Tourpreneur Tour Business Podcast

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

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

The conversation covers her product de...

Ryan Connolly went from finance analyst to glacier guide to co-founder of Hidden Iceland. In this episode, he shares the numbers behind their most pivotal business decision: cutting small group tours that represented 50% of their departures but only 10% of revenue.

That shift to exclusively premium and luxury private tours helped the company grow by 5% while improving quality and profitability. Ryan explains how relationship marketi...

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

The episode covers operational realities: importing equipment across borders, navi...

This conversation with Jeff Gayduk, publisher of Premier Travel Media, reveals an industry at a transformative inflection point where specialized group travel is experiencing unprecedented growth despite predictions of its demise. Speaking from his unique vantage point overseeing multiple travel industry verticals, Gayduk identifies 2026 as a watershed year driven by three major events—the World Cup, Route 66's centennial, and Amer...

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

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

Top 10 takeaways

1) Repeat guests keep coming back. About 75% rebook, often bringing friends and...

When Justin Buzzi launched a clear kayak tour in Florida, his goal was to offer something memorable. What he built was one of the most highly rated kayak experiences in the country—with over 50,000 five-star reviews and 30+ franchise locations.

In this episode, Justin joins Dustin Miller of Conversion Assist to unpack how they built a guest experience that keeps working long after the paddles are down. From guide training to persona...

When Christian Wolters rejoined Intrepid Travel, his goal wasn’t to reinvent the brand—it was to reconnect it to its core. As President for Canada and GM of Marketing for North America, Christian brought a global perspective to a local challenge: how to ensure that Intrepid’s messaging reflected its values, operations, and guest experience.

At the time, Intrepid already had strong credentials as the world’s largest B Corp-certified ...

When Kirstin Reeder’s first-ever bookkeeping client turned out to be a tour operator, she didn’t expect it to change the course of her business. But that relationship revealed how often tour operators are misunderstood by traditional accountants. Today, Kirstin and her teammate Amber Call run Purple Sapphire Business Solutions, a firm focused entirely on the unique financial needs of the tour and activity industry.

This episode is p...

As part of our Growth series, recorded live in Berlin at GetYourGuide's 2025 Unlocked Summit, we now turn to Naples, Italy. Tourpreneur host Mitch Bach talks with Jasmine Palmieri, Commercial & Product Director for World Tours Italy.

World Tours has scaled by keeping everything in-house—from their fleet of vehicles to employed tour guides—allowing them to maintain strict quality control as they grow. Jasmine explains their strat...

Welcome to the Growth Series! Tourpreneur hosts Peter Syme and Mitch Bach attended GetYourGuide's Unlocked event in Berlin in September, and recorded several conversations with tour operators who have scaled their businesses to tens and hundreds of thousands of travelers. They share their insights and secrets in this series.

In this conversation, Peter talks with Arzu Tutuk, Founder and Managing Director of Walks in Europe. She shar...

Today Tourpreneur host Mitch Bach goes to Budapest!

When a video game designer accidentally lands on MasterChef thanks to his partner’s prank, he doesn’t expect it to change his life. But that twist launched Joseph Szakács into founding Foodapest, one of Budapest’s most unique food experiences. In this episode, Joseph shares how he turned a surprise phone call into a purpose-driven business built around cooking, culture, and human c...

Good tour design doesn't just help create memorable experiences, it's also a way to build a defensive moat around your business that protects against competitors, copycats, and even AI disruption.

In today's episode, TP hosts Mitch Bach and Peter Syme dismantle the traditional information-based approach to tour guiding and argue for a shift in thinking towards emotional design. They explore how customers drowning in content and know...

Tourpreneur hosts Mitch Bach and Peter Syme come to you live from Berlin! They attended GetYourGuide's Unlocked conference, where over 300 of their tour, activity, and attraction partners gathered from around the world to have a day-long discussion that will shape the future of the platform, and our industry in part. (Last year's supplier discussions focused on the need for curation, leading directly to a major shift in the platfor...

If there's one thing we at Tourpreneur have learned about running an online community, it's how important it is to have in-person gatherings to anchor the online conversations in the friendships that develop in-person.

So far this year we've welcomed nearly 1,000 people to our small group "Shindigs" (meetups) held all around the world.

And we're planning on more, plus launching a brand new style of conference for the whole industry, ...

How do we design experiences that use photography to enhance the guided experience, and not detract from feeling engaged and immersed? That's the question Mitch Bach posed in this Tourpreneur episode.

Mikaela Toczek is the perfect person to answer that questions. She's the founder of More to Explore in Slovenia, which combines her background as a documentary photographer and photojournalism educator with her passion for guiding to c...

**Don't forget to register for our upcoming conference: TourWeek, Nov 10-13!**

The whole TP gang of Mitch, Peter, Chris and Kyle were in London together recently for a Tourpreneur party. And our friends at GetYourGuide emailed and said—hey, while you're in London, do you want to take a tour?

We said, sure! When we asked what it was, they said: trust us, this is a good one.

They weren't kidding.

It was such an interesting experience tha...

There's no explaining this episode. It's rambling and angry and raw and weird, but probably a very useful episode to listen to.

Mr. AI-is-the-future Peter Syme and Mr. Human-Connection-is-Everything Mitch Bach are joined by two brilliant guys who have made their living creating travel content. Stuart McDonald founded Travelfish to offer true expert insights into Southeast Asian travel destinations. And Matthew Barker is the founder ...