Alejandro Velásquez has been running live virtual tours for US public libraries every week since COVID, and it’s his primary income.
Tour operators already have the expertise, the routes, and the stories. Tour 27 is built on the idea that all of that can generate revenue on days when nobody is standing in front of you. Lucas Davies founded the platform to let guides run live virtual tours as a standalone product: a paying remote audience watches in real time, asks questions, and gets a genuine guided experience from wherever they are. Alejandro Velásquez, a Costa Rica-based guide with 30 years in the field, has been doing this weekly for US public libraries since COVID. It’s now his primary income source.
The model sits alongside in-person tours, not instead of them. Operators can run pure virtual sessions during the down season, when local foot traffic disappears but a global online audience doesn’t care about the weather. Education operators can reach schools they could never physically visit. Multi-day operators can run a $4.99 virtual session to warm a group toward a $14,000 booking. Operators who want to test the hybrid model can stream a live in-person departure to a remote paying audience at the same time. One departure, two revenue streams, no extra guide required.
Takeaways
- The revenue math on a single departure changes when you add a remote audience. [00:05:31 to 00:08:04] Twenty people paying $50 fills an in-person tour for $1,000. Adding 50 to 100 remote viewers at $10 each produces an additional $500 to $1,000 from the same departure, without adding to the physical group size. The remote audience watches live through a camera setup the guide carries; the guide’s job on the ground doesn’t change. Lucas frames this as adding the effort of one extra person while multiplying revenue by 50 to 100 percent.
- Virtual tours don’t compete with in-person travel. They serve a different market entirely. [00:14:26 to 00:17:31] Alejandro put it directly: no family is going to unpack its bags and cancel a Costa Rica trip because they did a one-hour virtual tour. The audience for remote access is primarily people who can’t travel, not people choosing it over travel. That audience is vast: Pete cited 1.8 billion annual travellers against roughly 7 billion people who don’t travel at all, many of whom have genuine interest in experiencing destinations they can’t reach.
- The accessible-market origin story shapes the entire product design. [00:00:44 to 00:02:22] Lucas built Tour 27 because of a conversation with his nephew, who has cerebral palsy and is in an electric wheelchair. The platform’s design reflects that origin: it’s built to bring experiences to people who can’t physically get there. Aged care homes and disability facilities in Melbourne are among Tour 27’s highest-adoption markets, which points to where operators should look first when considering their own remote audience.
- Alejandro went from no income to a full weekly schedule during COVID by pivoting to Zoom. [00:02:25 to 00:05:06] When tourism in Costa Rica stopped overnight, Alejandro contacted US public libraries and public organizations and began running live virtual tours. The participants were immediately responsive: they had nothing to do and were actively looking for real experiences to attend. Libraries across all US states are now his core weekly client, and that has been true for six years.
- Most guides refused to adapt during COVID, which created a lasting advantage for the ones who did. [00:11:58 to 00:14:04] When Alejandro asked other guides why they weren’t pivoting to virtual tours, the typical answer was that it felt weird. Most preferred to wait for the pandemic to end. The guides who moved into the format early accumulated years of practice in live virtual delivery while their peers waited. That head start in a still-emerging market is significant.
- The setup is genuinely minimal. [00:11:09 to 00:11:52] A stabilizing gimbal for the phone, a Bluetooth microphone for clean audio, and a battery pack for longer sessions. Starlink has made remote locations viable. Most virtual tours run 45 minutes to an hour. The barrier to entry from an equipment standpoint is low, and the total outlay is a fraction of what most operators spend on marketing.
- Breaking the recording instinct is the hardest guide skill to develop. [00:28:16 to 00:31:59] The instinct when guiding on camera is to act as though you’re filming something you can edit. The reality is that 50 or 400 people are watching in real time, and anything said incorrectly is live. Alejandro’s method is repetition: only by doing many virtual tours does the muscle memory shift to treating the remote audience as present. He once had 450 people attend a tour of a volcano in Costa Rica.
- Virtual attendees have Google open and will notice if facts don’t hold up. [00:28:16 to 00:31:59] In-person guides can tell a group they’ll follow up with an answer at the hotel that night. Virtual guides don’t have that option. Participants at home have access to books, Wikipedia, and search engines in real time, and some are professionals in the topics they’re asking about. Alejandro says he has to study more now than he did in 30 years of in-person guiding.
- Hago proved the market exists and proved that tip-only pricing fails. [00:21:39 to 00:25:54] At its peak, Hago had half a million monthly unique visitors and guides were making hundreds of dollars per tour. When COVID numbers dropped, tipping revenue fell, guides earned less, Hago couldn’t sustain the operation, and the platform collapsed. Guides migrated to YouTube but lost the centralized marketplace that had been pooling audiences. The demand was real; the business model wasn’t.
