Guest Bio
Tony Carne is the co-founder of Videreo, a platform that connects brands with the creator economy in the travel industry. With travel flowing through his veins, Tony’s journey began as a tour guide in Australia before moving on to build the global Urban Adventures business at Intrepid Travel. Today, Tony continues his work in service of local businesses and communities through Videreo, helping to foster authentic travel experiences and promoting cultural exchange.
Show Summary
In this episode of the Big World Made Small Adventure Travel Podcast, Jason Elkins speaks with Tony Carne, co-founder of Videreo, about the evolving role of AI in travel, the creator economy, and the significance of grassroots tourism. Tony shares his journey from being a tour guide to creating a platform that connects brands with creators in the travel space. They explore the intersection of AI and travel, the impact of technology on marketing strategies, and the importance of authenticity in travel experiences. Tony emphasizes the need for travel to be an authentic experience, promoting cultural understanding and deeper connections between travelers and local communities.
Key Takeaways
- ✓ Videreo connects brands to the creator economy – The platform helps link influencers and brands to create authentic travel experiences.
- ✓ AI’s role in revolutionizing travel – AI is transforming the travel industry by automating processes and enhancing marketing strategies.
- ✓ Grassroots tourism drives local economies – Supporting local businesses is key to sustainable tourism and cultural exchange.
- ✓ Authenticity in travel experiences – Focusing on local connections and authenticity is essential for meaningful travel.
- ✓ Pursuing passion leads to fulfillment – Following your passion in life and career leads to more fulfilling experiences.
- ✓ The creator economy offers new opportunities – The rise of influencers and creators provides new marketing opportunities for brands in the travel industry.
- ✓ AI helps measure influencer marketing ROI – AI tools allow brands to better assess the effectiveness of influencer partnerships.
- ✓ Travel fosters cultural understanding – Traveling can shift perspectives and deepen understanding between cultures.
- ✓ Tony’s journey started as a tour guide – His career in travel began in Australia as a tour guide.
- ✓ Supporting local operators – It’s essential to support local tourism operators and the experiences they offer.
What You’ll Find on Videreo
- ✓ A platform connecting travel brands with influencers and creators
- ✓ AI tools to enhance marketing strategies and measure influencer marketing ROI
- ✓ A focus on promoting authentic travel experiences
- ✓ Support for local tourism operators and experiences
- ✓ A commitment to cultural exchange and grassroots tourism
👉 Visit Videreo Official Website to learn more about Tony Carne’s mission to connect brands with the creator economy and support authentic travel experiences.
Learn more about Videreo and connect with Tony at:
https://videreo.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 (00:01.234)
Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Big World Made Small podcast for the adventure traveler. We’ve got someone from, I’m going to say all the way around the world, but at least from my perspective, I’m here in South America. We’ve got Tony Carne joining us here. He’s in Australia right now, right, Tony?
Tony Carne (00:19.298)
That’s it. Great to be on the show and appreciate the invite. Thanks, Jason.
Jason Elkins (00:23.132)
Yeah, happy to have you here. for those, there may be a few people listening that don’t know your name. I think that there’s a lot of people listening that do, and they will recognize you as you’re the co-founder of Videreo. Jeez, we discussed this before. Videreo? Videreo. Let’s get this out of the bat. Let’s get this taken care of right now. Videreo.
Tony Carne (00:38.83)
I go for Videreo, but… I go for Videreo, but people can go for whatever they like.
Jason Elkins (00:46.152)
But there you go. We kind of joked about it before I pushed the record button. I wrote it down, I had it right, up, up, good to go, and that’s what happens.
Tony Carne (00:52.526)
I did say it’s probably the worst branding out of the box that we’ve ever seen, but no, as long as it gives someone something to talk about, then we’re all good for it.
Jason Elkins (01:02.888)
That’s true, and we’re going to come back in just a second, and you’re going to tell us a little bit more about that. But I also wanted to mention that you are a fellow podcaster as well, kind of in this space, working with tour operators, kind of the adventure tourism space. So you’ve got the Everything AI in Travel newsletter and podcast as well. Is that right?
Tony Carne (01:22.176)
That’s it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So started that about 18, 20 months ago with the birth of Chachi PT and you know,
was blown away by its capabilities and how it might have been able to help me in my past life, working in adventure travel and wanted to share what I was learning from all the stuff that was coming out and there wasn’t really a newsletter out there. So I thought, well, if no one else is going to do it, I’ll do it. I was bookmarking 20 things a day. So why not? And put that out about 20 months ago. And it’s been extremely successful. And then jumped onto podcasting because I wanted to talk to people who were actually building things with AI
or were buying things and the process that they were going through. And so it’s been a fantastic journey for me to upskill my own knowledge on what’s happening and hopefully bring everyone else along on that journey as well.
Jason Elkins (02:11.548)
Well, a couple of things there. One is I think that is one of the beautiful things about podcasting is it kind of gives you an excuse to have a conversation with someone else. No distractions. Hopefully we’ve turned off our, you know, we’ve put our phone on, do not disturb. And it’s just, you know, 45 minutes to an hour of just a real conversation, which is kind of hard to get in this, this modern world of distractions. You can’t even go to a coffee shop and sit down and have a real conversation anymore. So, so I get that.
And I feel like when it comes to AI, there’s so much you could probably do three or four episodes a day and never run out of content, never run out of things because it’s changing as fast as you can have conversations, right?
Tony Carne (02:53.78)
Absolutely. And there’s some like just super smart people out there that are doing incredible things. And what I love about AI is that everybody can look at it through their own lens, their own experience, their own bottlenecks. And people come up with different ways of using it. And it’s just so omnipresent in the way that it can change the way that you’ve done things before and completely upend them.
And so I’m out looking for those people that are really doing interesting new things and changing the face of travel in many ways. it’s just, for me, it’s fascinating. I love hearing their perspectives. And every little one that I hear is another learning experience for myself. So that’s also good.
Jason Elkins (03:34.832)
Yeah, there’s just so much stuff. know when I first started messing around with it, my mind was blown. I was visiting family and I was talking to my mom. I’m like, my mom, this is so cool. Look at this. She had no interest. And actually, she’s one of those people that came from the other side as this is horrible. This is the end of the world. Everybody’s going to be unemployed in five years. And what are we going to do with ourselves?
and which is probably, you know, worth discussing. But also I remember just playing around with it. I was just thinking, okay, can I do this? Can I do that? Can I do this? And I remember I was dating someone at the time and I went to chat. help me write a nice text. And it was beautiful. It was very poetic. And I sent it to her and I didn’t, there was no preface like, hey, what do you think of this? I just sent it.
She came back, my gosh, that was so amazing, so beautiful. Jason, you have such a way with words. And then I thought, ooh, this is dangerous. Do it again, do it again. And now I see on my, the social media feeds and all these different agents that you can attach, that you can use to write more flirty texts and how you know or.
Tony Carne (04:39.595)
Do it again, Jason. Do it again. Who are you texting all the time before you send me these messages?
Jason Elkins (04:57.732)
AI girlfriends or boyfriends or whatever. it really is quite amazing. And I touched on, I mentioned my mom. She’s like, no, don’t have anything to do with this. This is the worst thing to ever happen. And I’m sure you’ve run into that. I’m sure you’ve had conversations around that as well. So I’m curious if someone’s listening to this and thinks, is afraid of what’s happening. Because I think there are a lot.
Maybe it’s too big of a subject to ask you this, but I’m just curious, what would you want to say to them?
Tony Carne (05:28.938)
Yeah, part of my life is consulting. And so I go into businesses and try and help them work out what they might be able to do with AI and inside a typical company, you’ll have the full range of people from like, wow, this is amazing. It’s going to change everything. Let’s do it right now through to a big middle of meh. I asked that something that I know a lot about and it wasn’t that good. So it’s probably not that good to this group that are like
This is horrible. Like I see my job going away. Like why would we be touching this? And by the time that we get through those consultations, my aim is to have the mindset of at least those people down the bottom end to change from, this is not taking away your job. This is taking away the worst parts of your job. And we’ve all got manual kind of horrible copy paste.
Jason Elkins (06:20.424)
you
Tony Carne (06:26.07)
hours of bringing different parts of data into spreadsheets and reformatting it in different ways to build reports or whatever that is just low value work. It’s just kind of sit there, you spend a few hours on it, you’re gonna send it off to someone, they’re gonna glance at it for 30 seconds and where was the value exchange and all that? And so that’s the kind of stuff I like to focus in on. And my first question to anyone as I walk around a company is like, what’s at the bottom of your inbox? Like, what are you?
kicking the can down the road on here. Like why, what’s in there that you’re not doing because you’re like, I can’t be bothered doing that task. It’s long and boring and horrible. And I know somebody wants this information at some point, but I just can’t get to it. And they’re the things that we try and solve for people off the bat. And that brings people around. People can then see, actually, it actually makes my work life better and gives me more time to actually do high value work. Cause everyone in a company,
has an opinion, has an opportunity to put their direction on where the company should go. But often they’re just so bogged down in the day to day that they don’t get that opportunity. And that’s where I think it opens up opportunity for all humans to actually move away from the drudgery and into your mind to really contribute well to where a company might go. And I find that that’s exciting. And hopefully most of the people that we’ve worked with along those lines have also kind of had that realization.
or move kind of somewhere further to the excitement curve of around what’s happening today.
