Unknown: Well. Hey there, everybody. Welcome to Gather and Go the podcast that helps you plan, promote and lead better trips. I'm Brian Jewell. I am your host and I am genuinely excited that you decided to spend some of your time with us today. And as always, our promise to you is that we're going to do everything we can to make that investment of your time worth your while. Now, today we have a featured interview with Kelsey TONER of Guest Focus. If you don't know Kelsey and his company, he is a thought leader with a couple of decades experience in the multi-day guided tour space, and he has helped thousands of tour companies like yours all around the world to become better and more profitable. And he has so much good stuff to share with you guys. I cannot wait for us to get to that featured conversation. Now, I'll be honest with you, most of the time, in most of our episodes, our featured conversations are about half an hour long. That's the the time period that I shoot for in those interviews. Occasionally one goes over a little bit and we either leave a couple extra minutes in there or we might edit it down to the best half hour we can get to. But Kelsey had so much good stuff to say. I just couldn't bear to cut any of it out. And I couldn't bear to cut it short. So what we're going to do on this episode is jump straight in to that featured conversation with Kelsey. So you don't need to worry about listening to me because I would rather you listen to what he has to say. And as we get into that, just a reminder, you don't need to worry about taking notes, because as we go, I'm taking notes for you. I'm going to come back at the end of the interview with a recap of some of the most important things Kelsey had to say. And of course, that will also be in the show notes that accompany this episode in your podcast player or on our website at Group Travel Leader. Com. So let's jump right in to our featured conversation with Kelsey TONER. All right, everybody. My guest today is a group travel expert on a mission to help fill the world with unforgettable experiences. He spent more than two decades in tourism, working in roles from guide and tour director to tour designer, trainer and more. He's the founder of Guest Focus, a coaching and consulting organization that helps tour companies around the world hone their products and messaging to become more successful. Kelsey Turner, welcome to the podcast. It's great to be here with you, Brian. I am so excited to have you here. I've been following your work for a while and there's so much value in what you do. I'm really excited for our audience to get to meet you and learn about it before we get into all that, though. 20 years in tourism, all kinds of jobs. Tell us how you got involved in leading tours, because that's not something that many people start right out of college. That's right. So essentially after university, I grew up in Nova Scotia, Canada, because I had gone straight through basically from high school into university. Even though I graduated with this lovely degree in political science and international development, I was just really looking for any opportunities that allowed me to travel the world, have new experience experiences, and meet amazing new people. And so I took all kinds of really interesting jobs from I was a dog sledding guide in the Canadian Rockies. I did high ropes courses and canoe trips in Australia and eventually picked up with a company called Backroads Tours who did active travel tours. So basically hiking, cycling, multi-sport adventures all over the world and end up probably a five years working with that company, which was a really incredible exposure to the world of group travel and especially the amazing tour leaders and experience providers around the around the world. Yeah. That's amazing. So you went all over the world, you worked with other guides. You saw things that people were doing. Well, I imagine you saw some things that people were maybe not doing as well. So how did that experience lead you to launch the company you have now, I guess focus. Yeah. So essentially after those five or six years, which really, as you mentioned, began with tour leading. But as we got more experienced and more skilled, we then started getting into tour leader training, you know, onboarding new hosts. We got into trip design. I spent because I speak French and did sort of French immersion growing up in Canada. I spent a lot of time in France working on our Air France trips. How can we move these from a great quality school all the way up to something that's exceptional? And so that tour design element was was really rewarding. And so from there, basically, long story short, I met an amazing woman. We want to get married and have kids. It's tough to do that from the back of a bicycle, I like to say. So essentially we were looking for a career transition and we saw, wow, did we just get a world class education on things to do and things not to do and and group travel. And so we launched at that time called ourselves Be a Better Guide. And we had created a lot of online training, a community of guides and tour leaders from around the world who were all motivated to create the most incredible experiences possible. And then that essentially evolved into working more and more with tour businesses and ultimately our sort of rebrand into guest focus. So I imagine after all these years of working with, you know, thousands of tour companies around the country, around the world, nothing surprises you anymore. You've seen a lot of great things. You've seen a lot of common mistakes, things that come up over and over. I'm curious what what are some of those common mistakes that tour operators are making today or were making when you were, you know, in the trenches with them? That led you to think, gosh, there's got to be a better way to do some of these things. Yeah, you better. I think you're probably speaking to as part of our methodology, I guess you could say when we really started looking at, okay, what are the most successful both multi-day and single day tour companies doing? You