Guest Bio
Peter Syme is a world wanderer and adventure addict who has visited over 140 countries. With a background that spans the military, corporate leadership, and operating multiple travel businesses in several countries, Peter brings deep insight into the tourism landscape. He is now a partner at Tourpreneur, where he’s focused on building the world’s largest community of tour operators. His mission is to help operators become more profitable by working at the intersection of technology, platforms, and the travel industry.
Show Summary
In this episode of the Big World Made Small Adventure Travel Podcast, host Jason Elkins speaks with Peter about the evolving landscape of the travel and tourism industry. Peter shares his diverse background—from military service to corporate leadership to running tour companies across multiple countries—and how it led him to his current role with Tourpreneur.
The conversation dives into the challenges small tour operators face, including isolation, lack of formal business training, and the complexities of marketing in a fragmented industry. Peter emphasizes the power of community and how Tourpreneur helps operators connect, collaborate, and grow. He also offers insights on customer profiling, product quality, and how networking and partnerships can accelerate success.
Key Takeaways
- ✓ Tourpreneur is a community of tour operators across various sectors.
- ✓ The community helps operators navigate challenges and improve their businesses.
- ✓ Loneliness is a common issue for small tour operators.
- ✓ Many operators lack formal training in business management.
- ✓ The travel industry is worth approximately $254 billion.
- ✓ Marketing is crucial for success in the tour operation business.
- ✓ Product quality is essential but not the only factor for success.
- ✓ Networking and partnerships can significantly impact business growth.
- ✓ Understanding customer profiles is vital for effective marketing.
- ✓ The travel industry is fragmented, offering opportunities for new entrants.
What You’ll Find on Tourpreneur
- ✓ A global community of tour operators sharing best practices
- ✓ Practical resources to improve profitability and growth
- ✓ Marketing and tech insights tailored to tour businesses
- ✓ Candid conversations on challenges faced by operators
- ✓ Opportunities to collaborate and form partnerships
- ✓ Support for operators at all stages of their journey
Learn more about Tourpreneur and connect with Peter at:
https://tourpreneur.com/
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Podcast Transcript
This transcript is auto-generated on recording, and has not been edited by a human. It may contain lots of mistakes, crazy words, and stuff that makes no sense. The host and the guest are not responsible for the accuracy of the transcript.
Jason Elkins (00:01.121)
Welcome back to everybody to another episode of the Big World Made Small podcast for the adventure traveler. This one has been in the works for a while. I’ve been aware of him for some time and I’ve had a few of his kind of colleagues and industry friends on the show and I’m super excited today. I’ve got Pete Syme here. He is a partner with Tourpreneur. Pete, so happy that you’re able to join me today.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (00:26.77)
Good morning, Jason great to be on your podcast and looking forward to it.
Jason Elkins (00:30.699)
Yeah, I am as well, have been for a while. First thing I’m going to ask for those people that don’t know, think probably if they’re industry people, they probably already do know you. But for those that don’t, your accent’s obviously a little different than mine. So where are you from and where are you calling from today?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (00:48.238)
I was born in Scotland. I lived all over the world but currently I’m back in Scotland, have been for a while. A little rural village in the middle of nowhere, 900 people. So based here but spend most of my life travelling. I’m in or around anywhere between 15 and 20 countries.
Jason Elkins (01:06.541)
wow. Okay. Cool. And you mentioned rural Scotland with right before I hit the record button, you gave me kind of a warning that sometimes the broadband is not always that good. So we’ll see how this goes. And, and you’re involved in a podcast as well with the Tourpreneur group. So, so you can appreciate some of the, so the challenges and.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (01:15.542)
Yes. Yeah.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (01:26.132)
We are well versed in all the issues of remote podcasting. It’s much better when you use a studio, but because we all live our lives traveling around the world and doing different stuff, we’re never in a studio. So it’s just grab people where you can.
Jason Elkins (01:39.005)
I’m, I’m, I’m in the same boat. It’s a pretty much every episode you look at, I’ve got a different background because I’m in an Airbnb somewhere or doing something like, which is great until you run into internet issues or like you said this morning, you know, people are banging outside the house, but fortunately I can’t hear it. So anyway, we’re gonna, we’re gonna discuss your whole story and really get into that. But I also want to give our listeners kind of an upfront opportunity to understand what is tour per newer.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (01:56.845)
Yeah.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (02:08.798)
Toprenor, which is reasonably weird name. I’m not responsible for it. Thank you, Shane, the guy who made it up. It took me about three weeks to be able to say it. Nobody would be responsible for it. So Toprenor is a community first. We’re a community of tour operators. So tour operators, not just in the adventure space, tour operators that cover every space, history, food tours, you name it. There’s 120 verticals within the community.
Jason Elkins (02:13.933)
You
Jason Elkins (02:19.564)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (02:34.51)
the last time we counted them, which probably means there’s probably more now because people invent and stuff all the time. There’s around 21,000 operators as of this week and they’re spread across 180 countries. And the operators can be day operators, which means they take a day tour out, a day experience, or they can be multi-day, which in the adventure world is like taking two-week trips to Nepal or Kilimanjaro or cycling holidays or rafting holidays or whatever it is. So we have
Jason Elkins (02:40.535)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (03:03.488)
a wide, wide range of, the thing that binds them all together, they’re all pretty small businesses. So they’re all small founder owned businesses. do have some big ones in there, but normally they are run by a solo operator or a small team of up to five people. And then we have about 5 % of the membership are big businesses, bigger businesses that have big teams.
Jason Elkins (03:28.855)
So this is, it’s a virtual community cause you’ve got people spread all around the country. know you do some get togethers and meet in person at times, but generally where does this community live? Like if someone wanted to go figure out how to get into it, whatever, where, where are they looking?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (03:42.062)
Yeah. We have a free community on Facebook where a lot of the action happens. We are the accident and emergency ward of tour operating. People come to us because they’re in pain. They don’t come to have a great enjoyment and say, we’re doing great. We’re having a fantastic time. Isn’t the world wonderful? They come to us because normally they have pain in the business.
Jason Elkins (03:54.795)
No.
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (04:09.005)
The margins are not right, they’re not getting enough bookings, the market is confusing them, the technology is doing their head in, the customers are doing things that they didn’t expect, the reviews are not where they should be, you could go on and on and on. So we are the accident and emergency ward that helps fix tour operators’ businesses. The Facebook group is the free level where everybody piles in, and then we have a community on a piece of software where we go into much more depth with individual operators and small groups.
