There is a third way to sell tours, somewhere between fighting for your own search rankings and handing your bookings to the OTAs: selling your city together with the operators around you. In Atlanta, a group of operators who tested it this past summer is now talking about turning it into a company of its own. Stephen Chester, who runs ATL Cruzers and Peachtree Trolley, is one of them, and he built his business without paying for online marketing in a city where visitors usually come for something other than sightseeing.
The conclusion is that a small operator’s reach comes from relationships, and those relationships multiply when operators stop treating each other as competitors. A group of complementary operators can answer a big group request that none of them could take alone, and it carries more weight with the buyers who move volume into a city. Listen to this one if you run tours in a place people visit for work, family or a ballgame. You’ll come away knowing who in your city you should be working with, and why the slow early years are part of the deal.
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Key Takeaways
- Expect your first idea to fail, and make pivoting a habit early. 02:36 to 03:14 ATL Cruzers started in 2010, before Uber and Lyft, as a golf cart shuttle covering the last mile of transportation. It did not work, and the company pivoted within its first month. The pandemic forced a second rethink. Staying flexible enough to chase new openings has been part of the business since day one.
- Call an operator running your idea in another city before you launch, and listen when they say your market is wrong. 03:34 to 04:17 Stephen found O Karts, a golf cart service for business professionals in Orlando, after being laid off as an accountant in 2009. Its founder shared everything about how to start one, and also said Atlanta was a poor market for it. He was right. The shuttle model failed in Atlanta, and the advice still saved months.
- Get to know whoever staffs your city’s visitor center. They can send you customers every day. 04:19 to 05:45 A staffer at the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau’s visitor center liked the golf cart and started calling Stephen whenever a visitor wanted to reach the Martin Luther King Center or the Margaret Mitchell House without a taxi. After six days of calls, she offered him a free desk at the center, left empty when a trolley operator closed. That desk turned a shuttle into short tours of the city. The founders then studied operators in other cities and added electric car tours and Segway tours.
- Price commercial insurance and parking before you buy your first vehicle. 06:09 to 06:35 Vehicles bought for business use need their own insurance policies, premiums and underwriters, and commercial cover costs several times more than personal cover. A commercial vehicle also cannot sit in your home driveway, so you need a place to keep it.
- Use vehicles when your city’s story is spread across neighborhoods, and choose ones you can plug into a wall. 06:35 to 07:40 In a walkable city, one neighborhood can carry a whole tour. Atlanta’s history, culture and character are spread across several neighborhoods, so vehicles were the only way to tell the story. Electric golf carts needed tires and charged batteries and no fuel, which kept costs low in the early years.
- Add a vehicle only when the first one runs near full and you can hire someone to drive it. 08:19 to 09:33 Every idea had to make sense on the numbers first. ATL Cruzers ran one car until it hit 85 to 90 percent capacity every time a tour opened. Then it hired a guide before buying the second vehicle, so no vehicle ever sat without someone in the seat. One car grew to five golf carts, and the Segway fleet reached about fifty at its peak.
- Run one great tour well before you build fifteen or twenty. 09:33 to 09:59 A class taught by a Chicago food tour operator put it as a choice: one big circle or many small ones. ATL Cruzers picked one big circle. It still sells a single car tour and two Segway tours, and keeps the menu that short on purpose.
- Skip the stage of building too many tours. It confuses customers and strains your guides and systems. 10:11 to 10:41 The common path is to get excited about every possible market, build far too many tours, and pare them back later. Too many tours confuse the customer and put a load on your guides, systems and operations.
- Put one product on your booking page so visitors go straight to checkout. 10:43 to 11:04 Ask whether a visitor wants to scroll through 18 products or see one. With a single product, visitors spend 10 to 15 seconds on the page and flow straight into the booking process.
- Lengthen a short tour in steps, and add one stop where guests get out. 11:25 to 12:40 The first ATL Cruzers tour ran 30 minutes. It covered three sights every visitor needed (the Margaret Mitchell House, the Martin Luther King sites and Centennial Olympic Park) and the neighborhoods in between. It grew to 45 minutes, then 70, then 90, with a stop where guests get off and experience a site they might not come back to. Getting to 90 minutes took about five years of research and visits to other cities.
