Creating a Tour is Your Ticket to Fun and Profit
Becoming a tour guide to earn money can be an exciting and fun job. The beauty of creating your own tour is that it can be entirely tailored around the things you like to do. All you need to get started is an interest that you can share.
What matters is that they’re driven by passion. Tours can be more than just a walk around the landmarks of a town. If you love chocolate, do a chocolate tour. If you love beer, do pub crawls. If you love photography, or nature, or food, then you can make a tour out of it. If you enjoy it, chances are someone else is going to enjoy it too.
Everyone has a different reason for getting into tours. Some love wine while some love cooking ocean and living an active outdoor lifestyle and believe in conservation.
Creating a Tour That Works
Once the theme of the tour is established, the next step is to consider the potential clientele. Knowing who is likely to want to do your tour is the number one thing you need to know before you get started.
The advantage of doing something you enjoy is you know what clients with that particular interest are looking for. You know their expectations and typical lifestyle, as well as current trends in that niche.
The type of tour you organize, and what you want out of it, will also dictate the size of your groups. In addition, if you find there is enough foreign visitors in other cities to support tours as well, you may want to expand. For example, a food tour could offer three different tours: Street Food Tour, a seven-stop walk that takes in the city’s best vendors; Foodie Dream Tour, a three-hour, three-restaurant dinner; and a Coffee Crawl Tour, a two-hour stroll to three cafés, teaching you the philosophy and history of coffee as you go. Small groups are easier to manage and allow for more flexibility—you can accommodate requests more easily and have a more personal relationship with the clientele. However, larger groups can be more profitable.
For trips that you personally guide (typically larger groups), the first day could start with a meet and greet at the airport. The next day you would start their itinerary. It could be going out to a coast or perhaps heading up to the mountains. Perhaps you are off to a remote river lodge where the only access is by rafting. You might dive right in to surf lessons, or perhaps a trip out to do some whale watching, or snorkeling near giant schools of fish while. Each group is filled with different guests and a different adventure.
Getting the Word Out
Changes in the travel industry have made it easier than ever to start a tour business. While in the past, tour operators had to rely on partnerships with walk-in travel agents, the internet and social media have made it possible to bypass the gatekeepers and reach clients directly.
The key to a successful social media strategy is to give your clients a good reason to talk about your trip. If they’ve been shown a good time, for a fair price, they are very likely to give you a glowing review on Facebook, Yelp, or other social media channels.
Because tourists are becoming savvier with technology, they are now more likely to plan their trips in advance based on social media recommendations and reviews. Setup a website and a TripAdvisor listing.
But keep in mind TripAdvisor has certain rules that exclude some tour operators. To qualify you have to offer a one-day tour. If your company is only offering multi-day or multi-country tours, your listing will not be approved. This is because TripAdvisor listings are location based and require your tour to be pinned to just one town or city.
Use your website, Instagram, Google+, Twitter, Google AdWords, and the occasional Facebook promotion.
Podcasts and interviews are a great advertising tool as well. It takes time to generate a base and a reputation.
Offline marketing can play a role in diversifying your clientele, helping you garner more walk-in business. Point-of-sale displays can also be quite effective (e.g. leaving his brochures in travel agent offices and hotels where his target customers would stay).
Some other ideas is to create a DVD with a little movie presentation featuring videos and photos that were taken on the tour and give one to each client. That might seem like a lot of work, but it wasn’t—I had a pre-prepared template that I just slotted photos and videos into. It was a great way to get people talking about a tour when they got home.
Making Money
Be it enjoying the natural wonders of Costa Rica…tasting wine in Italy…or enjoying the culinary delights of Colombia, tour operators have something in common: the desire to do something they love and the opportunity—and income—that allows them to do it.
How much you make from tours depends on a variety of factors, including what you want to get out of it (is it just for fun or a fully-fledged business?), the size of your tour, the cost of your tour, and the frequency at which you run them.
The amount of money you can make from a tour is dependent on many variables. If you take two tours every week and charge $50 per person, 10 people per tour will net you $1,000 at the end of the week. If each tour is four hours long, you’re making enough money to live comfortably in most countries in the world for only eight hours of work.
Steps to Starting Small
Starting small with your tour company makes it easier to self-evaluate and make necessary changes as your business matures, without major financial risks. While in this phase, you can figure out new strategies to give yourself a greater edge in the market, tweak and improve your itineraries, and make local connections.
The key is to take that first step, no matter where it leads. Each new step will help improve your tour.
Here are 11 steps to getting your tour business off the ground:
- Identify a hobby or interest you’re passionate about. It can be anything from cooking to hiking, cycling to bird watching.
- Buy a ticket and travel somewhere that interests you and that suits your hobby.
- Get out there and experience your surroundings. Take the tours, ride local transport, use taxis (make sure to talk to the drivers), eat the food, and ask lots of questions.
- Write down all of the information you learn and organize a list of local contacts.
- Evaluate your experience: What did you like? What did you wish you could have done? What were the highlights? What would you have rather skipped?
- Create your ideal trip itinerary using your personal experiences and 20/20 hindsight.
- Go home and tell all of your friends in your cooking group, hiking club, etc. about your amazing experience and show them pictures. Tell them you’re going back and organizing a tour. Who wants to come with you?
- Work with one of the local contacts you’ve made and package the ideal itinerary to market to your friends.
- Get your group on board and collect payment.
- Enjoy your next trip back with your friends.
- Find more clients and grow your business.
