an idea and a lot of people in travel tech don't actually come from within the industry. They're dropping into the industry. They can see some pain points or they've felt some pain points and they go straight into building and trying to then connect with the industry and find it's fragmented, it's difficult, their message is not getting across.
Speaker 4:So I act as a bridge with travel technology companies to the operators to help them understand and find, basically, product market fit. And that all sounds kind of easy. It's not easy, as we all know. It's incredibly difficult. But if you're going to build tech, you really need somebody on the team. If you're building it for tour operators, you need somebody who's been around tour operators for 20, 30 years to understand the industry and the transitions we've gone through, because we're just in the middle of another transition, but we've already had several transitions in the past. We had the internet transition, we had the mobile transition, social transition and we're now in an AI transition. So you really want somebody on your team that has been through all of that and that's the kind of role I do part-time with travel tech companies.
Speaker 2:Super helpful and interesting context with how the three of you guys have formed Voltron and run this business and I'll come back to that in a minute. But I wanted just to bring Mitch back into this because, mitch, of course you know you're a former local tour guide, you've been a multi-day tour director, you've been an operator, you've even designed experiences. But you also have trip school and you work with a really cool guy, don Littlefield, who actually I met at the first arrival, before he was working with you, and I really it was literally your first friend at a conference I sat next to him and I really got on with him and we see each other and so I'm thrilled that you guys work together. But tell everyone about what trip school is and this big conference that you just ran so successfully in New York.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I'm the human part of Voltron. These guys handle everything digital and I obviously think it's important, but I think that we need to keep rooted in the soul of what we do as a experiences business and focus on the experiences, which for me mean guided experiences. Most often think everyone has been seeing of redefining what it means to be a guide, to be a storyteller, to connect with people emotionally, to make the kinds of connections that more and more in this digital landscape that we all kind of live in and are sucked into every day. What does it mean to gather with humans? What does it mean that we're humans going off and humaning together? It's no longer just sitting there listening to somebody holding an umbrella and barking at you a script. I think that there's an opportunity and a need, just for all of us as humans, to elevate what it means to be a guide, to be a storyteller and then to design the kinds of experiences that really connect people emotionally, and so that's what we do at Trip School.
Speaker 1:We're, I think, probably the world's largest private tour guide training school, so we're not affiliated with governments, we aren't Italy, we are sort of independent, but we use that independence to, kind of like really focus on our mission, which is not about information, it's about emotion, it's about connection.
Speaker 1:And, using that kind of idea, we train local tour guides all around the world, we offer storytelling workshops, we offer tour director certification programs. For people who want to travel with these great large group companies all around the world whether it's Intrepid or the Travel Corporation like you've been involved with for so long, or G Adventures we help them get their start in this industry, because I feel like so often people learn about this job much later than they wish they had, because it's not something that shows up on career quizzes. And so I started trip school with Alan Armijo, who is another guy kind of doing something similar to what I was doing, and then we brought on Don to head up our entrepreneurship program and the idea is like we just help people get their start in the travel industry in the roles that aren't taught by hospitality programs and these sort of tourism schools all around the world. We kind of do everything but those Perfect.
Speaker 2:That's great context because I also want to talk about TripCon, since it was your first big in-person event and, as you just said, you're all about people and bringing it together and a number of people I knew who were going to TripCon, including Rodrigo from Impulse Travel who, as you know, I'm on their board. I adore that team and they were headed to your event and this is where, like, it's amazing how stars align, because I was thrilled they were going. You interviewed Rodrigo on your podcast, but I heard so many great things from them about being at TripCon, your first conference, and you've already planned next year. So tell us a little bit of what happened this year at TripCon, how that all came about, and then, of course, the exciting plans for 2025 in Charleston.
Speaker 1:Yeah, tripcon was a real roll of the dice. We figured I mean, like you, like all of us, we spend our entire year going to conference after conference, after conference and at so many of these events you have the CEO up on stage and I mean they're great and they sit there and they talk about how important it is to create these unforgettable experiences, how the guide is the soul of the company, how all of this fantastic travel experiences are happening, and yet the guides aren't usually there. Usually it's all of us boring B2B guys that are just sitting there networking and having beers together. And so at Trip School we've amassed a pretty fantastic community around the world. We said let's try to bring everybody together, let's do it as a conference for both.
Speaker 1:Inspiration to have guides just see that they are part of a global community. Often they feel sort of part of either their company life they might work for a specific operator or they might work in a specific region. We wanted to really forge an identity as this very specific and special role of being a guide or being a tour leader around the world, and so we kind of put the idea out there to the world and in the end, over the course of the week we had 550 local guides, multi-day tour directors, come, and they came from almost 30 countries and it was just wild. It was wild to see a Chinese tour director talking to a Peruvian local tour operator talking with humans from the guide platforms that they guide, from tours by locals with locals. Get your guide. They were there.
Speaker 1:So we brought together technology travel corporation Globus, tauk, ef, student travel guides, tour leaders, and it was just a soup of this very specific world that I know, you know so well of multi-day group travel. And they came there. They did job interviews. We had over 3,000 one-on-one job interviews booked through our app and so people got work. Every day I'm getting these emails. People are like I am a woman from Salzburg and I'm in the Grand Canyon right now because I got hired by American Ring Travel that just, and I'm leading a German speaking group across the American West right now and like it's that's wild and that's wonderful because like that is the surprise and the delight of that job is you don't know who's going to hire you, where they're going to take you and what you're going to, what you're going to see in the world. So it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Now, one of the things that stood out to me too and this is some feedback, so Juliana, who's the CEO of Impulse one of the things that she highlighted to me when I was in Colombia is just how difficult it is often for people who are living in developing countries to be able to travel, given the cost I mean, you just look at the currency difference, the cost of living for anyone who is in destination. And this is part of the challenge of our industry, and I'm sure we can all appreciate this is because you know, when you're living in a first world country and you have the opportunity to be able to travel, often the places you're traveling to, those people don't have the same opportunity. I never take that for granted. I feel like it is such a privilege that we get to travel and experience these places, and the fact is we actually get to come back and so many of those people in those destinations that we're traveling to they don't necessarily have the same opportunity.
