Operators keep asking Tourpreneur co-founder Pete Syme to automate their customer communication, and he tells them to stop.

Pete Syme and Mitch Bach open a new monthly series, Pete & Mitch Are Angry, with AI, whose noise has grown too loud for a small operator to sort through without hours to spare. Pete's reason for saying stop is that talking to guests is an operator's biggest chance to learn what they want, and that knowledge is where the upsell, the cross-sell, and the second and third booking come from. An operator who hands that seat to a chatbot learns none of it. Supplier work, invoicing, and pricing are where the automation belongs. Requests for a workforce of AI agents get a similar reply: agents built on a broken business break it faster.

AI amplifies whatever business it is pointed at. A solo operator with 12 tours wanted them all automated, and Mitch's advice was to cut the list to three, aim each at one specific customer, and skip the tech needed to serve 12 tours in 12 locations with different vendors and transport. Pete reaches the same place from the other direction: AI agents on top of broken processes speed up the breakage, so the foundations get fixed first. With sound foundations, the question that matters is what AI cannot do for the business. The answer differs by operator because geography, market, and economics differ, and no consultant can supply it. Automate the repetitive work around that answer, leave the answer itself untouched, and start every AI decision there.

Maria Petrenko runs a private guiding business on Santorini, one of the most visited islands in the world. Cruise-ship crowds and a mounting overtourism backlash have turned the destination's own reputation into a liability for anyone selling tours there. Petrenko pitches that same reputation to prospective guests as the reason to book her instead of a mass tour, leading with it rather than avoiding the subject or apologizing for it. She builds every trip around one early conversation instead of a fixed list of stops. She asks a guest open-ended questions until she hears what they actually want to feel: a family reconnecting after a hard year, a stranger rediscovering a late brother's honeymoon. She designs the day around that feeling rather than the postcard shot of the blue domes that floods the island's most photographed corners.

Petrenko backs the pitch with something operational. Living on Santorini means she catches problems, a blocked viewpoint, a cable-car delay, a scheduling collision with another guide's group, before they cost a guest their day, in a way a company managing tours from Athens cannot match. She argues that small, local operators absorb this risk constantly, and that they deserve more of the reward for it. Credit for a smooth trip too often goes to distant companies with less on-the-ground involvement. Her case is that local reliability is a real differentiator, one operators should be recognized and rewarded for.

Philippe Hertzberg has never bought an advertisement aimed at a traveler.

Hertzberg is the CEO of Secret Journeys, a company that designs private access experiences inside landmarks like Notre Dame and the Arc de Triomphe. Most tour businesses expand their bookable services to capture more revenue per client. Hertzberg does the opposite: Secret Journeys turns away hotel, ground transport, and flight bookings, even when clients ask for them, to stay a single, uncategorizable thing. Most tour businesses also try to reach travelers directly. Hertzberg doesn't advertise to travelers at all. He sells exclusively through travel advisors, and a single pitch to Virtuoso's CEO in 2022 put him in front of that network's 20,000 advisors.

Three other decisions run the same direction. Hertzberg turns down press coverage that would put Secret Journeys in front of the traveling public, free exposure most businesses would take, because he wants the advisor, not his own company, to stay the one the client trusts. He casts storytellers the way Disney casts characters, and the trait he's actually hiring for is curiosity about the guest, not guiding credentials or destination expertise. Landmark access gets negotiated the same patient way: opening the Arc de Triomphe at night took two years of solving the administrator's actual objections one at a time, including agreeing to cover security staff's cab fare home. The episode also covers how a storyteller turned a five-year-old's obsession with bells into a private treasure hunt through the towers of Notre Dame, and which cities, Amsterdam, Seoul, and Prague among them, Hertzberg is looking to expand into next.

Resources:

• Secret Journeys: secretjourneys.travel
• Philippe Hertzberg on LinkedIn

Kevin Durkee owns Culinary Adventure Co., which runs six food tours in Toronto. Eighty percent of his guests are local, 99.9 percent book direct, and in fifteen years he has never run an ad, fought for SEO, or opened a Google Analytics account. The industry mantra is that locals do not take tours and that the OTAs own the demand, so Mitch spends much of the hour asking how the business actually works. The short answer is that Kevin sells celebration rather than sightseeing: gift cards, Christmas presents, and a birthday program that gives a guest a free seat when three friends book alongside them.