Jason Elkins (08:00.966)
That’s a great response. I couldn’t help but think back to when I was running a travel business for a larger company and my boss wanted the weekly reports, which involve pivot tables on spreadsheets and this and that. And it was kind of an end of week thing. So Friday afternoon turned into Friday evening.
And I would be sitting there just trying to pull numbers from the spreadsheet and put them into the email and do all this stuff. And I would send it six or seven o’clock on a Friday evening. And then I was always just curious. I was like, we had a great week. Sales were great. And so I’d be checking my email all weekend, hoping somebody would respond and say, hey, Jason, great job. Looks great. And I hate to say it. Maybe my former boss is listening, but.
Tony Carne (08:48.299)
You
Jason Elkins (08:54.86)
usually was just listening to the crickets chirp and if you could just automate that it just figured you know spend a day or so just figuring out okay how do we make all this work so at least i’m not sitting there on friday night putting together a report that somebody’s they’re made out you know i shouldn’t assume that they weren’t looking at it but you know it left me feeling every week i was spending all this
Tony Carne (09:15.254)
Everyone has a quick glance. They all have a quick glance, I think, but like whether you get a response from it or not, or you get the response, you want that response right back immediately because you’ve put that effort in, you want the validation, but you might get a Tuesday afternoon, hey, thanks for this, you know, or whatever.
Jason Elkins (09:29.562)
And on his end, he could be using AI to respond at Friday at 9 o’clock. I wouldn’t know the difference. I’d feel good as an employee. I’d feel like, hey, this is great. They’re receiving it. So there’s all different angles to use. I do want to touch on, we’re going to get into your history, because I think that that’s what really our listeners just want to get to know you as a person.
Tony Carne (09:33.582)
You
Tony Carne (09:39.66)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason Elkins (09:59.1)
But before we do this, I’m going to say the name of your company wrong again. Vitareo? No, Vitareo. Vitareo. How are you saying it?
Tony Carne (10:07.362)
I’ll go for Vedario. Vedario.
Jason Elkins (10:10.578)
But Ariel, see, I would never come to that. I look at it. just cannot come. OK. So give us the third.
Tony Carne (10:15.994)
My co-founder Adrian, who came up with the name, he said, it’s from the Latin. It’s from the Latin. Vidia. To see. To see. But anyway, we’ve ended up. This is where we’ve ended up.
Jason Elkins (10:22.148)
yeah.
OK. So is OK. I won’t touch on that. And give us the 30 seconds 60 seconds elevator pitch so our listeners that are listening kind of have an idea of what that is before we start going into your story.
Tony Carne (10:41.87)
Yeah, for sure. So we’re building a new type of online travel agent or OTA and we’re at our core connecting brands to the creator economy. So this is kind of a social commerce OTA. On one side, we have brands that are looking to access new growth channels. We’re seeing kind of the…
moving back to AI, know, the possibility of SEO going away, performance marketing getting more expensive. And so we know from our conversations with brands, they’re always looking for new, cheaper growth channels. And on the other side, we have creators who already have the audience, you know, the average size of audience of our creator group is 30,000. So they’ve got this, you know, megaphone going out to a group of people that are following them specifically for their
travel knowledge and that seems like a great pathway to get the message of your brand out. But it doesn’t work properly in travel. For whatever reason, it’s still very bespoke in the way that people go about it. Very ad hoc in the way that people build their relationships with creators. Everyone starts just flicking through Instagram and sending out DMs and what have you. And we wanna build a system like some connectivity tissue.
that allows any brand to connect with any creator at any time. essentially that’s what our business does. we, are out creating great content and what our technology does is programmatically connect that content to travel products that match what’s inside that video. And so we created a really interesting system where a creator can build a store for themselves based off their 200 or 1000 videos that they’ve already created in social media.
Jason Elkins (12:17.544)
Tony Carne (12:27.744)
in under five minutes by just connecting up their Instagram account or the TikTok account and the magic of our technology, which is AI driven, we’ll put all those videos on a map, make it searchable and connect the right products to them to make it bookable. And so, yeah, just talking and take the hassle out of it from both sides, it’s performance based, you there’s no cost to the brands unless there’s a sale. And we want to be the good OTA, you know, we want to be the one that everyone loves.
And so that’s having worked on brand side, which we’ll probably get to a little bit later. That’s what I always wanted. You know, I wanted an OTA that would listen to me, that would work with me to drive my sales and do it in a way that was going to be economical for my business. And so that’s really top of mind for the way we want to work as well.
Jason Elkins (13:08.732)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (13:12.388)
It’s very interesting because just recently, I remember I was staying at a guest house with some other digital nomads. I was up in Columbia and we were all going to go out for the night and we had a conversation about where we should go eat. This one younger gal pulled out her phone and she went to TikTok and very quickly found the restaurant that we were going to go to on TikTok and it blew my mind. I was like…
Tony Carne (13:37.41)
This is how the kids do it these days,
Jason Elkins (13:40.046)
It never would have occurred. I’m on Google. I tried and true Google. I’m like, best restaurant, whatever. And yeah, she goes on TikTok and finds I didn’t even know you could do that. And now we’re having this conversation. It sounds kind of similar in a sense. mean, how did you come up with this idea? Because
Tony Carne (13:42.67)
you
Tony Carne (13:59.192)
For sure, yeah.
Jason Elkins (14:05.224)
I can see you on the screen. You look about my age. I’m not trying to say that because you’re around my age that any of this stuff blows your mind, but I’m guessing something happened that kind of gave you this idea to connect these creators with the operators and stuff like that.
Tony Carne (14:23.648)
Yeah, for sure. Like to me, it’s just the opportunity. So on one, as I said, on one side, there’s just this huge opportunity of creators that already have an audience that trust them and trust is what sells in the end. And I used to run a business called urban adventures, which I’m sure we’ll touch on a little bit later. And we would have a marketing meeting, you know, once a month or once a quarter to determine what our budgets were going to be. And we’d always have the
Performance marketing team come in, the ones that are spending with Google and Meta, and they just had a number that they could bring into the meeting and say, look, our blended return on ad spend at the moment is 2.3. You just give me the $100,000. I’ll give you back $230,000 in sales. That’s their pitch.
And like as a manager with the targets that you need to hit, et cetera, you’re like, sounds pretty good. Okay. If that’s kind of near where our expectations are in sales forecast, well, why wouldn’t I just give you the money? But then we have your more traditional marketing team, your brand side, the ones that come up with the creative ideas that, you know,
Jason Elkins (15:07.132)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Carne (15:27.736)
put a picture in the mind of the customer about who your brand is. And they’d always have fantastic ideas and often they involved creators and we’re always gonna do something fun. It was gonna be awesome. We’d found these incredible people that were so aligned with our values and they had this great audience and it was gonna be so cool. But the question for me was like, we have our sales targets. So like, where does this fit in? What can you tell me that you’re gonna get back?
you know in this quarter for this spend and they’d be like well likes and engagement and people will know about us and yeah in the end almost always the budget went 80 90 to performance and some crumbs for the table to the other side as of
kind of matured and thought that through, you know, particularly since leaving that business, I felt that we probably missed a massive opportunity in not investing harder into that. But what did I need, you know, for myself to be able to push the button on that? Because I also report to someone who’s going to ask me these questions around why you made these decisions. And so everybody, I think in the marketing world wants the ROI to be more validated through the creator work. And
we think with Viderio, that is what we can provide the market. We can have this brand team come in and say, actually, our return on influencer spend based on hard sales is 2.5. And now, okay, now we’ve got a contest of numbers in these marketing meetings on where the budget’s gonna be allocated. And if we can work with brands to get that number to a similar or higher number than what is happening in performance side,
then we’ll be able to move the budgets to about 50-50. And we think that’s kind of an exciting opportunity for brands to grow their growth in a way that they can measure and see the results of. And we think that’s the missing piece and that’s kind of what we’re looking to solve here.
Jason Elkins (17:22.408)
Do you think that all of this would have been possible before AI? mean, because what I hear, OK, this makes sense. then I realize the challenge of connecting, is it just affiliate links to websites? A lot of tour operators don’t have websites or the technology to handle that. Or is this something that really has only become possible here in the last few years?