Speaker 2:And one of the things that I think you've done so successfully is you've not only made the content and you say people coming from 30 countries, the arrival team does a great job of this as well making it more accessible and affordable, but you certainly really did. When I look at the cost of the program, it's $400 for a ticket to go to Charleston next year. That is very accessible, very attainable, and even the destinations you're choosing. So tell us a little bit. I'm assuming because we haven't talked about this. I'm assuming that is very intentional and strategic, because these are the people that you want to be able to bring together, that are delivering these experiences.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was from the very start. We wanted to make sure we had enough partners and sponsors to make this affordable and accessible for everyone. You're not going to get rich being a tour director. If anybody says this is your path to riches, being a tour guide, you're barking up the wrong tree. These are passionate people. These are just people who love what they do.
Speaker 1:Often they were doing the boring jobs like Peter, managing director of blah blah, blah, blah, blah blah, doing the boring jobs like Peter, managing director of blah blah, blah, blah, blah blah. And then they say you know what? I just want to go out and I want to share my love of London or share my love of wherever they might be. And so we worked with the Student Youth Travel Association, CIDA. We worked with the Pathways Project, which is a non-profit, a diversity non-profit that I'm a part of. We worked with companies, like with Locals, who offered a contest of their guides and they gave away four free spots and flew their guides from South Africa, from Poland, over to TripCon, and so we offered free spots to basically anybody that came and said I need help and I'd love to attend because this is for us us for Trip. School is workforce development. It's like we want more people to go home to Poland, to China, and rave about the idea of what it means to be part of this global community, and so we're going to yeah, it's a $400 ticket. I mean, it's a rounding error in the cost of some of these other conferences in our industry and we're never going to go above that because we just want it to. It's not about that. We're not getting rich hosting a conference, that's for sure.
Speaker 1:Charleston is going to be again the same idea, which is also interesting.
Speaker 1:I didn't mention hundreds of guides and operators and attractions offered free tickets so that these people coming from all around the world got to see guides in action. So two full days on the beginning and the end of the conference was just them out and about in small groups of conference attendees, taking food tours, hearing from other guides and like how often do we get to hear other people practicing our craft? Very rarely, and so I thought it was so cool the way they came together, and that's why we're always going to choose cities that are walkable, that are sustainable, in the sense that we can have a campus where we're injecting money into the local economy with the restaurants and just take over a city and make it a part of understanding what it means to be place-based storytellers. And next year as well, Tourpreneur is going to join in Charleston and we're going to make it a giant bazaar of people coming together to form these kinds of connections. So thanks for bringing up that accessibility and inclusion aspect of it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. It's clearly very important to us both and that's what makes this industry so special. And just to everyone listening to this, it's November 10th to 13th in Charleston, 2025. One last question on that. I want to kind of get into some of the big trends that you guys are all seeing at Tourpreneur for 2025. Who should attend? I know it is obviously focused on professional tour directors or guides, new or even those that obviously have a lot of experience, so that they stay fresh and they stay up to date. Yeah, who should attend TripCon?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's three groups it's guides, it's entrepreneurs and then it's recruiting operators. So we have a track that is helping guides professionalize. Often that means they begin to step their toes into the dark waters of tour operating, of being a business owner, of marketing themselves, of promoting themselves. Dark waters of tour operating, of being a business owner, of marketing themselves, of promoting themselves. Of course, tour leaders who are looking for those jobs, because there's nowhere else you're going to get as many operators together interviewing you so quickly. And then we want tour operators from around the world to come.
Speaker 1:We have the big boys, like the Intrepids and the Globuses and the Tauchs, but then also small mom and pop shops, small multi-day European tour operators that are looking to fill their tour leader roster for the next year. They might just need a couple of people to hire, but the idea is really to create that connection both as a community, but then also to offer them job prospects. And then, with the tourpreneur aspect, it's going to be a whole world of programming around that entrepreneurship, that operating business owner level as well. And so we just think that we're watching. I mean, you're going to ask us about trends, but one of the big trends is we're seeing everybody do everything.
Speaker 1:We have people in the tourpreneur community who are part of the time guides. Part of the time. They might also have their own business, their own LLC, where they're offering their own tours. They're listed on Get your Guide. They're also working as a Tours by Locals guide and then in the off season they're working with American Express as an advisor and that's one person. But they're actually divided in our industry according to all of these different categories that are each individually served. But oftentimes we're seeing more and more single these individuals playing a lot of different roles in our industry and they might even be working as operations partners for another tour operator. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So yeah, so bring us back to Tourpreneur. Obviously, you mentioned about Tourpreneur being involved in TripCon, and clearly this is where the three of you guys come together. You have your own businesses, but Tourpreneur is obviously a substantial operation unto itself, which, I think, why you say to Shane sometimes you're like it's a monster that he created because you've got the newsletter, the podcast, the blog, you've got courses and videos. It's the largest, most engaged online community for travel experience creators. So, of course, you have to have your finger on the pulse of all the trends, which is why I'm keen to get into them. But you also have a conference coming up in New York in February, the 17th to 20th where you're going to be doing workshops as well. So tell us a bit more about what you have planned for Tourpreneur in 2025. And then let's get into some of the trends that the three of you are paying attention to.
Speaker 1:I think the trends and the plans are one in the same. We need our community, our operators, to get more business. That's kind of what our mission is, and to get them more business. Of course, chris is helping them with their marketing, pete is helping them get their technology house in order, but overall, what we're trying to do is get them more business by creating more partnerships. For us, partnerships is the word.
Speaker 1:We just did a road show in California and every single time we asked for a show of hands. How many partners are you working with? How many other people are helping sell your tours for you? And most of them, I would say, were one, five, eight. A couple of them were saying 20, 30. What we're seeing is more and more you need to have your hands in so many different pots. It creates a more robust business, but those pots are everything from local operators that are bundling your tours together to sell kind of a Voltron product to a market.