- Buy an existing operator to scale up, and keep the small-group feeling as the vehicles get bigger. 12:52 to 14:11 In 2019 ATL Cruzers bought two local trolley companies. Going from five seats to thirty meant far more revenue per departure, and the work was keeping the private-tour feeling of a five-seat car inside a 30-passenger trolley. Peachtree Trolley went from one trolley to four, and its 90-minute sightseeing tour is now the company’s top seller. Segway tours still sell steadily because Segway no longer makes them and guests want to ride one while they can.
- When one brand sells out, refer the guest to your other brand as a local partner. 14:19 to 14:47 ATL Cruzers and Peachtree Trolley cross-promote but keep separate brands and separate marketing. When one site has no availability, it points the guest to the other as another local partner to try. To the guest it reads as a referral, and the booking stays in the family.
- Keep brands separate when they serve different customers and your partners need a simple referral. 14:55 to 15:35 Segway guests and trolley guests are different customers. Two distinct brands let hotel staff, concierges and city ambassadors give a one-line answer: small vehicles at ATL Cruzers, big ones at Peachtree Trolley.
- In a city people visit for other reasons, sell the neighborhoods they would never see on their own. 16:11 to 17:41 Atlanta visitors arrive for a convention, stay downtown near Centennial Park and hit the big attractions. A tour through four or five neighborhoods gives them a story to tell when someone back home asks how Atlanta was. Guests step off saying they never knew how much history was there, how beautiful it was, or that it was a city in a forest. Many come back later with family and friends because of what they saw.
- Park where the crowds already are, and let reviews carry your marketing. 18:19 to 19:30 ATL Cruzers sits across the street from the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola, and its branded trolleys tell passersby a tour runs here. The company has never paid for online marketing. It asks every guest for an honest review and has built a couple thousand on TripAdvisor. You can’t match the big attractions’ ad budgets, but you can match them on reviews: nine times out of ten, guests say they found the company through a Google or TripAdvisor review.
- Get reviews by making every guest feel known, even on a 30-seat trolley. 19:46 to 20:40 (estimated) Guides ask for reviews in a warm, favorable way, and the connection comes first. On the trolley, the guide learns everyone’s name and where they’re from, talks with the group the whole ride, and takes photos and walks with guests at the historic stops. That Southern hospitality is the source of the reviews.
- Travel with your DMO to trade shows to reach groups before they arrive. 20:40 to 21:27 (estimated) Atlanta has the world’s busiest airport and a large international market, plus meetings, incentive and convention groups that book well ahead. ATL Cruzers travels with the city’s DMO to shows to meet those buyers early. It is usually the only tour at the table, and without it buyers hear only about the Braves, the Falcons, the aquarium and the World of Coke.
- Build the DMO relationship by learning before you ask, and expect seven or eight years before it pays. 21:52 to 23:13 Sitting in the visitor center every day meant hearing what visitors asked about the city, and the staff began introducing Stephen to people in marketing. Atlanta’s DMO is pay to play, with paid memberships. It is also the voice of the city to the buyers coming in, so small operators need a seat there. Expect little back in the first two to four years. The return came after seven or eight years of showing up consistently.
- Treat being helpful and present in the industry as a long game. 23:13 to 23:44 Early on, you want every hour to produce bookings. Successful operators keep describing the same slow build instead: show up at events, be a positive presence, help other people, and the business follows years later.
- Take a tour in another city, tell the owner you’re an operator, and go to their meetup. 23:44 to 24:26 On an early trip to San Francisco, the owner of a tour the founders took invited them to a small operator meetup that night. There they saw how San Francisco’s small operators used relationships and partnerships, and they brought the model back to Atlanta. Going to market as a collective has paid off ever since.
- At big trade shows, pitch what buyers leave your city out of. 24:42 to 27:15 IPW is the largest trade show for international buyers bringing groups to the United States. Georgia attends as a state collective, and Atlanta brings five or six partners: transportation, hotels, the DMO and a tour operator. After a first year spent watching appointments, the gap was obvious. Buyers used Atlanta as a place to pick up a car or bus on the way to Savannah, left it off music itineraries built around Nashville, Memphis and New Orleans, and knew only Dr. King when the SCLC and many other civil rights leaders were also based there. As young Black owners, often the only Black operators in those rooms, the founders made a point of being heard and bringing more voices to the table.