Tony Carne (17:47.51)
Yeah, for sure. So AI has kind of been the huge unlock here. And my co-founder, Adrian, his previous job was at Amazon. So he had what on paper could particularly be seen as the most boring job in the world. His job at Amazon was to apply the right tax code for any product that was uploaded onto Amazon was going to be sold via Amazon because Amazon was on the hook to collect the VAT or the GST or
whatever the services tax that the government had put in place and then give that money to the government. And as a kind of dynamic marketplace where people can just upload things and start selling them, that’s a critical kind of piece for that company. so Adrian kind of headed up a team at Amazon that used artificial intelligence and machine learning to be able to programmatically apply these codes to any product that was uploaded. So that’s kind of his skill set and his knowledge base.
we’re actually applying that exact same idea to videos and travel product. we’ve built, Adrian has built an algorithm that can see what’s happening inside a video. And then we have a product database of upwards of 350,000 products at the moment, where it will take the description of what’s happening in that video and then go and find the exact products that match that description best and apply them to the video. So there’s this match there. So that’s kind of how the technology works in the background.
AI, you would have to do this manually. Okay, so it’s not, it’s a no go because you just wouldn’t be able to make the return back on what it would cost you to be able to match those products up or the product matching would be terrible, you know, and it just wouldn’t make sense. yeah, AI has been the unlock here and Adrian and I met through everything AI and travel, the other part alongside the newsletter and the podcast is I have a Slack group of people who are building things with AI, kind of mastermind.
Jason Elkins (19:18.62)
Yeah, yeah.
Tony Carne (19:46.286)
of the real people that are on the bleeding edge in this. And Adrian and I met in that group. And so he was also one of the first people to build anything I’d ever seen with AI and travel. A trip planner, which is like kind of what the default that many went to to begin with. But you just had this kind of idea and intelligence around what AI could do in terms of product classification. And then him and I joined together, have worked backwards to what the industry needs.
I said that for us, it’s that, you know, that ROI measure for brands. But on the other side, you’ve got creators and they all want to do this job full time. You know, there’s there’s stats out there that over 50 % of Gen Z Americans want to be creators as their career. Right. And so this is the way.
Jason Elkins (20:26.151)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (20:33.392)
Yeah, it’s like the dream job. It’s what do want to do? I want to be a YouTuber. I want to be a TikToker.
Tony Carne (20:37.774)
for sure. Exactly, exactly. But the reality is how many are making it like very low single digit percentages are actually making a full time living out of it. And that’s what we’ve gone out and discovered. So we’ve been around to the, the conference has gone to a lot of creative events. We talked to the creators, you know, are you making full time living out of this? And the answer is kind of almost universally no. And do you want to? And the answer is yes. And so over here, we’ve got a desire, you know, a need to, you know, build up an income stream.
for the work that they do. And over here, we’ve got the brands who want to see the validation of where their money’s being spent. So what we’re building is just the connectivity between those two players to make that all work for everyone so that the money can flow to the creators and they can get rewarded. And they almost should become like travel advisors have been in the past and work in a similar way. But at the moment, the industry is just set up in such an unprofessional.
Jason Elkins (21:15.218)
You’re right.
Tony Carne (21:35.244)
weigh in the interactions between these two parties. And we just want to software that makes that simple for everybody, know, simple, low technical lift all around, very quick to get going, simple mechanisms on was the sale made or was it not? It’s very clear. So it works for everybody.
Jason Elkins (21:54.232)
Let’s do this. Pardon me. I’m so excited. Just this question, can’t Honestly, I’m going to have to say, Tony, talk to me like I’m eight. Let’s do two scenarios. One is I am a tour operator. I’ve got a decent website. I’ve got some sort of maybe reservation system where somebody can go on and book a tour.
What’s talk to me like again, like I’m eight and help me understand what you can do for me.
Tony Carne (22:30.35)
Yeah, sure. So you’re in the sweet spot because you’ve got most of the parts already there. So the companies that we can work with are those that already have online booking capabilities of their own. So that could be a hotel, that could be a small tour operator or a large tour operator because we work with both. Now, if they want to access the channel of creators, it’s a daunting journey.
Lots of people have had, you know, I had a creator come through, they made some videos. I don’t really know what happened. Did it work? Did it not work? And the whole thing has been quite unsatisfactory for them. And so what we say to them is, sign up to Vidario. You decide the commission amount that you are willing to pay a creator for a sale. So we’re not like other OTAs who push down, must be 30 % or whatever it happens to be.
you choose because we’re a marketplace. And ultimately the creator will look at your offer and say, I’m willing to put some work in to try and achieve off that offer or not. And so we can obviously give some guidance on what might work or what might not. So offer a commission amount. We’ll be able to use our technology to hook into whatever affiliate or promo code system or whatever it is that you have. Most reservation systems already have something built into them that we can tap into and work with. And then we’d say,
let’s give it a try. So we will then introduce that brand to our creator group to come and present their business so they can talk to the group themselves, talk about what their unique sales propositions are within their business, why it’s such a great product. And then generally they would offer for one or a couple of the creators to come and experience their product on what we call a gifted basis. So basically a free trip or a free night’s stay or whatever it happens to be. So no
Jason Elkins (24:19.378)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Carne (24:22.886)
financial or cash out of pocket. It’s just the kind of the hosting of the, of the creator. And then the creator will come and create specific, content for their specific product and put that into, their own shop, to then sell it to their own audience, but will then also flow through to a macro OTA on Vedario. So where we have all the creators and all the product and all the videos altogether, which is a way that
people can search and always come up with something satisfactory based on their own travel intent. So what we’re doing is low technical lift. You just tell us what amount you want to pay and tell us what system you use. We’ll figure the rest out over here. And then an introduction to the community so that you don’t have to go find the creators yourself. We’ve already vetted our group. We know that they’re good. We know that they have validated audiences. We know that they can sell.
Jason Elkins (24:59.163)
Okay.
Tony Carne (25:21.358)
and then run that campaign. And over the next three, six, nine months, we’ll be able to feed back to you. Your investment might’ve cost you 600 bucks to host that creator. You might sell your tours for $300. And we can tell you the exact amount of sales that that creator has then generated for you. And what we wanna show them is a positive return on their investment. So if they’ve made 1500 or 3000 or.
$10,000 worth of sales based off that $600 investment, it then becomes a no brainer to do it again. Like, why would you not do it again? And so, and that’s what we prove out to people so that they come and try again.
Jason Elkins (25:55.868)
Right.
Jason Elkins (26:02.984)
All right, so I’m going check for understanding here. Hotel, let’s just say a hotel, a small boutique hotel on a beach in the Bahamas. Says, yeah, we’ll give 15%, 20%, or whatever to somebody that sends us a booking because they’re already doing it with other organizations. And then you introduce them to the network of pre-vetted
Tony Carne (26:13.336)
Yep.
Jason Elkins (26:32.871)
influencers and the influencer might be like, yeah, I’d love to go to the Bahamas. I think the Bahamas are great. So I’m going to go visit the place and do some video work while I’m there, put it into the marketplace and then it converts into a booking. The hotel operator gets some bookings out of it. The content creator gets
I’m going to say a free trip to the Bahamas because that’s where my mind is. Because sometimes that’s where their mind is. I got a trip to the Bahamas, and I got some commissions out of the deal. That’s pretty much what it boils down to, right? OK.
Tony Carne (27:04.142)
Sure? Yeah, For sure.
Tony Carne (27:15.352)
Correct, you’ve nailed it 100%. So the only other piece that’s in there, which I also didn’t explain is that when we introduce that hotel to our group of creators, we say, if you are interested in being chosen for a free stay there, then go and select this business as one of the preferred that you would like to sell in your own creator storefront, your travel storefront.
When they do that, if they have actually been to the Bahamas before, any videos that they have that are already in the store will already start to show up this hotel. Yeah, so if they’ve just got a picture of the beach or down the markets or whatever, because they’ve chosen this store particularly as something they wanna sell, it will show up in their store already without them visiting. So there’s this kind of free hit that the business gets in advance. And we actually use that
Jason Elkins (27:50.76)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Carne (28:09.294)
upfront with the creator. So they might have their webinar with the creator group and then one month later make the choice on who they’re going to work with. And we can actually say, well, these six have already have Bahama footage and they put their, put your business aside that footage. And this particular one has already made you three sales without them coming, you know, so we know that they can sell. Our advice would be maybe really lean into that or
Jason Elkins (28:31.752)
Okay.
Tony Carne (28:37.282)
This one has sent a bunch of traffic, but you can also look at those who haven’t been to the Bahamas and just go like, this person really speaks to the audience that we’re looking at. So this hotel might be a luxury hotel. There’s luxury content creators. There’s adventure content creators. So you can find the ones that fit well with your niche and then work with those to really make it work.
Jason Elkins (28:58.258)
So the content creator that’s listening to this show right now, it sounds like they can sign up, get vetted through some sort of vetting process.
onboarding or whatever, what would you like to say to the content creator that knows that they’ve got a bunch of followers that love to book trips, that are watching their videos on YouTube, going to the places that they recommend, but they are really having a hard time helping the tour operator or the hotel see that they’re sending people.