Speaker 1:Working with DMCs, working with the local receptives in your audience, working with travel advisors in the United States, working with digital platforms like the OTAs, and I think what we're trying to do is, with everything that we do, help our operators turn their passion into something that is also filled with that business savvy of making those partnerships and selling, selling, selling and we don't mean it in a dirty word.
Speaker 1:We're like this is just all about sales. Usually, our community has the passion part down. Usually they love what they do, but they're drowning in the fear of. My Facebook ads have stopped working. Nobody's visiting my website and we're just watching digital marketing become extremely hard and weird as all these companies are jockeying for what's next and their position. We're watching people who are in our community that are high volume travel bloggers lose their traffic, and so they're coming to us and they're saying what's next? Where can we go? And so, for 2025, whether it's our conferences or our business coaching or business retreats or our podcast, any of that it's all about helping them discover what these kinds of partnerships look like and how to go out and form them.
Speaker 2:Right, it's a really good point and let's go around. Actually, it's actually a really interesting way to approach this conversation about trends and what our listeners should be paying attention to in 2025 is given each of your expertise should be paying attention to in 2025 is given each of your expertise. So, chris, when we think about marketing in 2025 and digital marketing specifically, what are you encouraging your clients to pay attention to? What would you encourage all of our listeners in the travel industry to be prioritizing and focusing on for 2025?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a good question, as much as I alluded to there. No, marketing is getting harder, harder, um. No, being able to track what you do marketing wise is so hard now and it's only getting worse. Um, and just because the amount of platforms, amount of things that people need to do now to be seen is just as I write my book. No, you have to become that sort of media company because you really need to think about all the different things you need to do, whether it's videos or email, marketing or ads and all this type of stuff as well. But I would probably say that the one consistent thing that people need to do it's not really a trend as such, but consistently you just need to be outputting lots of good content, um, whether that's for seo and for ranking, but also for things like ai. You know, ai is scraping google, it's scraping websites, it's scraping all this information and if it finds that your, your content is the best content to provide to the people searching for certain things on AI, that's what's going to show up. So content is going to be key, even more so now. They always say content is king. It's going to be even more so now in 2025, because of AI.
Speaker 3:And then the other thing would be video. Vertical video is, hands down, the best. I've been banging around about video for years. Video is marketing is hands down, the best platform you can use. But vertical video is where the engagement is going to be. So, whether that's on tiktok or wheels or shorts or whatever, that would be. Too many operators these days still don't use video enough and no, they're all. No, they're all natural born storytellers. They should be able to tell stories through video format, audio format, whatever that would be. So, being able to use vertical video and actually just getting in front of your customers because that's what your customers are on is they're going to be watching more video than anything else over that over 2025 and that's only going to continue to grow. So vertical video for sure. Get more in that on there.
Speaker 3:Think about tiktok. You know a lot of people discount tiktok because they maybe don't think it's their age groups, etc. But if you're dealing with families, the kids might be on TikTok and then show something on TikTok saying, hey, mom and dad, can I do this activity? Or whatever that would be. So you should be on all these different platforms TikTok, more for entertainment, instagram for more discovery about your brand and who you are as a business, and inspiration, and using things like YouTube for more sort of discovery about who, what the destination is, and maybe leading more into long form video, et cetera. So think about the different buckets that you can have, but using the different platforms and different ways to just get your brand across. So, yeah, vertical video, but just more content written content and video content is what I see is going to be the big things going forward in 2025.
Speaker 2:That's great Thanks for sharing that, chris and Peter. Let's bring you back into the conversation about technology, then, because both Mitch and Chris have touched on AI and I know that's one of the many topics that you get in heated discussions about on LinkedIn and other places but tell us, in terms of technology, what the travel industry should be really prioritizing and paying attention to in 2025?.
Speaker 4:The industry should really pay attention, not to the industry. You need to look outside the industry and pay attention to the society and how people live, Because people drop into this industry. If we exclude business travel and we just focus on the leisure travel, they drop into the industry once or twice a year Now to get to that trip, they may have spent X number of hours on various platforms or various technology to get to the trip, but they're only engaging with the industry once or twice a year for many cases, some cases once every two or three years. So human trends around technology are not developed by the travel industry. They're developed by how people operate in their daily lives, at their work, doing their shopping, picking up their kids. Their whole normal life is how they use technology. And then they come along every now and again, bump into the travel industry and we tend to ask them to do everything in a different way, which makes it all very concordant, not very customer customer friendly.
Speaker 4:We're moving into a world where we're really going to become customer centric. The power of the customer is going to increase dramatically. We're in a world at the moment where we think we have data about the customer, even the biggest companies, your bookings, your experience of the world. They have a lot of data on people, but they don't have that much. They have data based on the transaction history of that customer and that's that. But the real data of the customer is about to become available to the whole industry. The customers are going to be in control of it. They're going to say what you can do, what you can't do, and they're going to expect a better service. And if we just take the whole customer journey thing dreaming, planning, booking, experiencing and sharing in Google's customer journey at the moment we've always used technology in a way of finding things, searching for things, but humans had to take the action.
Speaker 4:We're now moving into a world where the technology takes the action. So if you're running a travel company at the moment, X percent of your website visitors are humans and X percent are bots, that's about to get flipped on its head. Website visitors are going to be vastly majority bots AI bots, not humans and they ain't just visiting and looking, they're going to be carrying out actions. So the flight is going to be booked by my AI bot. My hotel is going to be booked by my AI bot. I think experiences have a bit of a moat there and you have to go a bit deeper with experiences. It's not protected completely, but a bit of a moat. So the overall big trend I see is a society trend of empowering the customer to become really customer-centric and delivering a personalisation scale and a function scale that we've never been able to do before and I think that's quite transformative for the whole industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really interesting, Peter, and I guess that's where and I think, it's a really valuable point you mentioned right from the onset there, which is that you know, in order to be successful in travel.
Speaker 1:Most of the companies are not just looking at what everyone else is doing.