- Know your financials cold. It earns credibility in rooms where you are underestimated. 27:32 to 28:49 An accounting background lets you talk numbers with buyers and partners, and finance is usually the part of the business people understand least. That fluency bought legitimacy. Early on, guests met the owner and asked where their guide was, then asked after the tour what his real job was. That reaction became fuel to be the best.
- Grow the industry’s talent pool by showing young people that tours are a career. 29:05 to 30:32 Students now travel young, for sports trips with sightseeing and museum days built in, and that early exposure makes them sharper travelers and future customers. Morehouse College has no hospitality program, and many of its graduates drifted from valet or front desk jobs into hotel sales without ever seeing a career path. Formal or informal, education is the easiest way to bring people from every background into tourism.
- Hospitality programs train for hotels and leave out the storytellers. 30:32 to 31:05 Programs that exist focus on hotels and corporate roles, and treat the rest of the industry as an afterthought. People with an entrepreneurial, storytelling streak who are great with people belong out in the world running tours, and they rarely hear that tours are a job.
- Find the student groups already moving through your city. 32:14 to 33:35 (estimated) Atlanta has six historically Black colleges downtown, and student groups tour Morehouse and Spelman every week. Those groups are run by businesses. When SYTA, the Student Youth Travel Association, met in Savannah, Stephen drove down and attended without taking appointments, just to see how it worked. Back home the market was everywhere: bus tours of students heading to the aquarium, a Braves student night, inbound youth sports teams from other countries.
- Price for student volume, and keep the product short. 33:35 to 34:18 (estimated) Price is the biggest factor for student groups, and a flexible price sets a small operator apart from the big attractions. With groups of 150 to 200, a low price at volume beats an $80 ticket, especially for a 40-minute ride before the group heads to The Varsity for hot dogs.
- Build a separate product for student and corporate groups, because they book early and stick. 34:18 to 35:10 These groups have little time to fill, so they need something quicker than the four-hour tour with lunch. Budgets are small, but the headcount makes up for it: 40 people at $20 is an $800 booking. School trips book far in advance and rarely cancel. Corporate groups can fall apart when one person drops out.
- Research every buyer before a trade show appointment, and keep a pipeline for groups years out. 35:33 to 36:35 Appointments are short, so have the pitch ready. Before the show, study each buyer’s website, reviews and itineraries, and learn what kinds of groups they bring and what they do in a destination. Sellers who only talk about how great their company is never get to what they offer that buyer. In three or four minutes, find out whether the buyer is coming this year, next year, or four or five years out, and track both kinds.
- Keep meeting the same multi-day operators year after year. One good match can bring 10 to 30 groups. 36:35 to 37:15 School tour operators may not book you for the first year or two. When bookings to your city rise, you are already in their database and their memory because they have met you every year. Once you are in a large operator’s itinerary, the scale adds up.
- Pitch your city and your partners at trade shows, along with yourself. 37:15 to 37:59 The student travel community is tight, and one strong relationship brings referrals from everyone that buyer knows. In a smaller market like Atlanta, partners make up the destination. When your tour doesn’t fit a buyer, recommend a walking or food tour that does. A good experience with any partner brings the group back and sends others.
- Pool operators into one visitor hub for big events, and judge it by the gap it reveals as well as the revenue. 38:15 to 39:57 For the eight World Cup matches in Atlanta this summer, ATL Cruzers and the owner of Bicycle Tours of Atlanta set up a shared hub in the new South Downtown area. Eight operators ran out of it, and a wall showed every option, from bike tours and a comedy bus tour to Segways and trolleys. The execution worked and the visitors didn’t come: fans arrived for matches and left right after, so the hub missed its numbers. It showed that Atlanta lacks the central departure point that Savannah and Charleston have in an old freight depot, and it built partnership and accountability among the operators over 30 days.
