Tony Carne has lived the whole arc of how day tours get sold. He started as a guide, built Urban Adventures into a global day tour brand for Intrepid, and watched the channel that built it disappear when the platform changed its rules. He has spent the years since working out what an operator can count on instead.
His answer starts with accepting that the free booking is gone. What works now is getting found through other people, because travelers search for and trust what real guests share far more than what a business says about itself. The same idea shapes how he and Mitch see AI. Listen to this one if you resent the OTAs and aren’t sure what the alternative is. You’ll come away knowing where to put your effort, and more convinced that the human being at the front of your tour is the part that lasts.
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Key Takeaways
- Stop chasing the free booking, because the last real one is gone. 03:25 to 04:35 Urban Adventures grew on it: rank number one on TripAdvisor in your city, back before Viator, and people found you and booked. The team relentlessly chased TripAdvisor reviews, and its handout cards carried TripAdvisor’s name in place of its own. It worked for a long time, and for a little while after the Viator merger too.
- A friend inside the platform won’t save you when the rules change. 05:12 to 06:45 Urban Adventures had a former Intrepid colleague as its TripAdvisor and Viator account manager and still got no warning. TripAdvisor started showing new businesses ahead of the ones that had earned the top spot, and a company counting on 20% growth a year broke even. Years of work on other OTAs, SEO, and partnerships with Lonely Planet and the New York Times still weren’t enough to replace that one channel.
- Open a city fast, test it, and be willing to walk away. 06:52 to 07:27 That is what Tony would do differently today. The Urban Adventures franchise model gave him no way to cut the weak cities, so they sat alongside the strong ones. If the competition is too tough or the breakthrough isn’t coming, move on and stick to your hits.
- Sometimes you just have to sell the thing people want. 07:36 to 09:07 Washington DC was, and still is, a powerhouse for Urban Adventures, and what sells there is golf cart tours of the National Mall. Very little about that tour feels like Intrepid. Airbnb took years to learn the same lesson.
- The tour nobody can copy is the one built on a guide’s own relationships. 09:11 to 10:20 In Venice, a guide named Cecilia ran a cicchetti bar crawl through her own neighborhood, bringing twelve guests into bars that hold about twenty. Those owners couldn’t take another group without crowding out their regulars, so the access stayed hers. Guests rated it for the welcome at every bar as much as for the food and drink.
- The tour people love and the tour that scales pull in opposite directions. 10:20 to 11:35 The tour travelers remember is built on one person’s access and relationships, and by default it can’t scale. The pressure to grow pushes operators toward average experiences that collect five star reviews. That has left the industry in an awkward identity crisis, dumbing itself down to suit conditions it created by taking easy money for too many years.
- Pitch your small group tour as the second thing a visitor does, after the hop on hop off bus. 11:35 to 12:30 The best two days in a new city start with knocking over the sights you can’t leave without seeing. Then you go deep on whatever you care about, food or artisans or something else, with a small group in a neighborhood you’ve never heard of. Urban Adventures tried to partner with Big Bus and other hop on hop off companies on exactly that, and none of them were up for it.
- Brand only pays off when a guest can book you again. 12:59 to 15:39 Airbnb had three billion dollars to build its brand, and Intrepid has been beating the same drum for 35 years. If you run tours in one city without a strong local market, that guest is probably gone for good, and nobody is opening your newsletter. It changes when you are in several places. Urban Adventures put every guide in the same red “Best Day Ever” shirt so travelers moving through Europe kept seeing it, and Justin Buzzi has built a brand around clear kayaks in multiple destinations. Secret Food Tours and Eating Europe have fans who land in a new city and book them again without thinking, because the “what am I going to do when I get there” problem is already solved.
- Half of day tour bookings come in the last 48 hours, and those travelers are on their phones. 16:30 to 17:55 Hardly anyone flies across the world for one specific day tour. Somebody is in Florence today working out what to do in Venice tomorrow. They are doing that in the TikTok and Instagram search bars, so that is where a day tour needs to show up.