Speaker 2:They're looking at other industries to figure out how they can innovate, whether it be retail, for example, with social media content to get closer to the source of booking. I know companies like Kluk, of course, are working much more closely with TikTok to make their trip experiences bookable. You guys obviously work closely with Get your Guide, work closely with Get your Guide. Is there any other developments, peter, while we're still talking about technology, that you would kind of direct people to, or examples of companies that are leveraging technology in a very human-centric way, to take your point about actually paying attention to what's happening in society? And so, yeah, I would love if you wouldn't mind sharing like one or two examples of developments that you're paying attention to, even if it is something that you are, you know, across with what you guys are working on it.
Speaker 2:Get your guide, for example, because I know you know they're starting to move into multi-day tour experiences, um, and obviously they're on an ota. So like, yeah, what? What are some of the other technology trends or developments in this space that you're, uh, you're paying attention to?
Speaker 4:I think the kind of first thing that we all have to understand so we don't all just get carried away with AI hype and there is a lot of hype around it but it's obviously justified, but it's really, really difficult ie off the scale difficult to make AI work in a really customer-centric way with the existing infrastructure of the travel industry. So all of the gates, all of the firewalls that everybody sits behind, the airlines are behind the airports are behind the OTAs are behind all the individual companies behind it isn't an easy job just bolting an AI connection in there and suddenly making all this work. So the whole industry is having to re-engineer and there's whole new layers of middleware. That's having to pull all of this out from all this historical legacy systems that are often held together with band-aids and guys who have been coding in them for 20, 30 years. We're having to pull all of this information out, stick it into different layers, then let the AI go to work, actually structure it in a way it's useful for the customers at the end and then redesign the UX layer that the customer is going to become much more friendly. So a lot of this people focus on the AI can write itineraries and it can make pictures and all these minor tiny things. They are little features. There's huge amounts of features AI can do, but we haven't at this point got a platform that AI integrates across the whole industry.
Speaker 4:So the really interesting companies I'm seeing is not the individual vertical companies. Even the giants of Expedia, booking, get your Gig Viator they're in verticals. It's very hard for them to open up across the whole company because they don't want their data exposed. But if you're building an ai middle layer, you can get the data from everywhere and you can build a complete customer journey and see what's going on in that customer journey. And if then you put a ux on the front end that is really customer centric and allows the customer to take control of their whole customer journey, so it's not just dropping in the information from booking. You have to go to another app to get your airline, you have to go to another one to get your taxi all of it's connected and all dropping into one UX is customer-friendly.
Speaker 4:That, to me, is where we get the change here. Companies that are working on that in the industry there's one, a mind trip. They've raised some cash recently. They've gone deep into that. It's not going to pop up and have it all solved in any time soon, because this stuff is complex complex. There's another company called data era d-a-t-a-i-e-R-A. They're about to go live pretty soon with some major players who have got this sorted and working. So we're about to, in 2025, see the first impacts of AI agents, both at the customer end and at the backend, bringing this stuff together in new ways that we've not seen before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's great and I think calling out Mindtrip is a really good example. And I'm just going to add something very quickly to that just for our listeners, because MindTrip is going to be on our Focusrite episode and Andy, who obviously you know is the CEO, I interview Michelle, the CMO, and I've got a chance to know Rudy and the rest of the team. They actually entered the travel space from automotive. They've been in other verticals. They'd never been in the travel space before and initially, kind of for their first year of operation, they weren't really engaging the travel industry because they kind of took an Airbnb approach that they were going to disrupt the travel industry and kind of the less they knew about it, they could actually kind of come at it from a new perspective. But interestingly they've adjusted and they've introduced some B2B solutions now for DMO partners and they've raised the additional funding, as you just highlighted. And I think their team since they're smart, talented and capable, they've quickly adjusted, developed strong partnerships in the industry. They've been at every event this year and so I'd actually highlight that as even if you've got a strong, talented team with a great concept getting into this industry, understanding B2B relationships and knowing how much the travel industry is a people-driven industry. They've quickly adjusted and I think that's where I think they're going to see a lot of success with B2B and I think ultimately they'll get back to B2C, which is what their first foray into travel was. But there wasn't really a revenue model there. But I think there will be in the future. So I'm glad you mentioned them. Data Era I wasn't familiar with, so I'm definitely going to check them out afterwards as well. We'll be right back.
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Speaker 2:And now back to the show. Mitch, let's bring you back into this chat now, too, because you are obviously the human connection between marketing and technology, and when I look at the client list that you have, some of the companies that stood out to me. Obviously, we've mentioned some of the high-profile ones, but companies like GreetHer and I call that out because one of Get your Guide's major trends for 2025 is solo female travel and that's something that, as you pointed out, I've got a background in multi-day tour and it's an industry that I remain very passionate about and see the next five to 10 years a long-term trend of companies like WeRoad getting into the space. For example, if you look at a company like Intrepid and their plans to double the business, a lot of their customers were already. For those people listening to our episode with James Thornton, he we're already, you know, for those people listening to our episode with James Thornton.
Speaker 2:He calls out their you know their customer profiles, and the number one customer profile is like a woman in her mid 40s, a single traveler, and we're seeing more and more solo female travelers that are choosing guided travel. And now we're actually seeing a lot more companies that are actually just female only travel, and so GreetHer was one of the really fascinating companies I got a chance to meet in 2024 at the Virtuoso conference, and so I'm hearing more and more about that trend. So what I wanted to ask you, when we come back to product and the actual guest experiences, what are some of the trends that you're seeing, whether it be with partners, you're training where you're like, wait a second, they're cracking new business models, models. If you wouldn't mind sharing some of the exciting developments that you're seeing in that space. That I guess what I refer to as trends, but sort of the product developments that you're seeing for 2025.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think multi-day is just such a funny, funny landscape. Both you and I have a passion for it and I just still feel like it is this behemoth that nobody understands or very few people pay attention to, in the way that it has a dozen different business models all wrapped up into this thing called multi-day travel, right, which could be a two-day hike listed on Get your Guide, or it could be a 30-day around the United States trip offered in modular components by Insight Vacations, or it could be solo female travel for a week. All of these things are different business models or different customers. They're also lots of times grouped into a single idea which is oh, it's a bunch of people coming together with a tour leader and a bus and they go off and they do sightseeing. And I think the real innovation now is the I wouldn't call it disruption. I think they're just getting.