Kevin also refuses to discount in either direction. He pays full price at every one of his forty vendor stops and quotes corporate groups higher when they ask for a break, with a setup fee and built-in gratuity, since the food costs the same in front of four people or forty. Private corporate work now runs thirty to thirty-five percent of annual revenue. He explains the retreat in Madrid that finally pushed his best tour from $119 to $199 with less food on it, and it has since sold better than in any prior year. Operators leave with a way to build a local repeat audience, a position to hold when a buyer pushes on price, and the three years and five cities Kevin spent learning what to cut.

Resources:

• culinaryadventureco.com
• thiscityisdelicious.com
• Instagram: @culinaryadvco

Airbnb spent ten years swearing it would never be another OTA. It just started buying its experiences from Viator.

For twenty years the industry has argued about whether anybody can build a real marketplace for experiences. Mitch Bach and Pete Syme think the Airbnb deal settles it. The companies with the deepest pockets have looked at the category, done the arithmetic, and decided to rent someone else's supply rather than build their own. The ones still committed to building are running on economics that get worse every year, even while the market underneath them grows. None of that stays inside the marketplaces. A business under margin pressure has only so many places to find money, and the commission operators pay is the one that moves the dial.

Pete's answer for operators is not a new tactic, and he says so plainly. What has changed is the price of ignoring the old ones. Discovery sits underneath every other question an operator has, and more money flowing into the platforms meant to solve it has made it harder, not easier. His argument is that operators keep chasing discovery where it costs the most to win while walking past the customers already sitting in their own city, the corporates and schools and universities that book fifteen times instead of once. Mitch pushes on what that leaves for anyone running a general tour for a general audience. They land in the same place: the only bagel tour in New York gets found, and the two hundredth walking tour in Madrid does not.

Resources:

• Peter Syme on LinkedIn, where he posts his breakdowns of the Viator and GetYourGuide numbers
• Tourpreneur business retreats in Porto
• Tourpreneur CONNECT

Mid-America Productions builds five-day tours around one thing: getting a choir on stage at Carnegie Hall.

James Redcay and Stephanie Tiboris run Mid-America Productions, a company that takes amateur choirs, church groups, university ensembles, community singers, on tour to perform at major concert halls: Carnegie Hall, Paris's La Madeleine, and venues in Vienna, Stockholm, and soon Reykjavik. Each residency runs about five days, split roughly in half between rehearsal and free time. Hotels and sightseeing are handed off to local partners and travel agents rather than run in-house, because James says the company sticks to what it knows: producing the performance itself.

For operators, the transferable move isn't about music. It's about identifying the one thing a trip has to deliver, then building everything else, pacing, free time, what gets outsourced versus kept in-house, around protecting that centerpiece instead of spreading attention evenly across a checklist of activities. James and Stephanie talk through what that discipline produces: choirs return decades later, first-time travelers get their first passport through the company, and revenue has grown every year since the pandemic on repeat and referral business rather than new-customer acquisition. They also cover what it took to keep that formula intact after founder Peter Tiboris passed away in September 2024.

Resources:

• Website: midamerica-music.com

Two five-day retreats in Porto and a conversation-first event in Louisville, and none of the three have a keynote on the agenda.

Tourpreneur is running two five-day retreats in Porto, October 21 to 25, in parallel. One is a growth-strategy retreat led by Peter Syme, split into outbound and inbound tracks. The other is a design retreat led by Kyle Campbell and Mitch Bach. Both cap at ten operators and cost $1,499 for PRO members or $1,799 for everyone else, including a year of PRO membership.

Tourpreneur CONNECT runs November 16 to 18 in Louisville. It's built around conversation instead of keynotes or breakout sessions, with attendees moving between hosted tables rather than sitting through a fixed schedule. Tickets run $199 for PRO members and $299 for everyone else.

Resources:

• Multi-Day Huddle: tourpreneur.com/retreats/porto-multiday-2026
• Design Huddle: tourpreneur.com/retreats/porto-design-2026
• Tourpreneur CONNECT: tourpreneur.com/connect

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

Jeanette Pierce is the founder of Detroit's The City Institute, formerly Inside Detroit, which she launched in January 2006 after leaving a job at United Way, frustrated that outsiders were the only ones talking publicly about her city. Detroit was still years away from bankruptcy when she started and deep in it a few years later, and City Institute grew through that entire arc, not around a single moment of good press. Mitch and Jeanette break down how she built the business almost entirely on private, custom "learning journeys" sold to corporations, universities, and local governments, rather than tickets sold to the public.

Jeanette explains her "peanut" method for customizing a single tour into dozens of different themes for different institutional clients, why she deliberately kept her team small after burning out at eight full-time staff and forty part-time, and how she chooses which community partners to feature and pays them for their time. She also lays out why locals discover tours through Eventbrite and HR departments instead of TripAdvisor, and how City Institute turns university orientation and corporate onboarding into recurring annual revenue. This is a full playbook for selling to a market everyone else assumes doesn't exist.