There’s multiple coaching sessions every week, multiple training sessions, courses being released, podcasts every week, newsletters going out every week, and we do do a lot in person as well. We will have 70 plus events in 2026 around the world where we meet. I’m about to head off to London. There’s one in New York tonight with about 60 or 70 people with it, and I’m off to London next week for another one.
Jason Elkins (04:51.258)
wow.
Jason Elkins (05:00.257)
What are these in-person events look like? How would you describe what people experience there?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (05:05.533)
We, yeah, the small ones, the one day ones, we’ll do something in the afternoon often with an individual tour operator. We may take the tour and then we’ll do a critique of it or we’ll do an analysis of it and rip it down and rebuild it for it. That’ll be recorded so we can then broadcast the lessons to the rest of the community. Then we’ll do some workshop sessions with a bunch of operators after that. And then in the evening, it’s a big social get together where it’s more about the network and get operators.
meeting other operators, meeting technology providers. We are there as a bridge to bring all of these interesting and great people together because in this world of small business, partnerships are the number one thing that makes a difference between a struggling business and a reasonably successful business. So to get partnerships, we have to create environments where people can be introduced to other people.
Jason Elkins (05:56.141)
Absolutely. get that. as somebody that’s kind of a one man show, mean, not really because I have guests like you come on and, but I can tell you, you know, I don’t have any colleagues sitting next to me. don’t really have anybody necessarily that I sit and brainstorm ideas with. and that’s, that can be a challenge. So you mentioned a lot of these operations are small. Maybe it’s one to five person team.
I’ve been around long enough to know that can feel pretty friggin lonely.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (06:27.819)
Yeah, and that is the thing, it’s loneliness, particularly for the founder, the owner, particularly no one went to university to study being a tour operator, no one. They all fall into this sector, and this is not a small sector, this sector’s worth about 254 billion. So it’s a big sector, but no one was ever officially trained for it. They drop in from being in corporate business normally, normally in the late 20s, early 30s.
Jason Elkins (06:38.239)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (06:50.455)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (06:56.631)
where they’ve just sort of got fed up with life of whatever life was. They’ve got a passion. That’s the one thing that they all seem to have, a passion for whatever their interest in vertical is, be that adventure, be it history, be it culture, be it the environment. They’ve all got a passion and they all then design and build a business around that. And then they hit a brick wall very quickly and figure out that this isn’t like being an employee. This is like, have to do 56,000 jobs every day, seven days a week to make this thing work.
Jason Elkins (07:01.805)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (07:15.639)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (07:21.325)
you
Jason Elkins (07:26.187)
And I’m not sure which one to start on.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (07:26.989)
Exactly, what one’s important, what one’s going to drive you more business, how do you look after the customers and it’s a lonely place when you’ve got all of that so we just try to provide the environments that they can speak to other people who are in the same situation and critically other people who have been doing this for 10, 15, 20 years who can help the newer ones coming along.
Jason Elkins (07:50.477)
How long has the Torpereur community been around?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (07:53.966)
It was formed as a standalone podcast by a guy called Shane Whaley, I think five years ago. We took it over three years ago when I say we, there’s three partners, Mitch and Chris, myself. We took over on May 2022 and changed it from a podcast into a community with a lot of training going on, the in-person events and just rounded out the
Jason Elkins (08:03.349)
Okay, so not very long.
Jason Elkins (08:09.591)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (08:23.874)
the groundwork that Shane had done by getting a community built around the podcast, we just then blew up an education platform and a health platform.
Jason Elkins (08:32.735)
It’s, it’s a good choice. I mean, with me in my position where I’m at, what I’m trying to do is I can look forward and say, yeah, it’s, it’s about community, but it’s kind of hard when it’s one person. So you’ve got the three and we’ve, we’ve had, we’ve, we’ve had Chris on the show and hope to have Mitch on the show pretty soon. And I actually listened to the episode a few days ago where you guys did the handoff with Shane. and I thought that’s pretty, pretty cool, but it’s, it, it’s a good example of.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (08:44.523)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (09:01.451)
Why having other people is helpful. Cause the three of you were able to take it to the next level where I’m sure Shane, you know, it was just like, could sit there and think about what he wants to do with it, but you need people to, help. it sounds like that’s what the community does.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (09:08.941)
Yeah.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (09:13.838)
Yeah, all three of us, we’re all at a stage at life, I’m older than the other two as they keep reminding me, but we’re all at certain stage at life where our days of starting brand new solo businesses are well behind us, we’ve all done it, we’ve all built multiple businesses. These days have passed and from all of that pain that we learned doing that, we know from day one you need people.
Jason Elkins (09:22.477)
You
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (09:41.346)
Luckily enough, we’re experienced enough to know how to start with people in place straight away in Bilford. And that’s not to say we’re looking to build a business with dozens and dozens of employees, because we’ve done that as well and we’re not interested in doing that. But we do know you need a certain amount of people to deliver a certain standard of service to our community. Therefore, we have built a small team that hopefully delivers what the tour operators need.
Jason Elkins (10:05.761)
Well, it seems like, you I’m a member of the free group on, on Facebook. And I think when you described as kind of like the emergency room, like, yeah, that pretty much reflects what I see in there. It’s, but what’s cool is like somebody comes in bleeding and then everybody, don’t know, everybody, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but other members come and help put on the bandages and stop the bleeding and, provide some insights and some, little bit of a, Hey, you’re not alone. I’ve been there as well, which
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (10:16.868)
Thank
Jason Elkins (10:36.019)
is always pretty helpful. We’re going. What’s? Yeah, it’s the.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (10:37.953)
Nothing’s really new. Nothing’s really new. Everybody, the pain is just the same type of pain. Maybe a slight variation on it, but nothing in life is really that new. So if you’re in pain in your business, someone’s probably been there before. It’s…
Jason Elkins (10:54.969)
And it’s, interesting because you could take all of the, mean, I guess you could run every comment, every post, everything that you guys have done, run it through and put it into some sort of AI assistant, but it wouldn’t, it well, that’s cool. We’re going to, okay. We’re going to, know Chris has done some of that stuff with his marketing stuff. but, tell me this though. Do you think there’s some people that.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (11:08.673)
We have.
Jason Elkins (11:23.693)
Okay, I know I could go search through the resources and get an answer pretty quickly, but I’m still gonna go into the group and I’m gonna write a post asking the same question that’s been asked 15 times this month so far. And I know you see that, cause I see it, but what do think that is? you?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (11:42.136)
called human nature. In our paid community, the pro members have an AI tool which is every bit of content we’ve ever produced or said. Every podcast has all been AI’d and they’re sort of all of that information’s there, but humans are humans. they’re the, we are constructed to take the easiest way possible to try and get a solution to our pain when we’re in pain.