- For big sporting events, sell food and drink before sightseeing. 39:57 to 40:57 World Cup crowds did far less sightseeing than operators expected, in Atlanta and elsewhere. Downtown Boston pubs ran out of beer, and in Atlanta a line of about 100 people stood outside the sports bar next to the hub every day, drinking while they waited. Operators with food and beverage did well. Next time, a hop-on hop-off ride to the stadium or a designated driver shuttle fits that crowd.
- Use a slow stretch to learn the operators around you. 40:57 to 41:22 The quiet hub gave the operators time to sit together, compare business challenges and find what they could do for each other. If another big event comes, they already know how to execute together.
- Pooled marketing is rare, even though tours in one city rarely overlap. 41:22 to 42:00 Operators are busy and develop tunnel vision, marketing only themselves. Tours in a city are usually distinct from one another, which makes collaborative ways of reaching a wider market and serving it together a natural fit that few cities use.
- Bring every visitor to one place and let them choose among the brands. 42:00 to 42:50 Southern cities like Savannah, Charleston and Nashville have run this way for a long time. Operators agree to get everyone to one spot, then let visitors pick from each brand’s offer. That beats each operator hunting for a few customers on their own.
- Meet the operators in your city, then find where you can collaborate and still compete. 43:31 to 44:31 At Tourpreneur gatherings around the world, a robust local operator group is rare. More often, operators know each other’s websites and tours and have never met. Once they do, they find overlaps. Eight operators working together can act as a DMC: bring in a large inbound contract and serve it across all of their tours in a coordinated way.
- A collective gives small operators credibility, legitimacy and buying power. Make sure no one feels shut out. 44:31 to 45:11 The Atlanta operators are already discussing what a formal collective would look like. Together they have more credibility and financial power than any one of them alone. The risk is alienating operators left outside, so tell everyone in the market that the opportunity exists.
- A cooperative is a third way between chasing direct bookings alone and renting your business to the OTAs. 45:11 to 46:27 One path is gaming SEO for direct bookings. The other is outsourcing the business to OTAs and working on rented land. A cooperative reaches a broad audience, serves customers better when the tours don’t overlap, and gains organizational power. A meeting planner with a big convention wants one contact, and a rep who works for the cooperative can take the request and parcel it out.
- When a planner has more people than you can carry, send the rest to your partners. 46:27 to 47:16 Event planners regularly have 500 people for an operator who can take 90. Having partners ready means you can answer the other 400. The same logic works with locals: suburban and metro residents will only take your tour so many times, but a shared ecosystem keeps them coming back for a bike tour or another partner’s tour.
- Fit convention groups into the free windows in their schedule. 47:25 to 48:02 Student travel is the newest market for ATL Cruzers, and conventions are getting more attention. Attendees are tied up for big blocks of the day and get out only in short gaps. Working with the DMO, the company built ways to get attendees out of downtown during that free time without competing with the conference program.
- Reach corporate clients through HR, then go deep inside each company. 48:34 to 49:35 (estimated) SHRM, the HR managers’ association, connects you to the people who book meetings for executives at companies like Google, Coca-Cola and Home Depot. Once you’re inside a company, work referrals within it before moving on. One Google recommendation led to another, and that chain has brought four years of Google groups. A ConferenceDirect membership puts you in front of meeting planners bringing groups from around the world.
- Go to industry happy hours and pitch team outings and rolling happy hours. 49:35 to 50:42 (estimated) Any industry happy hour is full of people who have coworkers. Ask what they do together as a team, then offer a team building outing or a pickup after their meeting to see the city. Drinks on the trolley make it a rolling happy hour that drops them back where they started.
- Tap meetups that other people already organize. 50:42 to 51:17 Eventbrite emails list industry meetups in journalism, photography and other fields. A group of photographers who want to shoot around Atlanta needs a vehicle that reaches all the spots. Look for groups gathering for their own reasons and offer them a way to do it together.
- Stay consistent, give customers what they ask for, and read the bad reviews closely. 51:58 to 52:33 After sixteen years, consistency is the biggest factor. Provide what customers are looking for, even when it differs from what you want them to have. Reviews are the clearest measure of how you’re doing, and bad ones show exactly where you missed. Relationships do the rest.