Resources:

• thecityinstitute.com

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

Kevin Currie, Director of New Scientist Discovery Tours, joined the company in 2019 to build what three journalists had started off the side of their desks. The pitch was simple: curate an itinerary around a science story, not a destination, and put an expert on the tour who can actually tell it. Kevin spent months in due diligence before signing on, looking at guest feedback, partner relationships, and industry data. Experiential travel was growing at 19% annually, roughly double the rate of standard travel. He built a business case, launched 20 tours, sold most of them out, and then lost everything to the pandemic. New Scientist kept him. He's been building since 2022 with a team of four.

The episode covers how New Scientist structures tour development from the inside of a media company, what Kevin looks for when he chooses scientists to accompany tours, and how the team manages a supply chain of partner operators, DMCs, and tour leaders without becoming a tour operator themselves. Kevin explains why they work with only six partners and why the pre-departure briefing between the expert and the tour leader is one of the most important things they do. He describes the 4.6-kilometer walk in the Brecon Beacons where every hundred meters represents 100 million years of Earth's history, and the moment a guest looks up and realizes the last 20 centimeters represent all of human existence. The episode is also a case study in how a niche operator competes not by being cheaper, but by doing the thing competitors literally cannot copy: getting the science right.

Elyrea sells a kind of tour no traveler would think to search for, and Jean-Vladimir Deniau built the whole company around that fact.

Jean-Vladimir Deniau is the founder of Elyrea, a French company that builds character-based immersive performances for the tourism market. The format is specific: a professional actor embodies a historical figure, Coco Chanel near Place Vendôme, Hemingway around Montparnasse, a GI on Omaha Beach, and walks a small group through that figure's neighborhood telling the story of their life. Deniau does not call himself a tour operator. He calls Elyrea a "Lego brick" that DMCs and tour operators build into the experiences they sell. The company has 15 of these performances running, almost all in France, and there is a structural problem at the center of it: nobody knows to ask for a tour with Coco Chanel, so the business cannot wait for B2C search demand. That one fact shapes how Elyrea picks its characters, how it sells, and how it funds itself.

Mitch and Deniau cover the business behind the tours. Why Elyrea sells to the trade first and keeps its strongest tours off OTAs entirely. The capital-light model that built 15 tours with no outside investor. The four design rules behind a 90-minute performance, starting with the claim that you win or lose the audience in the first minute. And the recruitment problem of training an actor who learns the whole show, performs twice, and quits because the street is not the theater. Deniau also names the advice he would give any operator building an emotional experience: stay true to the place, do not overplay it, and keep the technology out of the way.

Resources:

• Elyrea: elyrea.com
• Live actor booking for trade partners: elyrea.com/booking
• "The Colossus of Marousi" by Henry Miller, the travel book Deniau cites as the original spark

Most tour operators benchmark pricing against competitors and copy the playbook of the loudest voices in the industry. Mary Collins runs two businesses by ignoring both and starting from the question an anthropologist asks first: who benefits.

Mary Collins is the founder and CEO of Blue Fern Travel, a DC food tour company she launched with her husband in 2014, and the owner of Far Horizons Archaeology and Cultural Tours, the 40-year-old multi-day company she acquired in 2022. Both businesses sit on the same foundation: an anthropologist's instinct for community, story, and the economics of who benefits from a tour. Blue Fern pays full price at every restaurant, tips every server 20 percent, and routes a portion of every ticket back to a local nonprofit. Far Horizons travels with a PhD scholar from morning to night, caps at 14 guests, and spends two hours at sites where most competitors spend 30 minutes.

This episode is a working session on running two very different tour businesses from the same operating philosophy. Mitch and Mary go deep on hiring for personality over knowledge, pricing into demand instead of against the competition, building DMC relationships that survive a 20-year operator transition, and the specific moment Peter Syme had to tell her twice to raise her prices. She walks through what it took to inherit a beloved 40-year-old brand from its 80-year-old founder, the FileMaker-to-WeTravel tech overhaul, and the donation model that has routed half a million dollars to archaeological sites worldwide. Operators running food tours, scholar-led tours, or any business with a returning customer base will find concrete, actionable material here.

Resources:

• Blue Fern Travel (blueferntravel.com)
• Far Horizons Archaeology and Cultural Tours (farhorizons.com)
• Bread for the City (Blue Fern's donation partner)
• WeTravel (Far Horizons' booking platform)