know, we really got into that gear for everything from, you know, tours designed to their sales pages to how they were presenting their itineraries to the marketing and sales funnels and and broke down those best practices. And then that's ultimately where we put into our, our coaching program here with guest focus. But we put this in sort of an end to end formula that we call the guest focus formula. And it really boils back down to this single most important insight, which is if we really want to serve people at the highest possible level, if we really want to have a kind of like a product market fit between our group tours and the individuals who are buying them, we need to be super specific with the individuals that we're selling to. Another way that classic hang of the rich is in the niches, but that, I would say, is one of the biggest mistakes that we see operators makes. And here's a super short story. So I do a lot of these strategy calls with multi-day tour operators around the world, and this woman came on and she had this incredible idea for a, you know, health and wellness retreats. And I said, okay, who's your ideal target guest now? Who is this retreat really for? And she started listing off probably about ten different ideal target guests that she could have been serving. But one was, oh, well, this is for, you know, women who are in the corporate world and they work really hard, but they're just very A-type personalities and they need to detach and find themselves again. This is also for that, you know, women who who maybe just their kids are going off to school and, you know, they've been a mom their whole life and they need to find their identity yet. But it's also for women who just went recently, went through a bad breakup. And I can stop there and we can see here this this mistake kind of unfolding that if you really want to serve any one of those just three example categories the highest possible level and have a retreat and a healing experience and activities and things to do during that group tour that are going to really wow and delight those people that are really going to have them come away transformed and create that memory of a lifetime. We need to focus in on just one of those because if we if we tried to be too many things to too many people, we end up serving no one well. And we kind of fall into this broader category of bland, generic, multi-day tours of which the world is is full at present. Yeah. So as I hear you talk about that. My first thought is, gee, I thought a women's focused wellness retreat was already a pretty niche idea. You know, like, that's that's only a segment of the tour market. So you're really advocating, like, a micro micro niche, right? I mean, like, really, really dig down. Is that is that what I'm hearing you say? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And we sometimes, you know, think about these broad categories. You ask people about they're you know, there's different language for this. We love the term ideal target guest because it keeps in mind that we are in the hospitality space. You treat a guest very differently than sometimes we treat a customer. But that customer avatar is the same concept. So people sometimes talk about their customer avatars and you know, there's some 700 million people that might fall into that You know, this is four well, baby boomers who love active travel and cultural exploration. And you're like, oh, my God, you know, this is a massive, massive market. You there's lots of different ways that you can niche down, like you said, it could be geographically, okay, I'm going to serve specifically people from that demographic, but from British Columbia. Well, well, guess what? That opens up a whole lot of opportunities in terms of your marketing strategies, right. Where. Okay, now I have a much more targeted question. How can I get my offers, my tours, my experiences in front of people within that particular demographic, within that particular region? Well, now I can zero in on opportunities that might make sense for people who live in the Vancouver area over who might have be in Facebook groups that are dedicated to that particular region. There might be publications that serve, but all of those are efficiencies to get in front of this niches. And I think this is so counterintuitive because most people start out and the thing is, well, the way that I'm going to grow my business is I'm going to serve as broadly as possible. I don't want people to feel like, Oh, this tour isn't for them because it would be great for them. My tour is perfect for everyone. You talk to most operators, so like this tour is perfect for every visitor who comes through Nashville. You got to thinking like, well, I'm guessing that I can make a hell of a lot better tour for families with like Mike myself, with three kids under five, what I'm looking for a family friendly experience at a natural versus, you know, the baby boomers versus the German backpacker versus, you know, somebody on a spring break think those are people looking for very different experiences. And what's once you kind of key into that insight, you start to appreciate just how profitable a tour business you can build off of a very small number of guests. I love that. I think a lot of entrepreneurs get into business based more on gut instinct than on data, right? They've got an idea. They feel like it's going to work. That's probably part of what it takes to be an entrepreneur, is you're willing to to take a jump based on a gut feeling. So the travel company owner, the tour operator that took that leap, let's say two years ago or five years ago, and has just been kind of doing their marketing catch as catch can and bringing in whoever they can bring in. How do they take the steps from everything based on the gut to actually doing the work at gathering the data, getting the intelligence to develop that really specific customer? Avatar Yeah, great question. This is a lot of what we do in in our coaching program every day. You know, our coaches are taking in these businesses that are making a lot of these