Jason Elkins (11:44.012)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (11:52.909)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (12:07.347)
And for 90 odd percent, they will go, I’ll go and ask the question in the group. Even if you provide the tools for them to be able to find that, they will still go and ask the question in the group. That’s humans.
Jason Elkins (12:17.175)
I wonder if the other side, I wonder if the other side of that, it’s, can see it on all social media. I mean, in a sense, I mean, how many times have you seen questions asked on Facebook that you just think, geez, you could have Googled that and you would have had an answer right away. But instead you put yourself out there on Facebook and waited for three days to get 15 different responses. Like good example is.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (12:30.123)
Yep.
Jason Elkins (12:43.009)
somebody sees a snake in their house, they take a picture of the snake and they post it online and say, what kind of snake is this? Is it dangerous? And so you’ve got 15 people tell you it’s 15 different types of snakes. And you realize you could just do a screen, a photo thing on Google. It’ll tell you everything you need to know about the snake. But you don’t, maybe you’re not always trying to find the answer. You’re just trying to find some validation and a little bit of connection, right?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (13:00.043)
Yeah.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (13:06.805)
Yeah, and just a bit of connection as well. We’re not in the business of changing human nature because that’s a project way too big for us. Yeah, exactly. So you’ve got to build, you’ve always got to, when you build in anything, and I see this in founders all the time because as well as Tupenur, work with a lot of helping the founders and their passion and belief is amazing. It really inspires you. Often that passion and belief is blind.
Jason Elkins (13:13.805)
Good luck.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (13:36.559)
Human reality, human psychology, human nature, right? You have to take account of human psychology and human nature when you’re building anything, because you’re not gonna change it. I don’t care who you are, you’re not gonna change it. The occasional business breakthrough that does change it, and when I say the occasional, when we’re talking people like Google, TikTok, Facebook, they physically change human behavior on an industrial scale globally well, but that’s a 0.0001%.
For the rest of everybody, you’re not going to change humans. Therefore, you have to work with humans and do the best job you can to serve them.
Jason Elkins (14:12.883)
Absolutely. What did you, we’re going to get into your personal story really, really soon. And this kind of touches on that, but I’m going to ask you, what did you do before you groups like entrepreneur? Like when you were starting up, how did you bounce ideas off people? How did you get support?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (14:30.574)
Yeah, I’m slightly different coming into, like I say, everybody drops into tour operating, everyone. I didn’t train to be a tour operator. However, I had years of training that prepared me to be a tour operator. So I had 16 years in the military. Lots of that military stuff, because we weren’t fighting too many wars at that point, was doing adventure. So I was climbing mountains, kayaking rivers, teaching people caving, teaching people abseiling, climbing.
the whole adventure technical skill bit. And I’m not saying for the odd weekend, I was away for years doing that stuff. So that is in many ways tour operating without the commercial parts of it. We would take people to Peru, take people to Nepal, take people to India, as well as doing stuff in Europe. So you’re doing all the logistics, you’re doing all the organisation and you’re actually doing the experiences and the product. You’re just not having to sell it to anybody.
Jason Elkins (15:07.319)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (15:28.878)
So there’s no commercial. So the actual operation side of running a tour business was not challenging to me at all because I 16 years of running reasonable scaled operations for the military. I’d also six years in big corporate business, seriously large businesses doing billions of dollars a year. And I was at a reasonably senior level in them running countries. numbers, which I didn’t know in the military, I very quickly learned.
the commercial life I knew about margins because we were high volume tiny margins. I’m talking about margins less than a percent on many trades when I was trading. So the combination of military, the combination of numbers from big corporate business when I did start operating as a tour operator my first company was a rafting tour operator in the adventure world. had a distinctive advantage that I knew how to run logistics and I knew how important numbers marketing
I was starting from a base that many operators are not starting from. Most of, literally in our group, we’ve got 21,000. There’s less than 1 % who have ever run a profit and loss account until they started a business. Because they weren’t in that position in companies to run a profit and loss account. And that is a big learning curve when you’re responsible for the profit and loss account.
Jason Elkins (16:47.949)
That sounds about right.
Jason Elkins (16:54.965)
It’s, and typically, you know, if we look at just personality types, the, person maybe that’s drawn into being an adventure tour operator or a culinary tours or his or any, anything in tourism really. Oftentimes that personality is kind of the outgoing. like the spontaneity. They like the, you know, they like.
I don’t know if I want to say the fun stuff, but what they think is fun is different than somebody that maybe goes into accounting or into finance.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (17:26.91)
It’s a passion isn’t it? it’s rare you get someone who comes into this for pure business reasons. There is a few, but they’re in a tiny minority. The vast, vast majority is because they have a deep, deep passion for what they’re doing and a deep passion for looking after customers, often to their detriment. People will be, what do mean often to their detriment? That’s what they love doing. Yeah, but if you don’t learn the business stuff, you can deliver. We have operators who have only got five star reviews.
Jason Elkins (17:45.163)
Yeah.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (17:55.17)
They have not got even one four-star review. They’ve only got five-star reviews, but they have a terrible business. So the customers love them, but their business is terrible. you have to learn the business side, because if you don’t learn the business side, you’re going to spend all your time in the accident emergency ward being depressed, even though you’ve got all the five-star reviews. So there’s got to be some reality in this world. Now, I was lucky. I came from a background of hard reality.
Jason Elkins (18:01.547)
Yeah. I can relate to that.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (18:24.821)
of the military and big corporates. So from day one, most tour operators start guiding. From day one, I employ guides. And that’s not to say I didn’t do guiding ever. I did guiding to make sure I’m checking customers awareness, customer feedback, stuff like that, checking guides. But guiding wasn’t my passion to build a business based on me guiding, because I know I can find guides who can guide better than me. Therefore, my time and my effort is better applied at business development and building a business than
Jason Elkins (18:40.418)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (18:54.871)
being guiding with the customers. Whereas that is not common in tour operating. It’s normally the other way around. People love spending time with their customers, love looking after them, which is all great. But there’s only 24 hours in a day. And after you’ve done eight or nine hours guiding, or on multi-day, the whole day, and then the next day, and the next day, when have you got time to do all that marketing, the accounting, the planning, the itinerary building, the technology stuff you’ve got to do?