Tony Carne (29:31.288)
For sure. So for the content creator, we make your old content into new money. That’s basically our pitch to content creators. so, those that have been at it for a while, four or five years, building up their following by traveling the world and creating great content, nobody’s seeing that content anymore. They’re only seeing what was posted last week, today, very difficult to surface old content. And there’s no search functionality within a…
individual creators social media. So the only way to search is to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. So you maybe have just done a trip to Santorini and you posted Santorini and it all looks fabulous and people still love you for it. But if they have no intention of going to Greece at any time in the near future, then what was the point of it? But where they might be going was where you were two years ago. And so what we’re giving that creator is the opportunity to make
all their old content searchable so that it can match the intent of what their audience is looking to do in their future travels. And so from a traveler, from a user perspective, you can go in, love this person. They always give best advice. Have they been to where I wanna go to? And they can go into the store search and then find those recommendations that that creator is making, even if that content is two, three years old, the matches that we’re putting up today,
we make sure that those businesses are alive, that what is being offered is something that can be bought and actually traveled on in the future and will match their style and their intent. So if it’s luxury, they’ll be showing luxury hotels. If they’re adventure, they’ll be showing adventurous activities and that’s where our speciality and expertise comes in.
Jason Elkins (31:14.056)
So at the end, it’s the content creator at the end of their videos or somewhere in their show notes is like, here’s the link. If you want to see all the great places, you can book all these great places that we’ve been, that we have experiences with, whatever. Click the link and then go to our marketplace and select and search all the different places that we have a connection to. Is it kind of like that? All right.
Tony Carne (31:34.734)
100%, that’s exactly, you’ve nailed it. You should work for us, Jason. So that’s exactly what happens. So we encourage all our creators to have basically a standard footer in all the posts that they do that says exactly pretty much what you said. Not interested in this place, no worries. I’ve been to 46 countries around the world. Click my link in bio to see where I’ve been. so that…
Jason Elkins (31:59.044)
Is it only video or does this work well with bloggers and podcasters as well?
Tony Carne (32:05.304)
So we video first. So we are concentrating heavily on video. We think that’s the way that the world is going. We think that’s the best way to tell stories in travel. But most bloggers are also dabbling in video and will have an Instagram account and be able to access their own videos from their past travels. And we have integrations that they can drop into their blog, for example. So we can give them their global map.
Jason Elkins (32:13.831)
Hmm?
Tony Carne (32:35.156)
of all their travels with all their videos plotted on it that they can then put into their blog. So they have to have created the videos, that’s kind of one bit, but if they do, if their primary channel and where their main audience is, is through a blog and web, then we have integrations for them that they can use that, you know, they’re really successful.
Jason Elkins (32:55.592)
So as a podcaster who’s interviewed 100 plus now tour operators around the world.
And I’ve got video content as well. I’m just trying to think this out. I’m not saying, ooh, put me on your platform. But somebody that has a lot of interactions with a lot of tour operators, it seems like that might actually be a good fit, right? Of course, third.
Tony Carne (33:21.582)
So it could be, so you just need to think who your user is and what they’re looking at your content for. So with a content creator who’s on Instagram or TikTok, it’s very clear. They are showing off their lifestyle and the places that they’ve visited to people who want to have that lifestyle and want to visit those places. So that’s why it’s such a good match. Where it’s kind of B2B and you’re talking to industry people or professionals.
Jason Elkins (33:28.167)
Hmm?
Jason Elkins (33:32.146)
Hmm.
Jason Elkins (33:40.84)
Got it. Got it.
Tony Carne (33:50.038)
it’s probably harder for me to picture how that ends up in a transaction, you know, for commercialists.
Jason Elkins (33:54.756)
It’s hard for me to figure it out as well. I’ve been trying to figure that out since I started. So all right, that’s it’s very cool. Donnie, before we go any further, because I could just keep going. This is this is very fascinating. I want to make sure we take a moment to figure out how the heck did you get into this? What was going on when you were younger? I don’t know how far back we need to go to kind of get a picture of that, but you’ve done quite a few things.
Tony Carne (34:02.072)
For sure, for sure, yeah.
Jason Elkins (34:24.776)
Before I push the record button, I was like, I’m not even sure how to introduce you because you’re doing so many different things. But let’s go back to as far into the past as you think we need to go to kind of understand how you and I are having this conversation today. Where should we start?
Tony Carne (34:24.875)
I sure have.
Tony Carne (34:38.094)
For sure. yeah, yeah. So like, well, I was born in a very unusual place. let’s start there. I was born in a place called Alice Springs, which is for those that don’t know Australia, right in the center of the desert, outback, classic outback. not many people are born there. So it’s only a small place, 25,000 people, but it’s near.
Jason Elkins (34:46.856)
yeah, yeah.
Jason Elkins (34:52.018)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (34:57.915)
No.
Tony Carne (35:00.522)
one of Australia’s most iconic sites, is Uluru, the huge big red mountain that’s out in the middle of the desert that when people come to Australia, correct, that’s where people come and visit. And I was there because my dad worked in travel. So he worked for a bus company that used to take people out to Uluru originally, and then he worked for an airline. And the reason that’s important is that, so this is in the 70s, flying around places was
Jason Elkins (35:06.758)
There’s known as Ares Rock, right? Yeah.
Tony Carne (35:30.156)
really expensive unless you work for the airline. In which case, you you probably didn’t get paid that well, but you got to get on those planes pretty cheaply. Back in the day, you know, it was quite easy to get discounts on other types of travel as well. We used to call them AD75. So you basically paid 25 % of the price for anything you want to do. And the result of that was that we got to travel a lot when I was a kid. And that for me kind of fueled the desire to understand more about the world.
When I got older in my early 20s, I took off from Australia as quickly as I could out of high school.
Jason Elkins (36:05.768)
I got to ask you, I got to pause you there because I’m curious. I don’t know if this was Kwan. You know, I think Australia, I Kwan does. I don’t even know how long they’ve been around. But when you say you had the opportunity to travel when you were younger, was it mostly within Australia? Were you able to go to Bali? I know that’s pretty popular. I was in Bali last year, a lot of Australians. So did you have opportunities to travel outside the country as well?
Tony Carne (36:08.59)
Sure.
Tony Carne (36:33.312)
Yeah, we did. Yeah. So we, we went around most of the South Pacific when I was a kid. So Fiji, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, these types of places that were kind of where we would do our holidays, which are very different places to Alice Springs, let me tell you. And so yeah, that was kind of the experience to get out and really experience different cultures. Of course, you know, Alice Springs in itself has its own
culture going on when I lived there, it was a third indigenous, a third non-indigenous Australian and then a third Americans. So there’s also the other thing that happens out there is there’s a US base called Pine Gap and all the people who work there, their kids, et cetera, all, that’s who I went to school with, et cetera. yeah, so was already an eclectic place.
Jason Elkins (37:26.674)
There was a US military base in Alice Springs? Wow.
Tony Carne (37:30.53)
Correct, correct. Yeah, yeah. So it’s called Pine Gap and it’s not far from the city. It’s a radar and satellite detection facility. So it’s kind of the eyes in the sky down in the South. Hopefully not giving away too many US secrets here. I’m pretty sure everyone knows it exists.
Jason Elkins (37:48.208)
Yeah. Do you have do you have clearance to be talking about stuff like this? I don’t want my whole plot. I’ve done 100 episodes now. I don’t want them all just blocked by NSA or somebody. So be careful.
Tony Carne (37:52.75)
Exactly. Wait, is that a knock at the door? No, no.
Tony Carne (38:02.604)
No, think we’re all good. think everyone knows it exists. So that.
Jason Elkins (38:06.092)
Well, wait a minute. just I just I didn’t know it existed. And I was in the military. I had no idea. Okay. All right.
Tony Carne (38:12.014)
There we go. There you go. Well, hopefully I’ve given away too many secrets there. yeah, so like it was an eclectic place, but going off and seeing other places and even going to the big cities in Australia, which we could fly down to because where dad worked was another different type of experience, you know, going into a big multicultural city, et cetera. So anyway, I thrived in that, you know, the ambiguity of being in different and new places. And that was where my desire was. And like I said, when I, as soon as I finished school, I
Jason Elkins (38:18.514)
you
Tony Carne (38:40.87)
got a one-way ticket to the UK and lived out there for four years. Sorry, UK, I think I only had a three-year visa, but might’ve stayed a little bit longer. And spent as much of my time traveling, all my 20s actually, I lived to travel. did whatever work was required, mainly hospitality stuff, working in bars or hotels or whatever it happened to be to…
Jason Elkins (38:51.528)
We’re sharing all kinds of secrets here today.
Tony Carne (39:08.866)
just earn the money I needed to get back on the road. And that kind of form my opinion of why travel is so unbelievable and why it’s so important to the world, important to kind of helping people understand different cultures and being more empathetic. And I traveled at the localest level that you possibly could travel. And that’s been embedded in me for the rest of my life because I wanna see the benefits of travel.
Jason Elkins (39:35.516)
curious.
Tony Carne (39:37.676)
flow down to the people who are right at the very service level on the ground and facilitating the travel experience. They’re my people and so that’s who I’m always trying to.