common mistakes. And they're wondering like, Hey, why am I not breaking through? Why am I not resonating? You know, I get a lot of leads, but I'm having trouble closing them. I just can't get the deposits. And very often, you know, you'll be hiring and working with marketing agencies or people that are telling you, Oh, well, the real trick is this latest marketing hack. Oh, well, yeah, you just have to activate this channel. And the point that we really try to hit home with this guest focus formula is that we need to go back to this more fundamental route. And so your question is actually spot on. How do I choose an effective niche? And then how do I actually deeply understand and serve that particular niche? So maybe just for listeners who've got in a program, we talk about these five great criteria for choosing an effective niche. I'll just go through a couple of them because that will give people a little bit of insight into this. But no doubt, one is this sort of like sufficient seasonal or year round presence now for multi-day tour companies who are going outbound. You know, this might look a little bit differently, but we think about, for example, Germans who seasonally visit Majorca. There is a big market. They are seasonally there. They are interested in multi-day experiences. It's kind of like the snowbirds here in North America, while Germans, they go to the Balearic Islands, they go down there. So that would be a great example of a profitable niche because we know that they're coming consistently year after year. And that would be another example of a great criteria for choosing effectiveness. Is there a possibility of reoccurring income? Will this group be willing to return and buy from you again? And specifically in group travel? I would say that's going to be a. Pretty key element that we're going to be looking for. But instead of spending all of our time on some of those criteria, let's look at the next key step, which is it's one thing to write that all out on paper and then say, okay, I have this down further. I'm not going to make that mistake that Kelsey said the next mistake is not doing any sort of customer research. We just simply call this a deep dove. And, you know, this doesn't have to be a big process, but it's like if I want to design the best possible tour for you, Brian, I would get you on the phone. I would probably ask you a couple of questions. And what we teach, what we coach is that there's two or three really specific questions that we want to be asking, and the first one that we'll leave it at this. But the single most important question, as we like to call it, is asking about your challenges and frustrations. And so this is the key question that you can ask the people that you're looking to serve. So what are your biggest challenges or frustrations when it comes to? And then you can sort of insert, you know, when it comes to experiencing a health and wellness retreat in whatever Rica, when it comes to having the perfect family experience in France over spring break, you can insert your niche there. But by focusing in on what people don't like, their frustrations, the things that drive them crazy, you can start to assemble an offer. You could start to assemble a tour that's going to take care of every single one of those things. You're going to give them the easy button you're going to try and eliminate. We don't like talking about problems of frustrations. You try to travel and a lot of the I don't know, the marketing, you see the tour descriptions, it's all very aspirational and positive. But we have to keep in mind that travel is just rife with challenges, with frustrations, not being comfortable out of our element. There's all kinds of stress that goes along with these travel ailments, and the better you can understand what people are really struggling with, the better you can make that offer. And then the second question we ask, which is really just the flip side, is the dream scenario question. If we could design if I could design for you, Brian, the perfect week long tour to southern France. This is what would that look like? Describe that to me. What would the dream scenario be? And this is so key to record these conversations. You can do it over Zoom and make sure you're keeping recordings because what you're getting there is the customer language. I'm getting you to describe exactly what you want in the words that you would use. And when I'm going to create sales materials, what I'm going to create tour descriptions, guess what? Well, I can draw from that guess deep dove, that customer research. I can draw on the exact words that you use that you told me that you were looking for. And so I can come back to this. I guess what, Brian? I've gone ahead. I've taken your advice. This is what I put together. Let me know what you think. Yeah, that's. That's brilliant. I love that. I've been on dozens of multi-day tours with all kinds of different operators, large and small, over the years. And many, many of them have the post tour survey. And I feel like the questions are very similar. Most of the time they want me to rate the hotel property. It's maybe name one or two favorite attractions, give feedback on the guide. You know, if there's if I had any issues, there's a place to leave comments about that. But it sounds like the questions and the research you're talking about is a pretty different animal from that post tour survey. So for people that have been used to doing that survey, describe maybe the strengths and limitations of that survey versus this more in-depth interview style conversation that you're talking about. Yeah, I want to emphasize the guest focus formula is really about being guest obsessed. So that post tour feedback form, we want to be just as obsessed about it. So that is a key tool in your belt, right, that you want to be leveraging and you want to be using that. That type of feedback is incredibly profound in terms of, Hey, what did you love? What did you hate, what? What can we do better? And I love breaking it out by those different categories so much of the time. Well, obviously, that