Jason Elkins (19:12.301)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (19:23.691)
You just haven’t got time. So you’ve got to decide where your strengths and your weaknesses are and you’ve to backfill your weaknesses and play to your strengths.
Jason Elkins (19:31.563)
Yeah, that that reminds me you were mentioning five star reviews and all the all this stuff reminded me of I had a hot air balloon ride business for a while and I would work. You know, I love it a little harder unless you got it.
You know, if you can’t go hire another guy, there’s other pilots, but pilot, you know, pilot certification, stuff like that makes things complicated. That was the story in my head anyway. So I was doing all the flying, doing all the maintenance, the equipment, managing this, the kind of that stuff. But when I wasn’t doing that, I’d sit on the couch and I’d scroll through my trip advisor reviews, just reading them. isn’t this great? Isn’t my business great? And.
after a few years, it didn’t make any money. But I was like, I got a lot of great reviews. It feels good. So yeah.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (20:20.385)
Yep.
Yeah, that’s the life of many, tour operators and it can go on for years because they make enough cash flow just to survive but never become comfortable. They’re never banking money. They’re just making enough cash flow to survive so the business continues. From the outside it looks great because the media can look great, the customer reviews are great. it can look really, everything’s great but we know the actual fact.
Jason Elkins (20:48.461)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (20:49.613)
We’ve helped hundreds and hundreds of businesses. We’ve seen the accounts of these businesses. We’ve seen what they’re not making rather than what they could be making. So it is a tough, tough industry because of the market. The market is huge and growing rapidly. Travel is growing at 4 % per year compounded. Experiences, the sector we’re in, is in double figures compounded per year. So the market is insanely good.
Jason Elkins (21:09.485)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (21:19.521)
But if you apply thousands and thousands and thousands of businesses to that market who are run by people who have never run a business, you don’t actually have many breakout businesses that grow to be a really scaled, successful business. You do have some like all sectors, but we have a really small amount that break through to get past, nevermind the five million point, the one million revenue point.
is square 80 % of operators will be at under. And then you’ll have about 5 % of the one to five million and then you’ll have a small percentage that get past that five million point up to 30, 40, 50 million revenue when they help big teams and proper people in different departments.
Jason Elkins (22:06.039)
You know, one, one thing you said was everything you’ve said is interesting, but this particular thing I’m thinking about right now is I feel like if you take a lot of those tour operators that we were just discussing and you put them all together, just in a group, if they’re all kind of the same, they’re all looking at their businesses the same, you might get a lot of commiseration. might get a lot of like, you know,
look at you, you got great reviews, you might get a lot of that if you don’t have some sort of leadership in the group or some sort of mentorship or coaching or that type of thing. So it sounds like that’s really what you’ve done with Tourpreneur is it’s not just a Facebook community for people to come in and bounce ideas off of each other. You’re guiding them a bit.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (22:47.265)
and.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (22:54.667)
So it’s.
No, we’re coach, but it’s like everything. It’s like all communities. The ones who have benefited hugely, and we’ve had people build their businesses massively on the back of being an interpreter. It’s the ones who engage the most, get the most out of it. So the ones who commit to coaching, the ones who turn up for coaching, the ones who fly across the world to spend four days locked in a tiny Scottish cottage with me when I throw them in the lock in the morning to wake them up, they go away and build serious businesses. So it’s like everything in life. It’s we’re not magicians.
we can’t suddenly take a business and make it fantastic unless the owner of that business engages with us and is open enough to hear the truth. Because it’s quite hard for a business owner to sit in a room, something they may have been building for five, six, seven years, and have it absolutely ripped to bits. Not by us being annoying or arrogant or bad, it’s just numbers do not lie. Factual numbers do not lie. If you’re building a business that has no
resilience and structure in the economics of the business, that isn’t an opinion, it’s actual fact. Often the product is really, really good and we spend the least amount of time on the product of the experience. We do do some amount on that because the reason being is often the product really, really good. The customers love it.
Jason Elkins (24:17.354)
That’s because the operator is focusing 90 % on the product because that’s the fun part. It’s the part he sees, it’s the part he got. He or she decided to get into this business in the first place, right? I would think.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (24:30.635)
Yeah, and you’ll hear it time and time again, the product has to be excellent. You’re never going to survive. You don’t have great product. And all of that’s true. But I don’t look at it that way. The product is an entry ticket into the game. If your product isn’t a five-star product, well, you’re not even in the game. Your business is going to fail anyway. So I don’t see the product being the winning differentiator in this market based on the data that I see. The product being excellent is the ticket to the game. When the game starts,
It’s all the other bits that make the difference between a successful tour operator and a non-successful tour operator. Who has a marketing machine that’s working seven days a week? Who has a business development strategy that’s actually bringing in new channels? Who has the lifetime value of a customer nailed to the floor? They know the cost of acquisition of a customer. They know the margins off the top of their head. And who has a continuous new innovation cycle going with new products based on customer feedback that’s happening all the time?
All of these things that have to happen in the background are the things that make a difference between a really great operator and an operator that spends all the time in an accident and emergency.
Jason Elkins (25:39.341)
Right. You mentioned how like, you know, maybe they come into the program and you kind of tear their business apart. You know, they’ve been doing it for five years. You tear the business apart. That can be very intimidating emotionally for somebody, especially somebody that has was a tour guide. mean, we sometimes are pretty tuned in to people and emotions and we can get a little emotional. And I also suspect that maybe for the last five years, the only person that’s been
telling them that they’re doing anything wrong is their spouse, who can look at it and say, geez, you work an awful lot. We don’t have any money in the bank account. So maybe it’s their spouse or their parents are like, when are you going to grow up and get a real job, da da da da da. So they tend to maybe want to avoid having anybody tell them that they’re doing anything wrong. Do you experience that? Do you think that comes up?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (26:31.381)
Yeah, it comes up all the time and we’re not angels by any means and we don’t intentionally try to annoy people, but we’re black and white. I’m especially off the three of us, the most black and white. And there is no point pussyfooting around if you have a broken system, broken businesses. You have to lay it out there and you have to have a discussion with people and say, can be fixed. And nine times out of this can be fixed. Sometimes we have to say, well, you haven’t got a business here. is just not going to work.
But a lot of the time it can be fixed just by applying systems, by applying discipline, and by applying effort where the effort needs to go. And often that is as simple as the effort is being applied in the wrong places, or it’s being applied in a scatter gun approach rather than a focused approach. Whereas they’re doing a little bit of everything, but nothing really well. And it’s not one solution for every operator, because like I said, we’re 120 verticals plus.