Jason Elkins (39:43.464)
Yeah, yeah, I get that. I get that. Yeah, that’s very, cool. And I’m curious, like, growing up, I grew up in Sheridan, Wyoming, which is probably like the equivalent of it may be Alice Springs in Australia. It’s kind of in the middle of nowhere. And I was very fortunate to be able to travel as well. And I remember every summer I’d go spend the summer with my dad, travel around.
go to crazy places. Sometimes it might be Easter break or whatever, you we might load up in the in the van or something and go to Mexico and I’d come back after breaks and I would be talking about, you know what, you know, because there’s that question, what’d you do on your break? Well, we did this, we did that. And I remember my teacher actually called my mom one time and said, we need to have a conversation. Your son has a very creative imagination. And he’s lying to the other kids about all these big
Tony Carne (40:34.478)
About where he thought he went.
Jason Elkins (40:40.904)
You know, I grew up in a family. I was flying hot air balloons with my dad. So we would travel to the country. I went to Australia with my dad for hot air ballooning. And I didn’t quite understand that not all the other kids that I was going to school with had those kinds of opportunities. And sometimes it created a little bit of a disconnect or a reft or something. So I’m just curious if you experienced that growing up.
Tony Carne (40:51.384)
Amazing.
Tony Carne (41:07.63)
Not so much, not that I was, or I was oblivious to it, Jason, which is probably equally valid. But like, you know, I’m, I was definitely more cognizant of it. Once I hit my twenties of how lucky I was. Um, and, know, and comparing my experiences to my friends who didn’t get to, you know, who’s, um, every holiday was jumping the car and drive three hours somewhere and go camping. And yeah, absolutely nothing wrong with that. And we did a lot of that as well. Um, but didn’t, you know, getting on a plane was just like, it wasn’t a usual.
Jason Elkins (41:20.444)
Yeah, I think that came up to you.
Tony Carne (41:37.584)
thing. And so we were very lucky that we were able to like pretty much jump on a plane in the same way that people could jump into their car. And that to me is kind of being foundational in what came after.
Jason Elkins (41:38.504)
Hmm.
Jason Elkins (41:52.07)
And you have siblings as well.
Tony Carne (41:53.858)
I’ve got a brother, yes. So he’s also, was also a big traveler. He never snapped out of the hospitality world. Ended up being a restaurateur, very successful restaurateur. And to this day is still, still doing that. But still, he’s in Milan at the moment. So he’s, you know, he’s still out there seeing the world and it’s just inside us. We just, we just love it. We can’t get enough of getting out there and seeing the world.
Jason Elkins (42:21.042)
Did your dad appreciate that? Maybe your parents appreciate that, that when you got to the point you could go do your own thing? I mean, I know like as my kids get older, they wanna go travel, I kind of feel proud. I’m like, great, look, I exposed them to this. And I know it’s the same with my dad. know, when I started traveling the world, he, I think felt this like, this is great. I brought him up the right way and he’s going off and exploring.
And I’m curious, were your parents supportive of that? Did they think that’s a pretty cool thing or were they the types, you need to get a real job, you need to make money, you need to feed your family, that type of thing.
Tony Carne (42:59.238)
I think my mum would have much preferred I finished university and gone and got a proper career that she could explain to people. I think to this day, she struggles to explain to anybody what it is that I do, which is fair enough. People say he’s in travel and most people just think he’s a travel agent or whatever. So look.
Jason Elkins (43:03.24)
Some moms are like that. I don’t know why.
Jason Elkins (43:21.434)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Tony Carne (43:24.782)
I think they’re proud of the opportunities that they were able to give us and that we kind of became well-rounded global citizens as best we could based on the experiences they gave us. the apple didn’t fall far from the tree with my dad because he was in travel. He ended up working in marketing for the airline down here in Australia and also for the rail companies, et cetera.
I kind of found myself in a very similar position, you know, 25 years later, whether I, you know, planned it that way or not, which, you know, almost certainly didn’t, but yeah, through osmosis or whatever. yeah, that’s, that’s where I’ve ended up. And, you know, kind of had very similar career trajectories, my dad and I. So, yeah. So I guess, you know, is, is he proud of, kind of how that, how that came out? I hope so is, would be the answer. Yeah.
Jason Elkins (44:21.576)
Yeah, OK, very cool. So I heard you say you’d work, get the opportunity to travel, go travel, work some more, travel some more. So many questions. I think we probably need to come back. That’s why you have your own podcast, too, I’m sure. You’ve got a lot of things. And I’m curious, somebody else listening to this, maybe someone a little younger.
that really aspires to go do that maybe wasn’t set up with their family to go do that. They don’t have necessarily the resources. I’m curious if there’s, if I ask you.
I don’t even how ask you this. I’m sure there were mistakes made along the way. It depends on how you look at those mistakes. Sometimes we can look at mistakes and say, well, this is great. It was a learning opportunity. But I just feel the need to ask you, know, what were a couple, maybe a couple of the mistakes you made along the way that you kind of feel like you could have done without those lessons.
Tony Carne (45:16.526)
to sure. Look, I spent my whole 20s traveling and would somebody younger if they asked me for advice, say, was that a good thing to do? I think I could have quite easily ended up just, and no disrespect to hospitality work, but I could have just ended up in that cycle forever of working as a barman.
you know, right through my entire career. And I don’t know that that would have been at some point, it kind of gets old, you know, and you need to put down the roots that will provide for you to do the other things that you need to do in life or, you know, lots of people do in life, which is, you know, find a partner and have a family and get a house and all these types of things. And it could have went not that way at all.
Jason Elkins (45:45.736)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Carne (46:14.668)
Like it was, I think it was kind of almost serendipitous and quite lucky that I found my way into some kind of decent corporate life that has worked out really well for me. So I think there’s an element of luck to it. think there’s, you’ve still got to have internal drive. So, I mean, these are not really mistakes I made, you know, every day was kind of a mistake in its own way for, you know, depending how you look at it. But, you know, I enjoyed life. I enjoyed living life and
Jason Elkins (46:15.026)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Carne (46:44.854)
and I still do to this day, but I’m really happy that I found a place in an industry like travel that was so aligned with my passion. And I guess that’s kind of, if I had to give advice to someone young, it’s like, what are you truly passionate about? Do that because it makes it easy to get up every day and do that. You know, whereas if you follow a different path, so, you know, we kind of talked about my very short university career where I was on the road to becoming an accountant.
I don’t know that I could have got up every day and been super happy and punch the air with joy at going and crunching numbers for whatever reason or whatever business or person. So, you know, that would be my advice. I’m happy that it’s worked out the way that it did.
Jason Elkins (47:33.128)
Yeah, it’s a, there’s so much pressure, I think on, you know, just depending on your family, where you grow up and there can be so much pressure to figure out, you know, how are you going to make money? How are you going to support a family? How are you going to buy a house that sometimes we grow up? think thinking there are no creative options, you know, accounting, you know, I get it. My daughter’s an accountant. My father was an accountant. I could not do it.
But there can be a lot of pressure to do that. And I think a lot of people kind of get to their 40s. I’ve interviewed a lot of them on the show that did finance banking, legal stuff, whatever, and then got to 40, 45, 50. And they said, man, I just, I don’t want to do this anymore.
Tony Carne (48:26.158)
100%.
Jason Elkins (48:27.278)
So I think it’s great for young people just to, I hope they’re listening to the show. We’ve had so many stories of people that have, know, well, my parents really wanted me to go to law school. you know, my mom wanted me to be a doctor. And instead I’ve got this great company where I’m not the law or doc being a doctor is a bad thing, but.
If you aspire to do something a little different, for me it’s shared experiences, which is tourism. There’s no wonder that I ended up in this. So I think it’s great for people to hear that. And.
Tony Carne (48:57.954)
For sure.
Tony Carne (49:04.954)
And education, how it’s set up just has limited pathways that only seems like there’s limited doors that you can go through at the end. And they’re all the bachelor of something. And that’s kind of what people feel that they need to aspire to. But when you get out in the real world, there’s so many jobs, so many different types of work. can definitely find something that aligns with your passion that you can be the best at or aspire to be the best at. so that would be my advice.
Jason Elkins (49:31.304)
Yeah. And aren’t we lucky with, I mean, we’ve been talking about AI, but just even just the internet and YouTube. mean, isn’t it great that if I decided I really wanted to fix cars and be a car guy, I have unlimited amount of free education that’s out there. All I got to do is get an internet connection and a cheap phone to watch it on.
Tony Carne (50:00.063)
Exactly.
Jason Elkins (50:00.366)
And I can learn so much stuff. And I don’t think that was, you know, 40 years ago, if you were interested in some, you had to go physically find somebody that was willing to teach you. And that meant you either worked for free or you paid money and got a formal education. So pretty fortunate.