- Commissions are marketing you pay for after the result, which is why everyone hates them and uses them anyway. 18:47 to 19:27 Marketing has very few guaranteed outcomes, and paying up front in the hope of a result is a leap of faith for a small business. With a commission, the booking has already happened by the time you pay. You probably paid too much, and you also didn’t have to do that marketing yourself.
- MaxTour stays in the first five results for “Vegas to the Grand Canyon” by aiming to get a creator on its tours every single day. 19:50 to 21:16 The videos are plain and nearly identical, and some pop while others flop. That makes it a volume game. Social search is different from SEO, where you reach the top and stay there, so you have to keep replenishing.
- Ask every customer “How did you find us?” before they can check out. 21:16 to 21:37 MaxTour makes it a mandatory question. The answers are YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, and 80% of its bookings now come direct. That is why it turns on the OTAs only when things are really dire.
- Put the person who books in your content, and most of the time that is a woman. 22:02 to 23:00 Intrepid built its ads around that. Travelers start grazing through social media the moment they have a destination in mind and keep going until they are back home. Every search they make tells the algorithm to feed them more of that place.
- Travelers start a trip with more than half their decisions still open. 23:26 to 23:58 People book flights, a couple of hotels, and the few things they can’t miss about two months out, and the price shopping wears them out. Then the trip starts with 50 to 60% of decisions unmade. That is why day tours get booked so late.
- Hand every creator your five selling points before the tour, in the words travelers search. 24:02 to 24:39 If you are the best food tour in the city, or the one most connected to the vendors in the market, tell them that up front. Those are the keywords people type into Instagram and TikTok. Creators can then tell their own story around them, and you show up when someone searches.
- A comment keyword turns a creator’s video into a link you can track. 24:42 to 25:21 The creator asks viewers to comment a word like “food,” and ManyChat sends back the link to your tour straight away. The viewer does one thing and has nothing to figure out. Use a tracked link, and a bit.ly is enough, to see how many people each post sent to your site.
- Your brand account almost never shows up in TikTok or Instagram search, so the content has to come from creators. 26:00 to 26:32 Both platforms make their money on ads, and once you’ve told them you are a business they have little reason to show you for free. A creator’s video about your tour can rank where yours can’t. Someone else telling your story also lands better than you telling it yourself.
- Forget follower counts and look at a creator’s content and their last ten view counts. 28:29 to 30:24 The algorithm decides what gets seen based on how good the content is, whatever the follower number says. So start with the work itself: do you like how they shoot, how they tell a story, how they show up on camera? Then click Reels on their profile and read the last ten view counts. You’ll see a floor, a ceiling, and a typical result, say a low of 4,500, a high of 1.2 million, and a usual 20,000, and that typical number is what you’re trading one seat on your tour for. If they’ve hidden their view counts, skip them. And don’t write off the accounts that will advertise anything, nappies one day and bubble tea the next, because some of them still put a video in front of 400,000 people.
- A wild tour in the middle of nowhere pulls better creators than a day tour in Rome. 31:02 to 32:09 Full time travel creators want the best content in the world and will pay their own way to get it. A horse trek operator in Kazakhstan gets a higher level of applicant on CollabsMap than city day tours do. Secret Paradise in the Maldives has hosted several creators on its manta ray conservation cruises, a $2,000 week on a yacht, without paying them a fee.
- Ten years and 160 cities at Urban Adventures produced one DMO collaboration that worked. 32:37 to 35:34 In the US a lot of DMOs answer to a board of hotel owners, and heads in beds is where their interest stops. Tony spent 18 months trying to sell DMOs a video map with direct booking links to their own suppliers and got immense pushback. The AI tools many of them have bought since send the bookings back to the OTAs.