Speaker 1:We're getting better at it, right, because 50 years ago, the real excitement was seeing the Eiffel Tower, because you couldn't see it very easily and people were afraid of people. I'm an American. Americans were afraid of going to Europe. Is it safe? Is it easy to navigate? And the answers probably were no, it's not easy to navigate. All of my favorite memories of my early years living in Europe were centered around problems happening, and they created great memories, but it didn't create a great customer experience, I think en masse. And so companies were solving for different problems 30, 40, 50 years ago these large companies. And now the problem that people are solving for is again this idea that we're living these sort of like lonely, isolated lives. We're sort of inundated by technology, we're kind of overwhelmed by stress, and so, you know, sometimes you might call it wellness travel or you might call it these types of retreat experiences, but really what it is is actually designing for humans returning to their humanity, and I see companies returning to getting humans to be more human together in new and interesting ways. And so a big trend I see, in new and interesting ways. And so a big trend I see, for example, I guess I would call it under-designing of tours, so operators removing large amounts of things from itineraries to let them breathe, giving people just a morning at the hotel instead of saying, all right, we're going to get on the bus and we're going to pack it in again.
Speaker 1:That sort of pack it in style of travel, I think, is being replaced with an idea of longer times, longer periods, of really feeling like sustained connection, not only with a place but also with a person, with the group, and on that level, what they're doing, then, is just becoming more experiential. I mean, yeah, joe Pine, joe, I read the experience economy. It was the first book that I read as I was getting into this industry. That was in Paris, and it just happened to be trans or happened to show up in a Shakespeare and company, uh, as a used book, and it was like 1999 or the year 2000, when I was there, I just moved to Paris and I read it on a lark, I didn't know what I was reading. So, obviously, the experience economy has been around for a while.
Speaker 1:I think it's coming now in full force to the multi-day tour world, and it's because we're removing this idea of packaged experiences and selling based on bullet point itinerary items, and all of the operators are becoming more creative in the ways that they're designing for those human, those human things that we're all striving for, and you see it in everything from the way, uh, it's being, it's being changed.
Speaker 1:I, I'm, I go on to tiktok as research and also diversion, and I'll see contiki and ef, and both of them are rebranding what they're selling to young people. They're calling it social travel right, because they realize that, oh wait, they don't need packaged, planned experiences. What they need is friends. I see companies like Black Tomato doing crazy things right, going to the very top of the market and saying let's just go wild in a way that multi-day hasn't ever gone before. I see these companies kind of mapping new terrain and rediscovering, actually, what the soul of multi-day is, which is very different than what it was decades ago, when travel was a problem to be solved. Now the problems are solved through a lot of digital components, and so the new problem is we've all lost our humanity.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you actually mentioned Joe Pine, because Douglas Quimbley mentioned him at his opening of Arrival. He's actually going to be the MC in 2025 in Washington at their event, and the book that you just referenced, the Experienced Economy, absolutely was written in 1999. And so here we are, more than 25 years later, and talking about experiential travel and immersive travel. I mean, immersive travel was one of those trends and terms that came up during the pandemic. All of a sudden, we were doing immersive experiences. It was no longer just we couldn't just go to the museum, we had to have an immersive experience at the museum. And so the question I wanted to ask you on this topic, mitch, where technology plays a role to enhance the guest experience and where because there's just a little bit of context for everyone here, only because Chris kindly brought up Alex Bainbridge Alex is a good friend of mine, as he is to each of you.
Speaker 2:You and Alex, of course, have a healthy rivalry when it comes to AI and technology, and we discussed that when you're on our podcast before. Alex has been on our podcast talking about AI. He's a fascinating guy, he's definitely forward thinking and he's all about robo taxis and you keep seeing actually now those companies all of a sudden getting defunded, or GM just shutting down their robo-taxi program. So this is where sometimes you can get ahead of yourself. But actually it comes together in different ways because he's got a very successful partnership with Imagine Experiences Anna, who you know, and with these kind of AI guides. So there's a role for that to play and I'm not looking to debate that specifically with you, mitch. It's more, I would just love to get your take on where you see technology playing a valuable role in the guest experience and where you think it doesn't like where it, you know, just leave that to a human guide and to you know, to actually have a, to leave technology behind and just be immersed in a destination.
Speaker 1:You know, I I enjoy my, I enjoy my airline app. I enjoy it telling me we're boarding in two hours. I get a push notification because it's delayed. It points me to the nearest lounge. It has my boarding pass. Those are all phenomenal solutions. Just recently I read an article in I saw it somewhere about all of these new public toilets that have been put up by a company in Washington DC and it's meant to solve the problem of, like, finding a place to use the restroom and the only way to access them was through a QR code.
Speaker 1:So actually, a huge amount of unhoused, of people who don't have the means or the access, can't use them, they can't use the toilet, and so I think sometimes we're designing solutions that aren't actually solutions. They're just the technologies exist and so we think we have to use them. But I also think there's obviously an opportunity for these ways to connect some of the most annoyance. My job, I think, as like an experienced designer, as a guide trainer, is to promote and design the right kinds of friction, which are the kinds of friction that we all actually want in a travel experience, because they're what form real memories, for example, feeling lost, feeling surprised, feeling estranged from your home for a little bit, because this lodging is very different and a lot of this stuff isn't really about including or not including technology. It's about how you design an experience to use it in a way that promotes these moments of connection and humanity. And so you know, I think of.