post or survey is happening way after the fact. Right. And so part of that guest focus formula is this guest focused tour design. It's it's really trying to have that conversation and it could be an interview style. We actually show three. So one is the interview, so the other is the survey style. So if you have a an email list or you have some past customers, we have a template survey. But basically that's a great way to solicit lots of information from past customers, especially if they're your ideal target customer. And thirdly, we actually have this. There's actually a fourth way that we're introducing. I'll give you a sneak peek. But the third way is a stealth research where essentially I can go to communities. There's a great example from our program, Walter, and so Walter does multi-day tours over in Ireland, Walter's Way tours, and Walter spent a lot of time in Facebook groups for Americans who are planning their multi-day trips, a lot of self-guided trips to Ireland. And so he would spend time in those groups looking at, hey, what are the common questions? What are the. Pain points. What are people asking about? People are wondering about all kinds of, you know, is this going to be too much driving? Is this castle worth it? I only have so much time. And so he was able to, in a stealth way, just by participating in forums, Reddit communities, meet ups, Facebook groups. These are all great places to go and find where your ideal target guests are having conversations and you can glean just a ton of information. And that fourth way really is now with A.I is incredible what you can do with something like chat CBT when you focus those large language models on a particular niche, particular topic and a particular set of challenges. So there's now lots of ways that we can come at that before we actually get into the design of the tour. Something that makes sense. It's really this sometimes putting that cart before the horse. If you want to get that product market fit, you want to out care your competition. You want someone to appreciate that this tour has been desire designed as best as I possibly could around your needs and want specifically for someone just like you. And when people feel that, that's when they pull out their credit cards. That's when you get that product market fit. And when you get that, that solves so many problems that are going on down down the line when it comes to, hey, how do I rate effective sales pages? Hey, how do I have effective marketing campaigns? All that just got a hell of a lot easier because you've got the product market fit, right? Yeah, I love that. So let's say I have gone through that process and I run, you know, tours down to New Orleans or the Gulf Coast. Let's say I've identified my customer, I've done some research. Once I hear those pain points and figure out what they really want, how is that going to change that standard three or four night New Orleans product that I'm offering? How how am I going to build something that is different than the 20 other companies that are offering a very similar product? Yeah, hopefully this story will be relevant. But I took my young family out to Nova Scotia last summer and we came across a cafe that was catering towards families with young kids. And if you haven't seen one of these cafes before, I had never seen one before. It was amazing. They had a half of the cafe was this sort of indoor playground space. They had all the sockets covered up. They had an older kids area where there were like bits of Lego that were kept away from where my toddlers were going to be. So they weren't going to choke on that. They had star shaped plates with like kid food, kid friendly food, right? The cut up vegetables and hummus and was healthy. And then they had this amazing coffee and sort of bistro for the parents and adults. And I just want to compare or contrast the experience of my family going to that cafe versus the Starbucks or versus the coffee shop down the road. And we're thinking about it's like an order of magnitude better experience. But specifically for me, keep in mind, if you are working on your book or you're trying to catch up with an old friend and you come in to that cafe for the last thing that you want to do is have all my snot nosed kids running around and they're screaming that there's leg and back Lego bouncing off your head and like, this has been a nightmare for so many people. And so this is a nice way to kind of flip the script a little bit. Like you're asking the question, Well, how can I differentiate my tour and a great goalpost? Is that your tour should actually be if you're doing this well, sort of your your tour should be uninteresting or unappealing to the majority of visitors to that destination. That's when you're zooming in and you've you're actually customizing the design of your tour around the customer. And this applies across tons of hugely profitable niches. Let's give two more quick examples. So I was in the active travel space, right, where these people's idea of a holiday is, okay, we fly across the world, we bike around Tuscany in the middle of the summer. We take a tiny plastic seat, we shove it up your butt and you ride, you know, 100 miles a day, day after day, for six days in a row. Many people this is like a definition of hell, right? This is literally the punishment we can serve to people. So that type of biking tour, biking holiday is going to be unappealing to a ton of people. But there are huge numbers of people that that is exactly what they're looking for and all the benefits of active travel, the fact that I can slow and stop whenever I want. Being immersed and powering ourselves and the natural high that might come with exercise, they're all drawn to that. Another thing, the Lord of the Rings tours in New Zealand, right? Most people on the planet probably don't really want to go with a bunch of nerds and like dress up in costumes and like visit movie sites and we've got swords and there might even be role play. Like, that's going to be way too much for the vast majority of people. But you can see how and