- Run every Reel as a trial reel first, then move the winner to your grid. 36:54 to 39:52 A trial reel is a toggle in Instagram’s settings that keeps a video away from your followers and shows it to strangers, and within a day or two you know whether it hit. The accounts with huge numbers on every post have usually run around seven versions of one video, changing the overlay, the voiceover, the script, or the caption, and then moved the one that hit to the grid. The versions that missed still reach real people. If two hit, move one now and hold the other for a few weeks so your grid stays varied. There is no perfect piece, and the platform decides what gets seen (LinkedIn works the same way), so volume wins: one creator a week at minimum, because the big hits are the ones that end up in search.
- You can list your tour on CollabsMap for free and let creators who are already heading your way apply. 39:55 to 41:56 The free plan shows your first three matches in a dashboard with each creator’s stats, demographics, and latest content, plus a yes or no button. Say no and CollabsMap tells the creator for you, so nobody gets ghosted. After those three, the dashboard is $129 a month, or you stay free and handle applications by email without the stats. For bigger budgets it guarantees views: $50,000 buys five million of them at a $10 CPM, delivered by 12 to 24 creators who pay their own way and are paid on results.
- Set your terms up front, pay for content you plan to reuse, and answer every creator. 42:10 to 44:06 A posted offer with fixed terms replaces the DM haggling that leaves everybody annoyed, because only creators who accept the terms apply. If you want their video for your website, your ads, or your own feed, that is how they make a living, with one free exception: being added as a collaborator on their Instagram post. A quick “thanks, but no thanks” matters too, since creators talk in WhatsApp groups and ghosting gets around.
- Airbnb has really only used AI for two things, customer service and coding. 44:36 to 46:40 Its inbound questions now run almost entirely on AI, with a person stepping in when needed. Coding is the one that matters for a small tour business, because you can now build pretty much anything you need for yourself. And if you haven’t done anything with AI yet, neither have most people in this industry.
- Build small AI tools for the jobs nobody likes, and leave your booking software alone. 46:40 to 48:57 The weekly report that eats a day of someone’s life, with the downloading, the merged spreadsheets, and the slides, is the right place to start. Booking software is mission critical, and AI models change without warning, so a homemade system can cost you bookings before you notice. When you hire, guides included, ask who is curious about this stuff so you have someone to rely on.
- Use AI to analyze your business, and keep it away from the guide’s story. 49:00 to 50:01 There is no single “AI,” only different uses. Pulling in your reviews and analyzing how a tour is performing is an easy yes. Generating stories about a place to stand in for the guide is a no, because the people with the right to tell that story belong in front of the group, and a human guide should never become a luxury only the rich can afford.
- The people who will use AI tour guides were never going to book a tour. 52:13 to 53:59 They are the travelers who took five free walking tours in their twenties and left before the tip. Guests who want to experience a place through the people who live there will keep coming. Live guiding could even get stronger, the way people now go to more concerts to support artists they hear for almost nothing on Spotify.
- Being in more cities can be the mistake. 55:11 to 56:11 Lauren Aloise of Devour Tours has called expanding into every big town in Spain one of her biggest mistakes, and plenty of day tour companies are reaching the same conclusion. A small office team and a group of guides running a sustainable business is a result to be proud of. The people pushing you to grow are often the ones who earn commission when you do.
- The guide’s job has moved from knowledge to connection. 56:35 to 57:49 Mitch started his first company in 2003 knowing more about Paris than anyone on his tour, and that is no longer a safe bet. What guests come for now is belonging, connection, and gathering. A dozen strangers meeting in a strange place to do something together is rare, and it’s an opening for operators as people push back on AI and feel their attention drained by their screens.
- Let your guides tell their own story, because a script can’t do what that does. 57:50 to 59:55 Urban Adventures gave its guides a formula for building a tour and the freedom to put themselves in it. A Berlin guide who grew up in East Germany told the story of the day she walked through the open wall, and Tony has never forgotten it. If your tour is the equivalent of reading the encyclopedia out loud in front of the most obvious place in town, that is a dangerous place to be.