Tourpreneur Tour Business Podcast

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

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

A Google Business Profile does a different job than it did a year ago. Travelers now describe the exact trip they want in long, specific searches, and Google answers with AI that draws on what it knows about each business, trusting what comes from the business itself first. A profile set up years ago and left alone is feeding those answers with whatever it said back then. Lisa Landsman, whose job at Google is explaining it to small businesses, takes Mitch through the questions tour operators have been asking for years, and a lot of the answers have changed.
Things are moving fast enough that some of it may be outdated by the time you hear it. The upside is real for anyone running something specific: you no longer have to sound like every other tour in your city to show up. Listen to this one if you set up your profile once and haven't opened it since. You'll come away knowing what Google wants from your profile now, what its review rules allow, and where to spend your next hour on it.
Resources:
Lisa Landsman on LinkedIn
Gemini connected to your Google Business Profile
Ask Google Help, in the Google Business Profile Help Center

Tony Carne has lived the whole arc of how day tours get sold. He started as a guide, built Urban Adventures into a global day tour brand for Intrepid, and watched the channel that built it disappear when the platform changed its rules. He has spent the years since working out what an operator can count on instead.
His answer starts with accepting that the free booking is gone. What works now is getting found through other people, because travelers search for and trust what real guests share far more than what a business says about itself. The same idea shapes how he and Mitch see AI. Listen to this one if you resent the OTAs and aren't sure what the alternative is. You'll come away knowing where to put your effort, and more convinced that the human being at the front of your tour is the part that lasts.
Resources:
CollabsMap
Everything AI in Travel

Operators keep asking Tourpreneur co-founder Pete Syme to automate their customer communication, and he tells them to stop.
Pete Syme and Mitch Bach open a new monthly series, Pete & Mitch Are Angry, with AI, whose noise has grown too loud for a small operator to sort through without hours to spare. Pete's reason for saying stop is that talking to guests is an operator's biggest chance to learn what they want, and that knowledge is where the upsell, the cross-sell, and the second and third booking come from. An operator who hands that seat to a chatbot learns none of it. Supplier work, invoicing, and pricing are where the automation belongs. Requests for a workforce of AI agents get a similar reply: agents built on a broken business break it faster.
AI amplifies whatever business it is pointed at. A solo operator with 12 tours wanted them all automated, and Mitch's advice was to cut the list to three, aim each at one specific customer, and skip the tech needed to serve 12 tours in 12 locations with different vendors and transport. Pete reaches the same place from the other direction: AI agents on top of broken processes speed up the breakage, so the foundations get fixed first. With sound foundations, the question that matters is what AI cannot do for the business. The answer differs by operator because geography, market, and economics differ, and no consultant can supply it. Automate the repetitive work around that answer, leave the answer itself untouched, and start every AI decision there.