- Tour 27’s pricing model: upfront payment from the start, first 10 minutes free on YouTube. [00:23:48 to 00:26:23] The first 10 minutes of every session stream free on YouTube and embedded on the platform, giving the audience a taste. After 10 minutes, the session moves to a paid model starting at $4.99. Alejandro is direct about the principle: you can’t go to a concert and refuse to pay because you didn’t like the singer. Guides need to be paid for their work, even at a very low price point.
- The centralized marketplace is the structural advantage over running tours through YouTube. [00:26:36 to 00:27:37] When Hago collapsed, guides moved to YouTube but lost the shared-audience effect. A guide on YouTube builds their own following in isolation. A guide on a centralized platform brings their audience to the marketplace and benefits from every other guide’s audience as well. Tour 27’s goal is to rebuild that centralized environment with a sustainable payment model underneath it.
- The family-on-the-cruise use case has already happened in practice. [00:20:06 to 00:21:26] A family arrived in person for a city tour with Alejandro. He suggested calling the US-based relatives via Zoom and running the tour simultaneously for both the in-person group and the remote family members. Four people walked the streets of Costa Rica while several others in the United States experienced the same tour in real time, asking questions and interacting. It worked cleanly.
- Multi-day operators should view virtual tours as a conversion tool. [00:17:31 to 00:19:37] Pete’s framing: a one-hour virtual tour at $4.99 is a low-friction way to warm potential customers toward a $14,000 multi-day booking. In multi-day, the same clients often rebook over five to ten year spans. Investing in a low-cost virtual experience that builds familiarity with a destination and a guide is a logical top-of-funnel move that costs the operator almost nothing to run.
- The education sector is almost entirely untouched. [00:32:27 to 00:36:48] Alejandro has worked with two or three schools in six years, including a science class in New York focused on global warming’s effects on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Curriculum-based topics like botany, geology, biology, and history map directly onto what expert guides already know. Students can be called on by name mid-tour, which creates classroom-style engagement. Education tour companies that already have school relationships can use virtual offerings to reach far more schools than live logistics allow.
- Tour guides who specialize make stronger virtual instructors than guides who just narrate. [00:35:20 to 00:36:48] Alejandro’s background is biochemistry; many European guides have deep expertise in history, archaeology, or architecture. Virtual delivery puts that specialization in front of teachers who are selecting educational partners. A guide who can speak with authority on a curriculum-relevant topic is not competing with a standard tour operator; they’re filling a role closer to a guest lecturer, which opens entirely different doors.
- Virtual tours have no seasonality. [00:37:20 to 00:39:05] Online audiences don’t care whether it’s the local off-season or whether the weather is bad. A guide willing to work through the quiet months has access to a global audience year-round. Lucas’s specific framing: the down season is when operators have the time to experiment and the income motivation to try something new, which makes it the ideal window to run a pilot.
- Tour 27 offers a structured onboarding and training pathway. [00:37:20 to 00:39:05] Alejandro runs induction sessions for every guide who joins. Tour 27 has built simulation websites that walk a guide through a full tour of the app, including a simulated session, before they go live. The model is low-pressure: guides set their own schedule, do tours when it suits them, and can start with a small number of sessions to see whether it works for their business.
- The guest-to-in-person conversion has already happened organically. [00:14:26 to 00:17:31] People who do a virtual tour with Alejandro in Costa Rica sometimes contact him later to book an in-person tour when they visit. The virtual session builds a relationship with a specific guide in a specific place. If a participant later travels to that destination, their first option is likely the guide they already know. No operator needs to set up a formal funnel for this to happen; it follows from doing good virtual tours.
- Operators can pilot with just a few departures before committing. [00:37:20 to 00:39:05] Lucas’s recommended approach: identify which tours attract the strongest interest, decide which ones could support a remote audience, test a small number of live sessions alongside normal departures, and evaluate whether the incremental revenue justifies continuing. Tour 27 doesn’t require a long-term commitment or a high volume to get started, and the training resources are available before a guide does their first session.
- Tour 27 was just going live to the public at the time of this session. [00:26:36] Their tours to that point had been business-to-business focused. Alejandro was running Tour 27’s first public tour that Saturday. Guides who join now are getting in while the founders are directly accessible and the platform’s audience is still forming. The centralized marketplace effect compounds as the audience grows, which means early participants benefit disproportionately from the network they help build.