Jason Elkins (27:15.372)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (27:25.281)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (27:30.894)
We’ve got multi-day operators versus day tour operators, but with some who are hybrid. So each of these are very different business models with very different cash flow sequences going through them. Very different customer profiles. And the customer profile of a multi-day operator taking three week trips to Nepal is very different customer profile from the guy running bagel tours in New York on a daily basis.
the volumes of operators of business. We have day tour operators dealing with 30, 40, 50,000 clients a year and we have multi-day operators dealing with 200 clients a year, 500 clients a year. So the volume of customer interaction is very different across the business models as well. all of this is, isn’t, we can’t write a book and say, or Chris has done from the marketing side, but we can say, here, do this and it works for every business. Cause you have to tailor all of this stuff that we’ve just known by.
Combined between the three of us, 80 years nearly of experience doing this. We’ve combined it all, but it doesn’t apply to every operator. You have to find the pain points each one is in and then use the bits that are suitable for that operator. And you’ve got to mind their ambitions. This is the big thing. Many operators don’t want to build a big business. Many operators just want a really small, family, successful business. They don’t want 50 staff. Many of them don’t even want 10 or 20 staff. They just want…
successful business that’s running well, pleasing the customers, making them good money. They have no ambition to build us. I would say that’s the majority. It’s the minority who want to actually push hard and go to 5, 10, 15, 25 million dollars. The vast majority, if they can hit a million, two million dollars, make a good net profit out of that, they’re happy.
Jason Elkins (29:14.313)
Right. Right. Do you think, I suspect you’ve got a couple of different types of operators. And when I say types, I’m not talking about day trip, multi-day, whatever, whatever. I’m just talking about kind of mindset. Like you’ve got probably some people that come in and like, they actually kind of know what they should be doing. It’s not necessarily a knowledge problem. Maybe, maybe they know where they should be putting their time and resources, but they just need a coach or somebody to kind of accountability is the word I’m.
And then you’ve got others that maybe are really disciplined, but just literally don’t know what they should be working on. They, they, they’re super disciplined. get up at six in the morning every morning and do the wrong thing.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (29:45.036)
Yeah, the
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (29:55.534)
Yeah, guess when you’ve got 21,000 founders, they’re all different. But what you said is we have people who absolutely know what they’re but they’re a bit scattergun in that approach. And sometimes they’re doing too much. And a lot of the time, you have to stop doing this so you can free up time to focus on the things that are really important. And yes, we’ve got a lot of new operators when I say new, anybody going less than two years.
Like they’re really in the discovery phase of how do you make this happen? So they’re all over the place normally under two years, unless they’ve come from a really disciplined business environment that’s aligned with what they’re doing. So we have that white, that mix goes all over the place. And you got to remember, it’s not just us coaching. We bring in our coaches as well, other tour operators. Somebody’s been gone for 10 years and made a decent business and employing bunch of people, making a good profit. They’re as good as us.
at helping the other operators. So we get that network effect of introducing this operator to that operator. And on the coaching calls, the group ones, we have other operators helping the other operators. So it’s not just us helping because my experience of the interstices of a historical tour in Madrid is zero. I know about the numbers, I know about the marketing, I know about the structure, know about logistics of it, but the actual content of that tour.
Jason Elkins (30:51.597)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (31:20.557)
and who the customers are going in that to it. It’s not my sector, so I don’t really know about it. But there’ll be another operator who’s deep, deep into that, probably for a decade or more, and knows lots about it that can help the other operators coming through.
Jason Elkins (31:34.379)
One of the things, you know, I’ve been around the coaching world for a bit. And sometimes just with coaching, it’s like, you know, maybe the difference between coaching and consulting where consulting part of it might be like, okay, this is what you should be doing. And then the coaching part it is like, okay, you know what you should be doing. So what are you going to do this week? Why, you know, help them figure out why they’re going to do it and what are you going to do? And then next week they show up and you say, okay, what did you commit to last week? What did you actually do?
And then figure out what’s in the, what’s in the way. Do you guys do one-on-one coaching for some levels of your program?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (32:09.387)
We get asked at one-on-one coaching a lot, and we’re very selective about whether we do it or not. that’s just, that’s, it’s one, it’s tough, but the more thing is it’s time. It’s like, like I said, it’s 24 hours in a day. We’re trying to run, we are hoping to scale this up to 100,000 tour operators around the world. One-to-one coaching would stop us doing that. So I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, because it does happen.
Jason Elkins (32:15.775)
Yeah, it’s tough.
Jason Elkins (32:20.471)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (32:31.213)
I get it.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (32:35.405)
if we have someone who we can identify who is really, really serious. Weirdly, it happens on the other side of the market, which is all the service companies and the technology companies who service tour operators. I do some coaching on that side. So it does happen, but the minute you commit to that as a model, we’re not building the world’s biggest networking community of tour operators.
Jason Elkins (32:56.205)
Yeah.
But I suspect I’m just trying to think like if I was a tour operator and I was, you know, going to the group coaching and I was showing up and I was watching the videos and I was just absorbing that stuff. But if I then had some challenges implementing it because of my own mindset or my own issues, I could go hire an accountability coach. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a tourism coach, just somebody that’s like,
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (33:19.5)
Yeah, yeah.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (33:24.461)
Yeah, just accountability. Yeah, some people need it. Some people need it, some people don’t. I would be the coach’s worst client in the world and it’s just not something that would even cross my mind. It’s like, if you want to do something, get on and do it. But there is that need when we see it more and more. But I come back to this human thing.
Jason Elkins (33:28.341)
Okay, Jason, you? Yeah, just the accountability and combine.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (33:53.918)
Like we have 21,000 owners of businesses. To be an owner of a business, you’re a set type of person that is quite weird across the range. You’ve made that leap. You’ve been brave enough to step in the door and jump out the door into that weird world of running a business. So these are brave people, but they are all very, very different when it comes down to how you can interact with them, how you can coach, how you can take them forward. There is a huge…
Jason Elkins (34:20.427)
Yeah, I can imagine.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (34:22.743)
huge underestimation from these founders on the whole on the volume and scale of marketing that they have to do and awareness that they have to do. There’s an assumption that if their product is great, their experience is great, the market will learn about it and the customers will come to the door. Whereas we all know that’s not the case. The product gets you in the game. you, whatever they’re thinking they’re going to have to do from a marketing point of view.
they normally have to multiply that by times 10, some cases by times 100 to actually get a footprint, especially if you’re starting from scratch. It’s different if you’ve acquired a business, you’re taking it to another level. If you’re starting from scratch with no market footprint at all, it’s unusual for me to find a founder who has any awareness of the volume of content they’re going to have to produce to get people to come to the door. Because this is a marketing led industry, it’s not a sales led industry.