Speaker 1:I think the biggest problem with a lot of the technology that's being built around AI right now and digital guides and stuff is it's built by people who don't actually understand the real superpower of human connection. So they think that, for example, a tour guide just gives dates and facts and figures and if we can get Wikipedia to be digested and then spit out via API to an auto-generated list of things that can be spilled into my ear that that's solving a problem or that's giving an immersive experience. And I'm sorry, but that's a load of crap. The minute you're looking at a phone or the minute you're looking at a phone, you've snapped out of immersion. One of the best books I read a year ago was Paul Zak's book called Immersion, and immersion is basically emotion plus attention.
Speaker 1:So we need to create things that sustain attention, that get us enraptured in a place, and I'm sorry, but that's not going to be you holding up a phone and seeing some animatronic return to the 18th century as you look at a work of art. We actually need guides that know how to facilitate conversations, where we ask open-ended questions, to get Chris Torres, who doesn't go to museums, to say what do you, what do you notice here, what captures your attention, what is what? What do you think the colors of this painting are doing? That's, I mean. Sure maybe you can train a GPT to do that. Then I might make an argument that it's facilitating immersion. But I'm sorry you can't repeat that in a storytelling form of oh, picasso painted this cubist painting in 19, whatever, right. So I think that usually we're actually not living up to the potential of what is great about travel is great about travel.
Speaker 2:We're creating mediocre simulacra using technology that is devaluing the depth and the power of what travel can do. Yeah, no, it's a really valuable point. In many ways I completely agree with you, given my travel experiences and I guess we're relative contemporaries in terms of age. So we also traveled before the internet with guidebooks, when you didn't have pre-booked accommodation and you weren't able just to organize an Uber to take you anywhere. So I wanted to bring Peter back into this, given that you are also have experienced that period of time and given your background in the industry. But clearly you're focused on technology. So, to pick up from what Mitch just shared, what is your view on that exact same topic in terms of where technology plays a role to enhance the guest experiences and where you kind of need to draw a line to say that's actually not going to make for a better guest experience? So how would you kind of approach that with the companies you're working with?
Speaker 4:yeah, and this is a paradox. A lot of what mitch said I agree with. Just because we have the same experience of travel and how immersive and how transformative travel can be if done in a way that challenges. Travel has to be challenging. It's not supposed to be super easy all the time. Things in travel have to be challenging to actually make it a worthwhile experience. However, we have back to my earlier statements. We're working with society here.
Speaker 4:The travel industry isn't a standalone thing. It lives on the back of society. Society live in a digital world these days, so they drop in. Society is already self-guided, so there is only a small amount of people actually drop into travel who take guided tours, who take guided multi-tours. The numbers are tiny versus the numbers who travel and don't buy actually guided tours or multi-day. So what are those people doing? They're actually self-guiding. They don't know they're self-guiding. They're just using tools and in our day it was a guidebook and asking lots of people on the street where can I get to, where can I find accommodation, et cetera.
Speaker 4:People have moved on and they're just using things on the phone various apps, google Maps, et cetera. But People have moved on and they're just using things on the phone, various apps, google Maps, etc. But the downside of that is they're living in a digital environment all the time, so they don't really experience the destination. However, it's finding this balance. These new tools are going to make that self-guided 50,000 times better than it is today, so we can't expect humans not to use it. What we have to try and do is increase the benefit of Guided dramatically to give them a break from living in their own echo chamber in their own world all the time, because we've seen all the evidence now. People who spend too many hours in a digital environment end up completely weird. They just end up knackered, they end up stressed. I mean, I see a report for Expedia the other day talking about Gen Z. I don't even know what age that is, but I suspect it's young.
Speaker 1:It's 100 years less than you. Nine hours they spend on their phone.
Speaker 4:They're now booking 47% of the money, book all-inclusive packages because they're finding travel too stressful. I mean, kids shouldn't be finding travel too stressful that they need to book all-inclusive packages. They should be thriving in a travel environment. So we've got to be really careful about when we're developing these things, and money always talks. We know that people see opportunities for scaling and money talks, but you've got to balance it up.
Speaker 4:So I'm a big believer in these tools coming together with humans and creating hybrid experiences where you're dropping in and out with humans, which should be the peak of the experience. The human interaction will be the peak, but the opportunity to stay engaged with a guest. At the moment, we have operators who engage with a guest two hours out of a seven-day trip. They only see them for two hours. You've now got an opportunity to stay engaged with them for seven days, even though they may only be seeing the human guide for X number of hours. So there's ways that we can merge this into a hybrid experience that really benefits the consumer and the customer but also doesn't train them to become sort of digital zombie that's got no life and they're all going to be depressed and strayed.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I mean, I think Travis Pittman says this all the time and the CEO of Tour Radar, travis, goes. We need to grow the whole pie. It's just a couple percent. It doesn't mean we should kowtow to the general trend of everybody obsessing over their phones. We need to become advocates or activists for this human component and grow the pie of people who see this as an attractive and important and potentially transformative way of being a human together in a travel experience. Let's grow this. This should be a mission of ours as an industry, instead of all of us just competing for the same small percentage of people that are booking tours.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned Travis, of course, because TourRadar and I've mentioned this when we had Travis on the show. I mean 70% of their bookings happen offline, despite the fact that all of the available tools and functionality is there to book that trip online. But so much of it is involved trying to make decisions about who's going to be on the trip. It's a high touch product. It requires handholding, additional knowledge and expertise, so you actually need human interaction to be able to book those trips. Interesting that actually, they're leveraging AI more and more to get customers what they need to help them convert. But I just wanted to go back to something that Peter said, and then I want to get all of your takeaways to kind of point people to not only how do they connect with you, but also somewhere you would direct them to advance themselves on all the topics we've been talking about.
Speaker 2:I, after spending the evening hanging out with Peter, the next night I had done my talk at WTM and we've been doing more and more of this. When we have a travel trends function, we have like an after party and we invited a number of people to come and join us afterwards and Ian Cumming, who I've become really good friends with who runs travel massive. Quite a few travel massive members came and I really enjoy meeting many of those people because they're passionate travelers, they're all about community and they have really interesting stories to tell. And one of the the gentleman I spoke to that night, uh, who was actually, I say, gentleman, he was actually a really young guy and he in um doing an around the world trip and part of his round the world trip was that he?