Tony Carne (50:20.34)
Yeah, for sure, for sure. I guess the way my life turned out is that, I was a traveler, and then I eventually fell into travel. And like, for me, that was, that was the gift. So I was actually back in Australia, late 20s, traveling around Australia in a combi van, know, with long hair and a big beard. I am a cliche in many ways. But I
drove back into Alice Springs. So I was like kind of circumnavigating the country and drove back into Alice Springs and went to visit some family friends in the town that we still had there, even though we’d moved away as a family. And they said, what are up to? And I said, well, I’m just, you know.
cruising around Australia, picking up backpackers and, you know, split the cost of the fuel and you had a company and you had to sit around the campfire at night and chat. And I said, that’s a job here. And I said, is it? And I said, yeah, yeah, like, you know, there’s companies here that, you know, take the backpackers out to Uluru and out to the other parts of the Outback and you get paid for it. And I’m like, really? That’s interesting. And so next day I went and knocked on their door and said, hi, I heard you kind of.
looking for tour guides or what have you. And I probably wasn’t kind of textbook what I looking for to be completely honest, but I had one advantage and that was that they said in their marketing that they had local guides, but they didn’t have one person who was from Alice Springs working for the company. so I said, and you know, so it came out in conversation that, know, I was born there, you know, so I’m, you know, I’m the unicorn here.
Jason Elkins (51:50.981)
Tony Carne (52:03.118)
And so they gave me a shot. It was kind of the upshot of it and I… We need one guy so the marketing’s not a lie.
Jason Elkins (52:06.834)
We need at least one guy and wow, he walked in the door.
I mean, you’re going to have to clean the trucks and the vans and prepare meals and stuff. We’re not going to let you actually go out with clients for a while, but.
Tony Carne (52:20.722)
Exactly. But so I, yeah, so long story short, I became a tour guide taking backpackers out to these amazing places out in the wilderness of Australia. And they’d throw me the keys to a four wheel drive truck that could hold, you know, 13 to 15 people inside it and off we’d go for five days, you know, with sleep in what are called swags. So kind of, you know, a mattress in canvas, you know, that you’re
you know, out in the elements underneath the stars, no tent, no anything else, just out in the dirt, looking up, you know, the greatest stars that you’ll ever see anywhere in the world and just in this incredible landscape, you know, absolute God’s own country out there. And that was my life, you know, so five days a week, you know, we’d trot around the outback and, know, I had this four wheel drive truck and, I wanted to explore places I hadn’t seen and there wasn’t, you know, it was kind of a…
a rough itinerary that you needed to at least make sure you got to see the rock and Wataka, which is Kings Canyon, the other kind of main site out there. But outside of that, you were pretty free to kind of have a look around. so I’d just head off down tracks that I would see and people would say, where are we going? And I’d say, well, I’m not really sure, but we’ll see when we get to the end of it. There’s a track here, must go to something. And so just out exploring. You’re sure? Yeah.
Jason Elkins (53:17.448)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (53:35.356)
Well that’s…
Jason Elkins (53:39.24)
That’s so cool for them, though, too, because I remember I’ve done quite a bit of guiding in the past. I ended up having a hot air balloon ride business. I did a few things. And generally, was like, if I was having fun, I think they were having fun, honestly. I think that that’s what’s really important aspect of guiding, is if you’re just there because you’re trying to make the money or you’re just trying to get from one week to the next.
Something’s just missing. think it’s that guide that’s and you know I’ve been with a lot of guides in the over the years and that guide that looks at me and says hey you want to go do something really cool? You know that’s or or or do you want to you know I’ve been wanting to go to this place. I heard some stuff. I think it’s gonna be cool. Are you up for it? I think you’re a fool if you say no That’s where you just gotta go and just say yeah sure if you want to go there. I want to go there
Tony Carne (54:19.95)
For sure, that’s the one.
Tony Carne (54:31.5)
Yeah.
Tony Carne (54:36.942)
totally tap into that local knowledge and yeah, like they’re the best experiences always.
Jason Elkins (54:37.4)
Or yeah, and just trust people because if you shop and say, want to see Ayers Rock, want to see, I think you said King’s Canyon, whatever. And if you’re just going at the mindset, I want to see the Instagram places, that’s fine, whatever. There’s a place for that, I guess. But man, it’s like a restaurant. You shop in a restaurant. I’m in Quito, Ecuador. Today I walked down to this little restaurant and I
Tony Carne (54:49.111)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (55:07.336)
I saw the menu board. had no idea what it was. You know, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Latin America. And I’m just always like, I don’t know, what do you recommend? What do you like? And I always get a better experience when I do that. So.
Tony Carne (55:11.17)
Yeah.
Tony Carne (55:19.374)
For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we’d wake up in these swags in the early morning, you know, the, um, uh, the beautiful, um, sunrise happening you’re in kind of these, you know, um, red clay, um, mountainous areas and what have you. there’d be like emus, like just kind of 15, 20 meters away from us grazing, you know, on on the grasslands there. And like, I’m sure to this day, that is the story of those people are telling. They’re not telling about, you know, they went to sunrise at Uluru. They’re saying they’re talking about this time they’re in the outback.
Jason Elkins (55:38.173)
Hmm?
Jason Elkins (55:47.611)
yeah.
Tony Carne (55:52.78)
And there were these like incredible crazy animals that were like just there.
Jason Elkins (55:53.159)
Yeah.
What about dingoes? I feel like I just feel compelled to ask you about dingoes because I heard you saying sleeping in swags, just sleeping out on the ground. like I remember a little bit of time in the Southwest U.S. when I was in the Army and we slept out on the ground and every once in a while, a coyote would be, you know, sticking their nose in your sleeping bag. So what about dingoes? What should those of us that don’t know about dingoes know about dingoes?
Tony Carne (56:05.036)
Yes, that’s right.
Tony Carne (56:18.712)
Yeah, 100 % that happened. We were as well. But dingyos are very smart. They’re lot cleverer than us. And they don’t want to get into conflict either. But they do want a free feed if they can get a free feed. So often they will come in pre-dawn, have a sniff around the camp. We’d obviously try and clean up the camp before we went to bed as best we could.
Jason Elkins (56:34.074)
Okay.
Tony Carne (56:45.102)
Um, so there wasn’t anything for them, you know, people in the States with their bare canisters and that kind of stuff, do it to the nth degree. We probably weren’t doing it quite to that, um, uh, that limit, but it was pretty much generally only me that would ever see them. think, but yeah, they came into, come into camp and have a sniff around and, and whatever. like, if you kind of turn over in your swag, they’d be gone. They don’t want to get caught.
Jason Elkins (57:07.6)
Okay, so it sounds like, you know, cause I think a lot of Americans maybe we remember, a dingo’s got my baby. You know, yeah. But in general, yeah, right?
Tony Carne (57:18.102)
Yeah, so that happened out there. I mean, obviously that happened out there. But you know, a baby is very small. So that’s kind of, that’s the, they’re not going to drag away a, you know, a full sized human or whatever. So I mean, of course that story happened and it is impregnated in the minds of people. But by and large, they’re just kind of out there doing their thing and…
Jason Elkins (57:41.992)
But it’s not a reason. If someone, if someone, if I was having a conversation with someone and they said, I would love to go to Australia, but all these dangerous things in Australia, maybe dingoes are probably not the thing they need to most worry about. Or in your opinion, should they worry about any of it?
Tony Carne (57:57.294)
No, that’s right. Well, generally no. You know, for all the dangerous things we have out here, not much happens with it. So, yeah, there’s probably two or three decent shark attacks, you know, a year. And they can, there’s things you can do to avoid that as well by the of the time of day that you go out and the places you go out, et cetera. But, you know, of course, yeah, we’ve got spiders and snakes and whatever, but you rarely see them.
You know, like it’s you gotta be pretty unlucky is kind of, is how I look at it. and you know, where, there are things that you can do to mitigate it. That’s why you should have a guide, you know, so, you know, particularly up North, the crocodiles, et cetera, you know, where to go in and or not to go into the water. You know, it’s also well signposted, but you know, the guides there to make sure you don’t go in, you know, even if it’s 42 degrees and there’s like a beautiful water.
Jason Elkins (58:39.09)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Carne (58:55.918)
right there, you can’t go in it. You can’t even go near the edge of it. yeah, and that’s where having a guide is kind of critical, I guess, to the experience.
Jason Elkins (59:06.216)
But you know, we lose people at Disney Land. People have gone, I think they’ve done a pretty good thing. I think they’ve fenced off all the ponds. But you know, I think people used to go to Disneyland and there’d be signs, know, don’t go in the pond, whatever, stay away from the pond and people still go in. And then I grew up in Wyoming and Montana, right around Yellowstone Park. So every year.
Tony Carne (59:11.182)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Elkins (59:30.15)
I don’t know if you hear about in Australia, but every year we’ve got somebody that goes decides to put the both the bison or, you know, test out the hot springs and, you know, put their hand at it. Despite the sign that says the water’s, know, highly acidic and hot and everything, don’t touch the water and people still lay down on the boardwalk and stick their hand in the water. So that’s and then you hear stories and then some people like, it’s dangerous in Yellowstone. I shouldn’t go to Yellowstone.