Jason Elkins (34:52.695)
Mm-hmm.
Wow.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (35:22.093)
Sales is one of the huge opportunities in this industry because it can be done. But at the moment, it’s a 95, 96, 97 % marketing-led industry.
Jason Elkins (35:33.005)
And that’s, I suspect that’s tough. lot of founders, um, and there are a wide range of types of people, but a lot of the founders are coming into this, you know, maybe they scraped together. Like I remember when I started my balloon ride business, I scraped together enough money to buy a balloon. didn’t have any money left for marketing, you know? And so I sat on the couch and built the website myself and did everything myself. And, but, um, I suspect that’s a big obstacle. When you say like,
When you say you need to do 10 times more marketing than you’re doing, I’m sure a lot of these people that look on their face just goes white and they’re like, well, how the hell am I going to do that?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (36:11.564)
Yep, and it is a challenge. But as we know, there’s tons of technology to do today that if you learn it, it makes all of that easier. But on again, it’s not just 10 times more marketing. It’s the right marketing. Anybody can be a busy fool. You can be a busy fool all day long. You no effect. You’ve got to know inside out who your customer is or if you’re starting out your target customer. Who is that customer? What’s the profile of that customer? And where is that customer in a digital ecosystem or in an offline?
Jason Elkins (36:25.153)
Well, yeah.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (36:41.366)
ecosystem because believe me the tour operators who are the most successful have great offline systems as well as online systems. We see this time and time again with the younger tour operators who have been going less than five years they think it’s all about online and online is huge as we know but the older ones the ones have been around we have members who been operating business for 30 years when you look at where their customers are coming from they’re tapped into offline communities left right and centre.
A FITCH!
Jason Elkins (37:11.575)
So are we talking, are we talking affinity groups, postcards and hotels, or I guess the flyer, the flyer rack. What do you mean when you say offline?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (37:21.902)
They will have connections if they’re inbound, people come into their destination, they’ll have connections with every type of accommodation, it the Airbnb type, be it the hotels, be it the lodges, they’ll have connections with all the transport companies, they’ll have connections with all the restaurants, they’ll have connections with other companies that are not direct competitors to them, but in the same sort of sector, so you can swap stuff there.
They will be going out driving business by pitching and they may have an education channel where they’re going out and doing presentations to schools and driving big groups of school kids. Maybe going to universities doing education. I used to go to universities, I used to go to schools, used to go to all the charity groups. Charity group could deliver 200 to 500 customers in a day. One charity group. They’re not finding me on a marketing thing. I have to go and pitch to sell them. The military, we used to deal with the Navy, the Marines, the Army and the Air Force. There are four channels within.
one channel, corporate
different ways that you have to up your marketing and business development time. And a lot of this is not money. A lot of this is time, human time by understanding who your customer is, understand these channels and opening up these channels. The minute you’ve opened them, you then create a lot of media about that channel. I see so much media from a tour operator that’s about their experience in general because they’re used to dealing with tourists. Tourists are some of the worst customers in the world.
They turn up, they do your experience, they give you a five star review, thank you. They go off and you never see them again because they’re away back to their next. You’re on a cycle of complete new business all the time. Anybody who’s been to business school, they run a million miles from any business that has to get new customers time and time and time again. So there’s all of these other channels where you can create customer channels who have a long value, who deal with you on a regular basis. But it doesn’t happen by doing
Jason Elkins (39:19.573)
You never see them.
Jason Elkins (39:32.866)
Right.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (39:42.424)
just marketing out there, you have to actually do business development as well.
Jason Elkins (39:47.021)
I wonder, just, I’m going to this, this idea that it’s been rolling around. do a podcast. this side, these types of ideas roll around in my head a lot, but if I was a doing, I don’t know, let’s say food tours and Berlin. Um, and I wanted to look for people like Airbnb owners or other businesses that could feed, feed me their clients. I might. So for example, I might start a Berlin podcast and I might reach out to.
Airbnb owners, I might reach out to restaurants. might reach out to hotels and invite them to come on to, my show. And we’re going to discuss what’s important to them. And then they share, you know, I I’m giving them something valuable. I’m giving them something, but most importantly, I’m creating a connection and a relationship. Like they know I do food tours in Berlin. so I interviewed them for my show. then the next time somebody somebody’s at their place saying, Hey, we’d love to go on a tour.
Who do you know? Just things like that, right? And it’s not necessarily money.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (40:49.698)
Yes, there’s a hundred ways of doing this and most of it is time rather than money. And why a lot of tour operators don’t do it is because they don’t like rejection. Because they have a five-star tour that all their customers have been telling them brilliant and they love them. And then when you start doing business development, you get a lot of people telling you they’re not interested in you whatsoever. They have no interest in you. So a lot of operators don’t like that rejection. But for every 10 rejections, you’re going to get somebody who works with you. So it’s just you’ve got to have
to go through all the rejections and decide everybody has a different system like for, it’s a very simple one for Airbnb owners. There’s a tool called AirDNA.co I think, which tells you the location, it’s a subscription tool, but it tells you the location of every single Airbnb in the district that you want. So when I was an operator before I sold up, I knew within the distance traveling I judged based on experience people are willing to travel to do my experience.
Jason Elkins (41:48.449)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (41:48.494)
I had 1599 Airbnbs around that distance. So then I could see who were the busy ones, who were the big ones. We were group focused, so I could see the ones that would take 14, 15, 20 people. So you could rank them on the likelihood of you getting business out of them. And then what do you do? You reach out to them, sometimes digitally, because some of them be run by property managers, but my case being rural, most of them were run by owners. Now, if they’re run by owners, that’s a
Jason Elkins (41:55.158)
Okay.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (42:18.425)
big signal, a big tick, you can do business there. So it’s a case of chatting on doors, getting in contact with them, giving the information, doing deals. Some of them is a financial deal, some of them is not a financial deal. But there’s a different way to reach different verticals. And I would say nine times out of 10, it’s not a money issue, it’s a time issue, and an application issue, and a discipline issue to do it right.
