Tourpreneur Tour Business Podcast

Tour operators are told locals won't buy tickets to see their own city. They're usually right. Jeanette Pierce built a twenty-year business by selling the tour to someone else instead: the employer, the university, the city government that already has that local on a list. The product isn't sightseeing. It's attraction and retention. Jeanette Pierce is the founder of Detroit's The City Institute,...

New Scientist Discovery Tours runs 100 tours with a team of four, works with six operator partners worldwide, and has guests putting deposits down on a solar eclipse in Australia in 2028. The entire operation is built around one idea: go to the same places as everyone else, but tell a story nobody else is telling. Kevin Currie, Director of New Scientist Discovery Tours, joined the company in 2019...

Elyrea sells a kind of tour no traveler would think to search for, and Jean-Vladimir Deniau built the whole company around that fact. Jean-Vladimir Deniau is the founder of Elyrea, a French company that builds character-based immersive performances for the tourism market. The format is specific: a professional actor embodies a historical figure, Coco Chanel near Place Vendôme, Hemingway around Mon...

Most tour operators benchmark pricing against competitors and copy the playbook of the loudest voices in the industry. Mary Collins runs two businesses by ignoring both and starting from the question an anthropologist asks first: who benefits. Mary Collins is the founder and CEO of Blue Fern Travel, a DC food tour company she launched with her husband in 2014, and the owner of Far Horizons Archaeo...

Adam Guy runs I Know A Guy NYC Tours, a solo private tour business he started after quitting a 25-year fundraising and marketing career during COVID. Mitch and Adam unpack what it actually looks like to refuse the standard playbook of growth, hiring, and operational scale, and instead build a six-figure business around one person and a defined niche. Adam stays in New York City. He runs only priva...

There is no itinerary. No promised outcome. And a 98 percent five-star review rate. Geetika Agrawal is the founder and CEO of Vacation With An Artist (VAWAA), a platform connecting travelers with master artists in 42 countries for multi-day, one-on-one apprenticeships. The business does not sell tours. It sells access to process: five to six days in an artist's studio, working directly alongside p...

Karl Wilder started The Chef Tours with 300 euros, no advertising budget, and a radical premise: spend the majority of your ticket price on food and wine, not marketing, and let your guests do the talking. It worked: 70% of his bookings now come from referrals. Karl spends upwards of six months developing each new city, walking streets with his dog Milou, watching how vendors cook, tasting obsessi...

Most tour operators know they should stand out. Very few are willing to say something specific enough to actually do it. Yulia Denisyuk is a journalist, storyteller, and independent trip operator who has spent years watching the travel industry default to the same itineraries, the same highlights, and the same cheerful marketing, while the travelers who might actually connect with something real k...

When AI bots can generate endless facts and flawless narratives, what’s left for human tour guides? This week Mitch Bach sits down with VoiceMap founder Iain Manley to explore the future of storytelling in travel, from his perspective as a journalist and developer of a self-guided audio tour app powered by human creators. We dive into the power of personal perspective and the new risks of playing...

Mitch Bach talks with Jenn Barbee, co-founder of Destination Innovate, about the real inner workings of DMOs, those three letters that every tour operator has an opinion about but few actually understand. Jenn has spent 30 years inside destination marketing, from a shoestring US Department of Commerce team trying to promote America on a $50,000 budget to her current work closing the gap between DM...

How do you scale a company without losing your soul or passion? Mitch Bach talks this week with Paul Whitten, founder of Nashville Adventures, about how a former combat veteran, Peace Corps volunteer, UK Parliamentary Fellow, and Amazon project manager translated the learnings from his winding life path into a fast-growing tour company built at the intersection of passion, profitability, and publi...

This is an episode all about the hard stuff. Politics. Disagreement on tour. Tour sites where the truth itself is in debate. Confronting places with complicated, dark histories. Most of the advice out there is: avoid this stuff at all costs. People just want to have fun, they're on vacation. Guides should stick to the script and make sure they don't say something that upsets the guests. I'm not he...