Tony Carne (59:42.456)
Yeah.
Tony Carne (59:48.314)
Hmm.
Yeah, yeah.
Jason Elkins (59:58.696)
No, it’s not. They have, they cannot make it any safer than they have. If you want to get hurt there, you got to try pretty hard. man, it’s, it’s, there’s so many, you know, you get 7 billion people on the planet. There’s going to be a handful that just really do stupid stuff.
Tony Carne (01:00:00.568)
That’s…
Tony Carne (01:00:07.294)
Yeah, unfortunately people try really hard, don’t they? So that’s, that’s, that’s it.
Tony Carne (01:00:21.102)
Probably only do it once, but once is sometimes enough.
Jason Elkins (01:00:27.654)
My brother and his wife, her parents were coming out from Pennsylvania to spend some time with them and they went into Yellowstone Park. And as they go through the gate, you get the little newsletter or whatever and his mother-in-law is in the back seat reading, the water’s very hot, dot, know, reading all the warnings and all this stuff. And they go to the first place, they get out, they’re walking down the boardwalk.
And Justin hears behind him a woman’s voice saying, the water is hot. He recognized he recognized the voice. said he just kept walking. I don’t know her. I’m not with her. I can say that now because he and his wife are divorced and whatever. But anyway, it’s just yeah. So yeah, it’s it’s it’s been fun. OK, do you so your first real job?
Tony Carne (01:00:58.862)
Why is my skin melting off me?
Tony Carne (01:01:15.65)
Yeah.
Jason Elkins (01:01:23.452)
kind of in the business was the guiding job in Alice Springs. Okay.
Tony Carne (01:01:27.566)
For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that, um, I did that, um, still, I was still in travel mode. So like, but it was just a great hack to, um, you know, go and work for nine months. You’d earn really good money, um, compared to what I’ve been working in or earning in hospitality. And it gave me the runway to go travel for a year. You know, so I go and work for a travel for a year, work for you, travel for a year.
And I was coming back from South America after spending a year down there and I just couldn’t go back to Alice Springs. So it’s in many ways kind of one of the more wonderful times of my life, but it also has a shelf life to it. And that was the only job that was on offer with that company. And so I had a look around and saw, are there other jobs out there for tour guides? And I happened to come across an ad for a company called Intrepid Travel that were looking for tour guides.
and this is kind of early 2000s and they had a website. So I did look on their website and seen that they went all over the world, including South America. Yeah, yeah. And I’m like, I’m like, well, there’s a chance here. I could just turn around and go straight back to South America where I just had the absolute time of my life. The Spanish was flying reasonably well. I’m already a tour guide. thought, I’m a good crack here to get this gig and how good would that be?
Jason Elkins (01:02:29.564)
Seems legit, intrepid.
Jason Elkins (01:02:44.86)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Carne (01:02:46.958)
And so I applied and I went through their process, is highly rigorous. I mean, who they used to bring on as a tour guide, right up to the point where you kind of do weeks of training. And then at the very last thing they do is you’ll go out for a few beers. And like, it’s kind of a celebration of, well, you made it through the course, but the course isn’t over as I found out, because they’re seeing how you are with a few drinks in you. And some people didn’t make it
Jason Elkins (01:03:12.793)
because that can be the biggest problem with guides. I’ve been around long enough to know. Yeah.
Tony Carne (01:03:15.722)
Some people didn’t make it through that night, Jason. Some people were like, that was the step that they failed at. But fortunately for me, I made it through that step and then had my meeting the next day and I’m like, beautiful. They said, yeah, Tony, we’d love to have you on board. And I said, great, Keto, Caracas, Bonas Aires, let’s go. Where am I off to? And they said, Cairo. And I went, I see. So it was kind of a bit of a curve ball from that perspective. I had been to Egypt, but it wasn’t kind of.
you know, anywhere in my top 50 list, I think, of where I hoped I might be sent. But, you know, by that stage, I was kind of really invested in the process and, you know, and this was the job that was on offer. So of course I said, I said yes. And as things turn out, as life turns out, know, sliding door moments, it turned out to be the greatest thing that could have ever happened to me because they also ran us through how progression works within.
Intrepid and was like, you know, go out to wherever we send you and be the best guide you can possibly be. And if you’re the best in five years time, then maybe you’ll become the senior leader, you know, which is kind of some hierarchical, you know, seniority within the, in the business. And then if you’re the best senior leader for the next five years, you might get a shot at becoming a ground manager, which is like the person kind of in control of a particular region who runs the guide teams and, you know, contracts with the hotel sets up the itineraries and, and what have you.
Jason Elkins (01:04:22.375)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Carne (01:04:41.612)
You know, so you’re on this pathway to a 10, 15 year career to try and get to anywhere of seniority. with Egypt, it was the first year they were opening anywhere in the Middle East. And they sent three of us out to do it. And they brought over a bunch of leaders from India who ran the first season with us, but it wasn’t kind of for them. It wasn’t the place they wanted to be. And so they all kind of left at the end of the first year. And was just the three of us left as kind of the old heads.
around and the season went spectacularly well. They’d sold everything out, but they were just doing one country in the Middle East and they’re like, we need everything else. We need everything from Morocco to Iran. Let’s get this thing going. And so they put out a job for not the senior leader, but for the ground manager. So this kind of, know, this glorious job that you would need to spend 10 years at the company to even apply for. But they told this story to all of us, the three of us that have went out. This is the progression process.
Jason Elkins (01:05:21.608)
Yeah.
Tony Carne (01:05:40.162)
So the other two didn’t apply and I applied and I got the job. And like one of the other guys was half Palestinian, fluent Arabic would have been absolutely the lay down was their perfect guy for the job versus me with my terrible, exactly, exactly. So again, sliding door moment, exactly found myself kind of.
Jason Elkins (01:05:55.752)
he believed what he was told. There’s a there’s a a some value in that.
Tony Carne (01:06:05.23)
elevated to this incredible job where I got to travel across the Middle East now, sans customers. didn’t, wasn’t a tour guide anymore. And I had to go and set up the itineraries for Intrepid out in the Middle East and find, you know, Intrepid’s very immersive company. You know, we go and have home stays, you know, we go to local people’s places for lunches and this kind of stuff. had to go and find these people that would be happy to bring, you know, for you to bring a dozen gringos to their house once a week for lunch, you know, with my terrible Arabic.
Jason Elkins (01:06:32.134)
Yeah, that’s not it. Probably doesn’t too easy.
Tony Carne (01:06:33.838)
And yeah, so yeah, meeting these fantastic people, many of whom are still my great friends to this day, right across the Middle East. And, now, you know, from that moment where they said Cairo and my heart sunk, you know, I ended up living in Cairo for five years now. think it’s one of the greatest cities, you know, in the world, you know, by far, such a, laden’s cave literally to explore. the people that I met out there were just incredibly amazing, you know, and just a foundational part of my life.
Jason Elkins (01:07:04.424)
So one or two years into that adventure, you, was it like, yeah, this, I’m happy they didn’t send me to South America? Yeah, yeah.
Tony Carne (01:07:12.856)
For sure, absolutely. yeah, South, well, turns out Jason, that yes, they had South America on their website, but they didn’t operate in South America. they had no jobs there at all. So like, was, you know, for me, just misreading the situation at the time, there was another company which still exists, G Adventures, was Gap at the time, and they were sister companies. you know, G was Latin America, and Intrepid was Africa and Asia.
Jason Elkins (01:07:23.711)
Tony Carne (01:07:41.326)
And you know, and nobody really did the Middle East and they just kind of cross sold each other. So there were no jobs there anyway. So I was never going there. and so
Jason Elkins (01:07:47.848)
I can’t imagine a travel company, a tour operator doing something like that advertising trips in places they don’t have trips. Are you serious?
Tony Carne (01:07:58.872)
Go figure, go figure.
Jason Elkins (01:07:59.408)
And I’m not knocking intrepid orgy. We’ve had guests on the show from both. But yeah, I get that. That’s a very.
Tony Carne (01:08:04.11)
For sure. Yeah. So was a great, I mean, it was a great cross-sell opportunity for them both to be able to sell the entire world. And yeah, so it all worked out well, but there were no jobs. There were no jobs for Tony in South America ever. So that was just me.
Jason Elkins (01:08:10.834)
Yeah, yeah, it makes sense.
Mm-hmm.
Did you come back to South America and spend any time? Because I know the first time you and I spoke, we talked a little bit. I’m in Quito, and we’ve got some mutual friends here in the area as well. So I’m curious, did you have the opportunity to come back and spend any real time in South America?