Speaker 2:would not use search engines and he would not use social media, and he forced himself to ask people for their recommendations, which also made me laugh, because that's what we all used to do and so but we were highlighting all the challenges with, sometimes, when the search doesn't necessarily give you the best recommendation, even though they may get the best reviews.
Speaker 2:A lot of companies have realized how to game the system, especially when it comes to social media, and so when you're using those tools, really you're relying on the algorithm and the combination of businesses that have optimized themselves, and the reality is, you won't discover the businesses out there that are not playing the digital marketing game and don't necessarily know how to advance themselves, and so you're gonna miss some hidden gems for sure, because they're not going to be surfaced to you and you may just have to stumble into them or have someone tell you about a place that they've heard of or that has just been discovered. So, peter, I would love, if you wouldn't mind, just to close off, and then we'll go around to everyone else, Tell everyone how they can connect with you and tell everyone, if you wouldn't mind, point them towards a resource it could be yours or someone else's where you'd recommend or you'd gravitate to, to get more information, to learn more and advance themselves in 2025.
Speaker 4:So the best place to get in contact with me is LinkedIn. I've been a big supporter of LinkedIn since 2003, I think when it came up. I've been on there for years. That's without the best. It's the only place I'll actually live digitally now. I don't do Facebook and all the rest of it apart from the group, so that's the only place I live digitally on LinkedIn, the place I would say trends.
Speaker 4:So in my day, because I'm a bit older, I had to read a lot and I would be getting through three, four books a week. I was a compulsive reader and that's changed over the last five, six, seven years. And the place I would point people to is YouTube. It's the biggest under-resourced thing in the world. If you want to learn about AI, the level of availability of there's no secrets in AI there is zero secrets. It's all sitting on YouTube. You just need to learn how to search it, stay updated on it. You can learn from a video in 20 minutes on YouTube which I was taking 10 hours to read a book. So that would be my number one resource for people who want to really learn about technology, where we're going, how it's going to interact with travel. It's all sitting on YouTube, getting updated daily.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's cool. I totally agree about youtube. It's interesting. When I introduced uh interview christian watts, you know he was absolutely about youtube. Tony karn, like it's like there's so many resources out there.
Speaker 2:Um, the thing I actually I love about youtube that I've only recently started to embrace is listening to music on youtube, and specifically npr, tiny desk, um, which I listened to adle years ago. It was like 13 years ago when that first came out. Billy Eilish just recently launched a and I just, if you need a little break from from day-to-day activity and stress, I highly encourage you, when you're on YouTube and after you've done your research on AI, just go over to NPR, check out tiny desk, listen to some music and just just have 10 minutes to chill out and just appreciate a beautiful voice and acoustic music. But anyway, that's my hot tip. But thank you, peter. Thank you for joining us. Chris, let's jump over to you. Please Tell everyone, please, how everyone can connect with you. Obviously, we've already mentioned your website, but how people can connect with you and what would be a resource that you'd point people towards?
Speaker 3:Yeah, for me it'd be either chris twoopenercom or chris at tourismmarketingagency that's where you can get me I'm also by going linkedin as well. Um, and for me, to be honest, where I learn the most from is actually and that's not a shameless plug here but, um, as a two-opener community. Well, the amount of questions, amount of advice, what people are doing in that, in that group, opens your eyes out, opens your eyes to a lot of things about what this industry is needing help with, um, and what they're and problems that they have, etc. And that's where I I learn a hell of a lot on the two opener group, um, just because of yeah, it's the best resource I've ever came across to learn what this industry needs and what they want and and the problems that they have. So, so, for, for, for me, it's a two opener group, although I am a big advocate of YouTube as well.
Speaker 3:I think YouTube is incredible. Um, no, even just just a side note on that note, and again, why I think video is still the thing that you really need to be focusing on. No, me and my wife will actually sit now and watch, because YouTube's now got an app on many TVs, et cetera. These days, we'll sit and watch a radio show. Radio shows are now creating YouTube channels of the radio show on these. So we'll sit and watch a sports one, for example, for football, soccer, as you guys call it. We'll sit and watch that for two hours every single night because YouTube and video is just getting more and more and more ingrained into society, et cetera.
Speaker 2:So YouTube for sure is, hands down, one of the platforms I've always used as well that's awesome, chris, and clearly there's a connection there between spending time together and youtube, because I'm sure you've experienced this as well. Most of our um, whether it be family gatherings or parties, at some point they descend into like watching youtube clips and people making suggestions and that endless loop of video and music you know all the time, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:Tiny desk is amazing as well. A lot of Tiny Desk.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's awesome. Thanks so much, chris. I really appreciate you joining us and, mitch, let's bring it back to you. So how can people get in touch with you and what would you point people towards?
Speaker 1:The same LinkedIn, mitch Bach or Mitch at thetripschoolcom or Mitch at tourpreneurcom. Trip School is my home for all the guide stuff, tourpreneurs, for all of our business stuff. I think Chris's point about our Facebook group the Tourpreneur Facebook group is really important. We're not gurus, we're not just flying into the industry and sharing what we think is some brilliant five-step method for growing your business or whatever. We're basically just not only practitioners but aggregators of all of the advice that is hard won by operators who have been working on these things in all different business sizes for so many years. And they're coming freely and generously to simply offer their wisdom to fellow business owners. And I think that's what makes our industry just so special and why people stick around in it, despite its antiquity or its backwards practices or whatever. I think there's something really special about the people who are just generously offering of themselves every single day in our community and the reason why we're so excited about all of our in-person meetups. We have 60 country meetups, 60 countries worth of meetups around the world. Next year we have our conferences. It's because the online part of the community is strengthened by knowing the people that are making those comments. It makes the community warmer online. It makes it more generous online, and so digital and in-person they work together. They work together, and I do not want to become known as the guy that just always goes online and argues with Alex Bainbridge and Christian Watts and other people who are AI advocates. I think it's a both and, but I do think that a lot of oxygen, especially online, especially on LinkedIn, gets taken up by advocates for yes, yes, yes, more more more technology. Advocates for yes, yes, yes, more, more more technology, and so I am going to recommend things called a paper book. I think there's so much studies that have been done about actually you absorb something more when it is a paper book and your brain remembers things spatially and so, paging through, not kindling through, I recommend all of the tech people in your audience going out into the woods and sitting down with.