What if the most powerful segment in travel has been hiding in plain sight for decades? Tourpreneur's Mitch Bach talks with Carolyn Ray , CEO of Journey Woman , about her transformation from corporate executive to full-time traveler and advocate for the 50+ woman traveler—a demographic that represents half the world's population yet remains largely invisible to the travel industry. After a life-ch...

This is a story of growth through creativity, experimentation, and using technology to stay lean. Carlo Pandian ( LinkedIn ) is the founder of Slow Travel Italia . Four years ago he started with a single wine tasting in Verona, and today runs 160 experiences across 12 Italian cities, serving 15,000 guests a year with a very small team. In this episode, he talks to TP host Mitch Bach about exactly...

In this episode Mitch Bach sits down with Marinel de Jesus , a former human rights lawyer turned tour operator. She is filled with questions about the adventure tour industry: Why do porters on the famous, touristy Inca Trail in Peru carry crushing loads for little pay and even less dignity? Why is it so difficult to find women adventure guides in so many parts of the world? What do indigenous com...

This short episode was recorded live at GetYourGuide's Unlocked conference in September 2025. When you meet Arturo Ardao Rivera, the first thing you feel is his energy. He doesn't come off as an engineer, which was his profession until he discovered a joy for tour guiding and running a tour business. Originally from Madrid, Arturo found his true passion when he created Rainbow Tours Stockholm. It...

It's 2026... welcome to a new year of Tourpreneur weekly travel business podcasts! And we're starting the year off in a slightly different vein. This episode is a must-listen to help you set a new and hopefully inspirational, deeper tone for your year ahead as a business owner or guide. Our opening guest is the inimitable Dr. Anu Taranath, a professor, author, and facilitator. She's truly one of a...

Pete Syme interviews Andrea Lamparini from WeRoad, a hybrid tech company and tour operator that's rewriting the rules of group travel for millennials and Gen Z. The conversation reveals how WeRoad has achieved exceptional growth by building a community-first model where strangers become friends through small group experiences, using travel coordinators instead of traditional guides, operating as a...

Christy Hunter started Photo Walk Nashville seven years ago after discovering Airbnb Experiences, combining her photography skills with local knowledge to create tours that capture memories for travelers. What began as open photo shoots quickly evolved as she learned to segment products for different customer types—bachelorette parties, couples, solo travelers, dog owners, and corporate groups. Th...

Ryan Connolly went from finance analyst to glacier guide to co-founder of Hidden Iceland. In this episode, he shares the numbers behind their most pivotal business decision: cutting small group tours that represented 50% of their departures but only 10% of revenue. That shift to exclusively premium and luxury private tours helped the company grow by 5% while improving quality and profitability. Ry...

Kevin and Sylvia launched iRide Arusha in July 2024, offering motorcycle tours and rentals in Tanzania. Within 18 months they scaled across four East African cities through a franchise model called iRide Africa, with partners operating in Rwanda, Nairobi, and Mombasa. The franchise structure allows riders to cross borders and book multi-country tours. The episode covers operational realities: impo...

This conversation with Jeff Gayduk, publisher of Premier Travel Media, reveals an industry at a transformative inflection point where specialized group travel is experiencing unprecedented growth despite predictions of its demise. Speaking from his unique vantage point overseeing multiple travel industry verticals, Gayduk identifies 2026 as a watershed year driven by three major events—the World C...

Pete Syme talks with Drew Falkman about vibe coding, a way for tour operators to build custom software tools using plain English prompts instead of traditional programming. Drew explains how AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude have been trained on code repositories, allowing them to generate working applications from simple descriptions. The conversation covers why this matters for small operators, w...

Born from a wine import business and shaped by deep relationships with multi‑generational wineries, Joy of Wine Journeys built a premium, multi‑day model with a ~75% repeat rate. Natalie shares why they skip big cities, how “depth over density” creates value, and how pricing, partnerships, feedback, and tight ops compound into growth. Top 10 takeaways 1) Repeat guests keep coming back. About 75% r...

When Justin Buzzi launched a clear kayak tour in Florida, his goal was to offer something memorable. What he built was one of the most highly rated kayak experiences in the country—with over 50,000 five-star reviews and 30+ franchise locations. In this episode, Justin joins Dustin Miller of Conversion Assist to unpack how they built a guest experience that keeps working long after the paddles are...