Tony Carne (01:08:31.906)
No, I have. So mean, I’d spent that year beforehand already out there. And since then, I’ve been back at least four or five times. So down to Patagonia, Chile, Argentina, I’ve been to Ecuador, where you are right now, I took my daughter over to the Galapagos a couple of years ago. Yeah, one of the greatest trips that you know, I’ve ever done anywhere in terms of, you know, a place to go. Yeah, so yeah, I’ve been through Peru, again, with my daughter. So yeah, I love it. Still got
Jason Elkins (01:08:51.561)
That’s so cool.
Tony Carne (01:08:59.63)
A few things that I need to go and do over there. I need to get up to Columbia and love to get across the Venezuela and see a bit more of that part of the world as well.
Jason Elkins (01:09:07.9)
That’s a lot of stuff to see. would love, if you don’t mind, I’d love to touch on, you mentioned your daughter. If she, how old is she? Okay. We’re going to, I know this could be a touching subject, so you take it whichever direction you want to take it. If she came to you and said, dad, I want to work in tourism. I don’t want to go to school. I’m going to…
Tony Carne (01:09:17.326)
She’s 14 now, yeah.
Jason Elkins (01:09:35.388)
go apply for a job with Intrepid or whatever and go do this. I guess first part is would you, I have a sneaking suspicion you’re going to say yes, you would be supportive. So I want to follow it up immediately with a question and like what advice would you give her?
Tony Carne (01:09:52.12)
So yeah, it’s interesting because I think as kids, you naturally almost rebel against whatever your parents want you to do. So I’m quite mindful to not push this barrow too hard with her. she’s, know, strangely for our family, very interested in sciences and things that we’ve had no relationship with, you know, in anywhere, throughout our family and happy to more than happy to encourage her in doing that.
My advice to her when she finishes high school would be to…
get yourself a ticket somewhere and go somewhere, even if it’s just the break between high school and the start of university and get out and see the world. you know, we’ve spent a lot of time educating her about how to get around the world, how to handle yourself in situations in foreign places. And she seems super comfortable, you know, out traveling around. already got a reasonably filled passport and she loves travel. you know, I think.
Jason Elkins (01:10:52.456)
Yeah.
Tony Carne (01:10:53.578)
whether she ends up working in travel or not is kind of totally up to her. But, you know, of course I’d be happy for her to go down that path. And it’s way that I’d be able to help her, you know, if she ends up in occupational therapy or whatever, zero help that I can give her. you know, so, but in the end, it’s up to her, but, you know, my advice is, you know, live your life, find your passions, whatever your passion about, try and pursue that as the way to earn a living because life will just be far more fulfilling. And so it’s up to her to make those decisions on what
Jason Elkins (01:11:21.638)
Right.
Tony Carne (01:11:23.286)
on what that actually looks like.
Jason Elkins (01:11:25.66)
And so many, I’m going to use the term gap year, suggest that gap year, which seems very common for people from New Zealand, maybe Australia. In my travels, I’ve run across a lot of people doing the gap year, not many from the US, usually Europeans, Australians, Kiwis. There’s so many things that can be learned during that that’s not necessarily travel related. It’s about…
Tony Carne (01:11:39.758)
Mmm.
Jason Elkins (01:11:50.664)
It could be just about independence. you like being far away from friends and family? Are you OK with that? Social interactions. Who knows? She may go to Argentina and meet somebody there that lives in the UK or Spain or something that’s doing computer work.
And she’s really interested. And they’re working remotely. And she might end up coming back and say, hey, I want to be a computer programmer. That has nothing to do specifically with travel. But it’s just that opportunity to meet people from a wide variety of backgrounds, languages. I mean, a lot of people. Is she speaking Spanish? Yeah, OK. And I asked, as you’d mentioned, that she’d been here and gone to. It’s pretty cool. She went to Galapagos. What? She went and she was 12? 11 or 12?
Tony Carne (01:12:35.822)
She is not.
Tony Carne (01:12:41.751)
Yeah
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason Elkins (01:12:46.226)
pretty cool. I remember my daughter when she was around that age, I want to go to Galapagos. I want to work at the Charles Darwin Research Station and be a marine biologist, which is great. I would encourage that. Yeah. Here’s the difference, though. Here’s the difference. You took your daughter. And I said, well, maybe some days we are. And now she’s an accountant.
Tony Carne (01:12:58.07)
It sounds like my daughter. Exactly. 100%. 100%.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think this is kind of where the science is coming from, you know, so she, she did a subject at school, was marine biology. And then we went to the Galapagos and like, think, yeah, it’s kind of really embedded in her that like, there’s a pathway here to like a really cool life through science, you know, which is academic interest. I’m like, well, great, yeah, pursue that for sure. Like that’s if that’s where it is.
Jason Elkins (01:13:29.64)
And I can just imagine her friends in school or her biology teacher. She comes back, yeah, I took a lap of ghosts this summer, whatever, no big deal.
Tony Carne (01:13:34.606)
Yeah, I went to the club. Sure, for sure. No, she’s very lucky. I hope she appreciates how lucky she is. for sure, for sure. Yeah.
Jason Elkins (01:13:44.744)
She will when she’s 30. She’s like, man, wasn’t I lucky? She’ll be on a podcast someday. Somebody will be asking her how she got into travel. Well, my dad. anyway, Tony, we I feel like we have not covered enough. Maybe we need to come back and do this again. But I I’m curious. I want to be respectful of your time and our listeners. What what’s the big stuff that I really forgot to ask? Didn’t ask or you want to make sure that we touch on before we wrap up?
Tony Carne (01:13:56.11)
Sure. Good.
Tony Carne (01:14:15.03)
Look, I’ve loved the life that I’ve had. I’ve had a great life, but it’s what it’s taught me that I think is most important and what I’ve become passionate about as a result. that is that I think tourism is a great enabler for the world. I think it’s a great way to…
change and shape perspectives of humans through the active traveling. To me, that’s important. And I think we’re all a better world if we understand each other better. And my passion specifically is around helping grassroots tourism to thrive and to be able to make the best living that they possibly can in the way that they think is best for their community, their environment, and really
create the opportunities for that to occur. Intrepid for me was a great company in the way that it really pursued that as the core end goal for how travel should be. And I’m so thankful for the time that I had there. And to me, like that’s what I want to try and scale. And that’s why I’m trying to build this business of Vidaro is to do it in a scaled way so that we can get
more interest of people into the kind of unknowns of tourism where I think the real goal is. And you talked a bit about, you know, meeting that local that could say, Hey, you want me to show you something really cool? Like, they’re the people I love. They’re the that’s my that’s my family. That’s my tourism connections. That’s my world. And I want them to be able to connect with market and be able to show people those really cool things that are not currently the
Jason Elkins (01:15:48.413)
Yeah.
Tony Carne (01:16:00.246)
number one Instagrammable thing on the planet because nobody knows it exists, you know, and only very few people are getting to experience it. And I want people to be able to build their livings off giving those experiences and creating those memories for travelers that build great impact across the world. Yeah. So that’s, that’s kind of who I am and why I do get up every day and do what I do. And to me, that’s what’s important.
Jason Elkins (01:16:24.454)
I love it. Well said as someone who named my podcast, The Big World Made Small Podcast, it’s kind of that same, how do we connect more people on a real level? just, you know, because I started this when I was over in Southeast Asia, it my first trip to Asia. And I’d always thought of it being so far away. And then I realized, no, it’s not really. When you’re connecting with people,
over street food or whatever it is, it’s like, this is so cool. And when people go have those experiences, it just changes the way they look at the world. so I knew that we would have a lot of alignment. Really happy you came on the show. Look forward to working on some future projects with you as well. And thank you, Tony. Really appreciate it.
Tony Carne (01:17:11.31)
Really appreciate the invite, Jason. I hope people enjoyed what they heard and got something out of it as well. if anyone wants to… There you go. There you go.
Jason Elkins (01:17:19.004)
Well, even if they didn’t, I sure did. If anybody’s still listening to this, reach out to Tony. He will have his link to his website in the show notes. Reach out and say, hey, I made it to the end. And I was fascinated as well. yeah, so especially tour operators and influencers.
It sounds like this is like if you’re a tour operator or an influencer and you’re listening to this, you should at least click through and go check out what Tony’s got going on. I’m pretty interested in the whole, that whole space that we’re discussing as well. So I’ll be doing some more research as well. Thanks, Tony.
Tony Carne (01:17:40.366)
100 %
Tony Carne (01:17:55.928)
For sure. Totally. I’m on LinkedIn. I accept all connections. So like if you want to reach out and connect with me there, I’m happy to connect with you there as well.
Jason Elkins (01:18:05.472)
Which is really how I connected with you as well, is the same thing. I saw you having conversations with some of the other people that we’ve had on this show. And I said, man, this guy, I gotta get to know this guy. So I’m happy we did. Thanks, Tony.
Tony Carne (01:18:07.566)
100%.
Tony Carne (01:18:17.176)
Brilliant, good, and hopefully we get to do it in person next time, Jason.
Jason Elkins (01:18:20.392)
Sounds like a plan. Talk to you soon. Thanks. Bye.
Tony Carne (01:18:22.283)
Excellent.
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