Speaker 1:I'm going to just mention four books that I've recently become absolutely enamored of. I've read all of them multiple times. One is a book called Rooted by Landa Haupt. It's about the science behind why it's important to take off your shoes and go step on grass. It's the science and magic and wonderment of the way in which we can rewild ourselves. So she talks about this idea of us reconnecting with our wild side, our most human, mammalian, primate, shell side of our humanity, done through nature, done through being being alone. And I think the power of that book for me is it's a compendium of all of these different scientists, botanists, biologists, neuroscientists, and what it brings together is actually a very full sense of what it means to be human. That I hope then tech developers, app developers, experienced designers can take to heart and understand the power of what it means to be human in a really powerful way.
Speaker 1:Other book David Brooks how to Know a Person. David Brooks, you may know him as kind of a conservative commentator for many, many, many, many years with the New York Times, but David recently was like I realized that I'm kind of an asshole and I'm not good with people and he made it a project to relearn how to be better at empathy, how to be just a better person and connect better with people. It means, for example, not asking, hey, what do you do? What's your job, you know? But rather asking a question like what, what, what project gets you out of bed right now in the morning, things like that. It's like the art of asking questions, the art of remembering how we can connect as humans, especially in the wake of the US election and all of these things that are dividing us more than ever.
Speaker 1:And then another book called the Serviceberry. My husband's a book publisher. He works for Simon Schuster and he was the editor behind this book. That is very, very short but insanely powerful and it's built around. It's a book about gift economies.
Speaker 1:So on our California road trip, the memory that I think I remember more than anything was waking up early morning. The Airbnb that we were staying in didn't have any coffee, and so I went out to a coffee shop and I went out with Don Littlefield and we walked in there and it was a couple of surfers and we just started talking and talking and talking to the two guys that were sitting there at the front of the cafe about how great this coffee is, about Pismo Beach community, all of that. And halfway through the guy said you know what the coffee's around me Get, whatever you want. And then we talked more about who he was and what he was doing there and he said actually I just broke up with my fiance and I honestly feel sad and it's this insanely beautiful moment, but it was centered around this opening. That happened the minute he bought us a coffee and something really simple is it's the power of a gift, and I think there's a lot of opportunity to design experiences, design technology to facilitate gifts right To not facilitate extraction but to facilitate gifts and that best part of us and the Serviceberry is a really beautiful book about that, it's about free libraries, it's a call to action on that.
Speaker 1:And then the final thing I would say is read Kyle Chayka's book called Filter World and just return to understanding how algorithms have fundamentally altered how we think about who we are as a person. And I think all of that would be my Christmas bundle to anybody developing technology in our industry right now and then still go out and develop it, but center it around that.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, mitch.
Speaker 2:Those are some fantastic suggestions, and I've not read any of those four books, so you've added them to my list, and I'm an avid reader and I will make sure that those are in the show notes, too, for all of our listeners that we're trying to quickly write down the titles or the authors and, um, and for any of our listeners, too, that are obviously listening to this, that prefer listening audible listen to these books, especially if they're read by the author.
Speaker 2:I often go back and forth between reading and listening to books, and I enjoy both, and so for those of you out there that are like I wouldn't read a book but actually listen to it because you can, so those are excellent, mitch, I really appreciate you, you know joining us, sharing all of your valuable advice the three of you, obviously I'm proud to call you all friends and privileged to be colleagues in this amazing industry that we we all obviously love and continue to want to see adapt and change in positive ways. So thank you for making the time for this. I certainly wish you guys every success with Torpreneur and your businesses in 2025. I look forward to seeing you guys in person again soon and keeping in touch. So thanks again for making the time for this and wishing you guys all the best for 2025.
Speaker 1:We cannot wait to have you on our podcast and open the door of your brain to share with our audience the vast wisdom of the decades of your experience in the industry as well. So the gift keeps on giving, and thank you for having us. Thanks, mitch, that means a lot. Thanks, don, thank you, Peter.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Chris.
Speaker 3:Thanks very much.
Speaker 2:Thanks again for joining us on our latest episode of Travel Trends. I really hope you enjoyed this conversation with Pete Mitch and Chris from Tourpreneur. Definitely check out more details about them at tourpreneurcom. Join their Facebook channel. Sign up for their newsletter. They're a terrific group of individuals and a very important part of our industry and I encourage you to stay engaged with them. Thanks again for featuring me on your podcast recently. It was a real honor and for those of you who are interested in hearing that conversation, you could definitely go and check out their podcast Now.
Speaker 2:For next week, we're going to be focusing on safaris over the next month and we're going to start this deep dive into the evolving world of African safari travel by introducing a friend of mine and the CEO of African Travel, sherwin Banda. He's an amazing storyteller and he has such an inspiring personal story that I think it's actually the perfect way to set the stage for the world of African safari travel, and I actually got goosebumps when he was describing the experience of being on safari. So for those of you who haven't been on safari, or if you want to be transported back, definitely check out next week's episode Now. We post clips and highlights of all of our episodes on our social channels, which is Instagram, youtube and LinkedIn at Travel Trends Podcast. So be sure to check out clips and highlights there.
Speaker 2:And then we send out a monthly summary of all of our shows and our upcoming travel plans. So register at TravelTrendsPodcastcom for our newsletter. Check out the events page because we have a ton of events coming up which couldn't be more excited to attend and also meet many of our amazing listeners. So be sure to reach out to me if you're going to be at any of these upcoming events, and if I can feature you on an episode of Travel Trends, I will be sure to do so. But until next time, safe travels. Thanks so much.