Jason Elkins (42:42.669)
Or like you said, just the, I mean, it’s a sales job. mean, you, if I’ve done sales, I’ve, I, you know, I did real estate sales. used to knock on doors and yeah, it’s, it can be a lot of rejection where if you’ve got a tour operation business and you think, okay, is all I gotta do is build a cool website and do some digital marketing. And then I’m only going to deal with the people that are interested in me. Like you said, that’s kind of it. You know, people are incoming.
As opposed to going out knocking on doors, trying to get in front of people and like that’s, that’s gotta be a huge part of it.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (43:18.061)
It’s a common, to me I’ve always looked at it a combination of both. Again, it depends on where you look at. Say you’re in Berlin and you’re running a food tour. That is a heavy, heavy touristy city. So a big chunk of your target market is going to be tourists because it’s just never ending. It’s a 12 month a year season in Berlin now. November’s slightly slow, but apart from that, it’s a 12 month a year season. So you do have that throughput of endless tourists coming through Berlin. But how many corporate companies are based in Berlin?
Jason Elkins (43:33.835)
Hmm?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (43:47.664)
Thousands of scaled corporate companies are small corporate companies. You’ve got a whole other vertical there if you want to develop it. How many education establishments? You’ve got a whole other vertical there. Every single operator has multiple opportunities. You can’t do them all. You have to decide where your skill base is and what ones you want to go after. What I’m saying here is unless you’re in a brilliant location for tourists where you have a throughput of millions per year that you’re not driving,
Jason Elkins (43:53.719)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (44:15.439)
They’re driving because of the reputation of the destination. If you’ve got that, you can survive just in Tours. If you’re in a secondary city or third level city or rural, you’re not surviving on Tours. It’s just not happening. And if you do get enough, you’re getting enough for two months of the year or three months a year. So you have to design your business design in a different way that can create different customer channels to feed your business on a 12-month rotationally business.
Jason Elkins (44:18.443)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (44:44.609)
And maybe even include that in your product mix. I’m thinking, you know, what somebody as a tourist wants in Berlin might be different than what somebody that lives in Berlin, right?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (44:52.623)
100 % Too many operators get hooked on their product because of the five-star reviews. This is what everybody wants. It’s not what everybody wants. If you have different channels, you have to change your product to suit the channels. Sometimes you don’t need to change it dramatically. It can just be a tweak of 10 % of the product, 20 % of the product to suit the actual type of the client. And a lot of these clients I’m talking about, these channels, these are groups. A corporate brings a group. can be a small group, it be five, it could be 500.
And so you’ve got to change your product to suit the type of group. If it’s a school, education, university, they will have different ideas what they want out of the experience. You’ve got to change the product to suit the group. The reason they do that is obviously because once you impress these groups and you get their five-star reviews, that’s way more important than a five-star review from two tourists because these ones might go back to their corporate and that corporate might be 10,000 people, might be 100,000 people.
Jason Elkins (45:43.628)
Yeah.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (45:49.924)
They have an internal communication system, every one of them. Your job is to make sure you’re on that social internal communication system. Because if one sales manager sees another sales manager having a great time with these team outdoing eggs, they’re going to want to do it as well. One client can end up actually sending thousands and thousands of customers your way.
Jason Elkins (46:12.877)
And I’m imagining that maybe even the reviews themselves might carry a different weight for different types. So if I write a review and say, I’ve, you know, I run a sales, me and my sales team, I live here in Berlin. I’ve lived here for 30 years. My sales team and I went out and we did this tour. Like that’s going to resonate differently than maybe a tourist who’s like, we were in Berlin for a day and we went on this tour and it was great.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (46:39.119)
If I was pitching a bank to come and work with us, part of the pitch would be a video of their competition doing what I do. It would be a video suitable to what we were discussing and it would have a brand of their competition on it. This is your competition having a great time doing what we are doing. And I’m sure it annoyed some people, but that’s life. You’re never going to please everybody.
Jason Elkins (46:48.117)
Yes. Yeah.
Jason Elkins (47:01.247)
you
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (47:06.285)
I know it converted a huge amount of the other banks because I ended up with every single bank in the UK coming to our business. it was a trick. Once you find something that works, you double down on it. You double down on what works. It will stop working at some point. Everything in marketing, everything business development stops working at some point. When it works, double down.
Jason Elkins (47:21.378)
and
Jason Elkins (47:27.477)
down and I’ve for a while I’ve been thinking of video testimonials, know, instead of reviews, especially with AI that can write reviews and write responses and all that stuff. Some sort of just, just little clips, little, you know, you’re interviewing the bank president or something for a bank and you’ve got that as a video testimonial that’s part of your presentation. which, and I guess I’m saying that cause it can be easier to create that sometimes than a video of
things happening out on the street. But I don’t know. There’s so many ideas. Just find it. Find the right one.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (47:58.544)
And anything with video now, it’s, I mean, we started putting videos out in 2003, 2004. You can imagine what it was like then. People were big chunky cameras and it was a mission to get them, then all the editing and all the rest of it. But it drove so much business then and compared with today’s world where everybody under 40 just looks at videos and doesn’t read anything. And if you’re not producing video content in today’s world, you have an issue. You have a marketing issue.
Jason Elkins (48:07.117)
You
Jason Elkins (48:28.077)
I agree. And that’s why I’m, you know, this is a podcast, but we’re shifting into doing more and more videos and, it’s a, it’s important. Pete, we’re going to, we’re going to, I said, we’re going to discuss your story. Everything we’ve been discussing has been so fascinating. Um, I think we need to do the, the three minutes. Like you started in Scotland, you’re back in Scotland. Give us some kind of idea how you got into all this. If we can do that in a few minutes.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (48:56.495)
Yeah, my driver’s always been adventure. So the military was the easiest place to go for adventure. I joined the military at 16 year old, left Scotland, came back in my mid 30s, got my fill of adventure all around the world, God knows how many countries and then I think I’ve been in 147 countries now. So the military filled my need for adventure, but when I came out, went into business, that didn’t fill my need for adventure. That filled my brain with how to run a business, but it didn’t satisfy my need to be in mountains or lochs or…
Jason Elkins (49:02.167)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (49:25.603)
rivers or caves or whatever it was. So came out of big corporate business back into adventure, bought a bust rafting company, built that up, started several more, bought some more, started a multi-day company, opened a business in Spain, opened a business in Morocco. Got to the stage where I decided the clients had changed, the staff had changed, and my way of doing things was probably not suited. So got out of the game altogether without a plan.
somehow ended up in the tourpreneur carry on, helping other operators. That was never a plan, that was just serendipity how life rolls out. So semi-retired, I say I’m semi-retired now, I seem to be working all the time but I’m semi-retired running around the world helping tour operators.
Jason Elkins (50:13.195)
You’ve been very, very active and I appreciate what you do for the tour operators and just people that work in the space. Cause it’s not just tour operators. mean, I I can go in the group and, and read comments and see things that help me. You know, I’m not actively running a tour operation, but of course my clients are tour operators. So that helps. But so many of these things can be applied to so many different,
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (50:27.758)
Yeah, we-
Jason Elkins (50:37.751)
businesses especially the similarities, small business, one person running the show. Yeah, so thank you.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (50:45.175)
On the other side of the market, we also have large business. We have 70-odd corporate partners. We work for Google for six months helping them. We’ve just finished a year’s partnership with Get Your Guide. So on the other side of this market, we’re working with and helping with a select amount of platforms and tech companies who have tour operators as their customers but don’t really understand them, because as we’ve discussed, tour operators are a certain breed. So as well as working with tour operators every day,
We’re also working with the market every day who needs tour operators to survive in their own business.
Jason Elkins (51:19.307)
probably interesting because I mean, I think both you and I see cases or examples. And when someone shows up in the emergency room and their issue is all about working with OTAs, like, you know, get your guide or, or whatever, there can be all kinds of discussion around that, but then you’re also working with get your guide. And I see the value because that’s how you can help iron these things out, I guess. But, does that prove, does that provide some, does that present some conflicts or some.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (51:30.276)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (51:48.065)
challenges in your private group.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (51:49.805)
I’m sure it does, well does, we know it does in some tour operators, but bluntly we don’t care. It’s like, it’s either the biggest or the second biggest sales channel in the sector. So would be remiss of us, it wouldn’t be, it would be a failure in our duty if we didn’t work with a company who gave us the opportunity work with them, who’s willing to let us understand how their listings work, how their data works, how the sales work.
Jason Elkins (51:55.678)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (52:02.689)
Huh?
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (52:17.539)
So we can tell operators step one, two, three, four, five, six, this is how you get more sales from that platform if you choose to work with them. We’re never telling them if they choose to work with this platform or that platform, that is an owner’s decision. But if they choose to say yes, we want to be in a position where we say, well, this is how you’re going to get the most out of it. Because so many people listen to these platforms and they’ve just not optimized it. once we have a huge range of operators that shouldn’t go near these platforms.
Jason Elkins (52:17.569)
Mm-hmm.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (52:46.863)
because they’re delivering an experience in a tour that is not suitable for them. If they can’t give cancellation, if they can’t give 24-hour notice, there’s lots of experiences that just can’t do that. So don’t work with the platforms, black and white. If you’ve designed something that doesn’t work with them, don’t work with them, because all you’re going to do is complain.
Jason Elkins (52:51.394)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (52:56.706)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (53:02.829)
But yeah, cause that’s what happens is they sign up and they do what they think they need to do. And then it doesn’t go for them. It doesn’t go well. And then they spend three years saying, I think I’m going to quit working with so-and-so because they keep screwing me over, but they keep doing the same thing for three years.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (53:21.697)
It doesn’t, not all platforms are suitable for all tour operators or vice versa. You have to have a design that works for a platform. And we know because we’ve got the data and we’ve got access to all the operators, the companies who do, do very, very well. Because they’ve also got the pricing correct. So the level of commission is irrelevant if you can sell at the price that can cope with the commission. But if you haven’t got your pricing correct,
Jason Elkins (53:39.893)
Well, yeah.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (53:47.162)
Tour operators can actually kill you. OTAs can actually kill your business if you’ve not got, if you get a lot of sales and you haven’t got your pricing right, you’re going to go out of business. So it’s our duty to understand how these global scale.
Jason Elkins (53:55.703)
Yeah.
But that’s not the OTA’s fault. You’re setting the prices.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (54:01.935)
No, exactly. Exactly. So we just take the view we have to understand as much as we can working with these giants of the industry on how they work so we can help the tour operators work with them in the best way possible if they can. If they can’t work with them or we see a model, we’re quite blunt. We’ll say, don’t go near an OTA because your model is not going to work for the OTA and you’re just going to get frustrated and the OTA is not going to be happy either.
Jason Elkins (54:31.831)
Yep. Yep. Good, good advice. Pete, just, yeah. Which is tough for people that are emotional, which a lot of tour operators are emotional.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (54:32.431)
Business is black and white. It’s fairly black and white on some things. It’s just logic.
Yeah, yeah. As your listeners can probably work out, I don’t do the emotions in business. It’s black and white.
Jason Elkins (54:49.605)
We’ve had, uh, I’ve had 130 some conversations now on the show with a wide range. Most of the people I’ve interviewed are probably in the Tourpreneur group or, or should be. Um, and it’s been a wide range of, uh, how people approach things, all, all wonderful people. I’ve enjoyed it. Pete, um, we discussed a lot and, uh, is there anything I forgot to ask anything else you want to make sure that our listeners know about either you Tourpreneur life in general?
before we wrap up.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (55:19.663)
about me. I’ve had my time on this big blue planet and it’s been fantastic so nothing about me. Any listeners who are interested in getting into the travel industry and it all looks wonderful from the outside coming in and traveling the world and stuff. I think it’s the best industry in the world, spent most of my life in it. It’s a brilliant industry to be in, it’s a challenging industry to be in but we need more people coming into the travel industry.
Jason Elkins (55:21.835)
I knew you were going to say that.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (55:48.943)
who have different ideas, who have got different ideas on how to set up new products, new experiences. so younger people, older people, it doesn’t matter where you are in your stage in life, I’m interested in more and more people looking at travel, looking at the opportunities in travel. It’s the biggest industry in the world. We have 11 % of all employees in the world working travel. No one is as big as that. And we have, depending on which data, between 10 and 12 % global GDP. So it’s the largest industry in the world.
but it’s the most fragmented in the world with the most small businesses. So anyone with a bit get up and go can find a niche in travel and have a go. It’s going to be tough, but it’s going to be fun. And what’s life here for? To have a bit of a challenge and a bit of fun. Come and join us.
Jason Elkins (56:34.461)
Absolutely. Very, very well said. Pete, thank you so much. I appreciate you taking time out of your day to share with me and our listeners and look forward to continuing to collaborate on some projects with you in the future. Thank you so much. All right. Thanks, Pete. Bye bye.
Pete Syme Tourpreneur (56:46.447)
Thanks very much for the invite.
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