I mean, there's no news to anyone that that is a multimillion dollar industry of tourism based around these niche interests, around these niche things. So that's a great bar or standard. Is my tour unappealing or uninteresting to the majority of business, this destination? And that's got to be super appealing to that tiny niche, no question. But that's a great that's a great bar to measure yourself by. Yeah. Talk to me about the impact that small touches can make, because I hear you talking about that cafe. Some of the details you shared are very small. You know, the Legos are separate from the preschool area, important to parents, but it seems like a small thing. So to the tour company owner who says, I have limited resources, I can only charge so much for for my product, I can't, you know, blow it out on, you know, super memorable meals are amazing properties. How do you use the power of details to deliver that customer experience? That's got to make the customer perceive value and want to come back again. Yeah. I think this boils back down to this about caring your competition and really diving into their dream scenarios and pain points. And you'll be amazed once you start doing these guest deep dove surveys that you're on. You're on the lookout as a smart business owner and small smart group travel planner for those tiny little details that oftentimes are not hugely expensive but make the biggest difference. And so we're actively looking out for those for the small items. Is there any other particular tactics that I would say are are great for that? No question. I would say the that postwar survey is also a great tool for calibrating. So when we were working with multi-day tour companies, you know, breaking out, hey, how is this particular how is this this particular element of the tour and how would you rank it? And leaving space for, hey, how could this have been better? So many companies aren't really getting into that level of detail with those poster forms or they're like, you know, they're dashing them off and they're just numbers. So that's one way I can tell a short story about how we did this in the south of France by Russia wasn't so France, it was in Burgundy. We had a wine tasting experience. And those are have traveled in France and I've seen parts of North America, too. But that wine tasting experience is very phoned in. I feel like most of the time they're fairly interchangeable. It is. And so what I was looking to do, I was motivated by creating a memory of a lifetime. I was wanting to. Okay. You get me to cough up all the secrets we have inside of our coaching? Here's. Here's one. Three things that you can look for special people, special moments and special access. These are three things that can really elevate the guest experience, can elevate the perceived value of your tour. And so the special access. We're staying at the chateau. And I said, Look, we want a better venue. What have we got? And we kind of walked around and sure enough, there was this 800 year old cellar that was like on the property. They weren't using it because it wasn't up to the modern wine storage standards, but it was this very kind of dingy quality cobwebs. But we saw the potential and so we put the wine barrel down in there, we put the candle lights on the wall, we cleaned it up, we processed guests like, Hey, it's going to be a little bit damp down here. But this is now a we're having our wine tasting experience inside of this ancient cellar. So right away we've got this special access, the special moments, right, where we have this this atmosphere that we've created with the candlelight. Yeah, that's wonderful. I want to have you dove in a little bit more is something that you have mentioned that I know is a pain point for many listeners, which is they've done the work, they've built that amazing trip that's going to serve a specific clientele very, very well. Then they have to do the marketing. They have to write the tour description either for their catalogs or for the newsletters they're going to send or for a page on their website. And, you know, these are our travel experts. They're not marketing experts. They're not writing experts. And some of them who, you know, take a look at their web analytics often are just driven crazy because they see so many people come to the pages and then leave without booking. So after you've done all that preliminary work, how do you close the loop? By putting together really compelling descriptions that will get people essentially the click purchase. Well, what's great is I've kind of given you a bit of a. Giving you a little insight of what that copyrighting process looks like. But no question, most tour business owners and travel organizers, we don't have a background in e-commerce. We don't have formal sales training. And most of us are not formal copywriters. Right. And so this is a huge pain point for a lot of people. And I empathize with with anyone who's felt that. Sitting there staring at a blank page or a cursor or rewriting things, crumpling it up in the digital age. So what we did, what we have in our in our coaching program is essentially this. We broken it down into 12 elements. So any great group tour sales page is going to have these 12 essential elements. And we think we can go through a couple just to give people a sense of why these what these elements are and why they're so important. Example, of course, is media. Like just I'm just pulling out of these 12. Let's talk about a couple. Just give people some inspiration. So we have a number of best practices with the images that we're choosing for our tourism activities and the conversion rate, meaning how likely people are to take the next step in the sales process. To convert on that actual sales page is hugely tied to the images and videos that we put on there. And I would say the most common mistake we see in this area is very generic stock footage is of chateaux, of animals, of landscapes. I mean, any group tour you look at this and some oftentimes it's 90% of the images are these generic. And they don't show who. They don't show the ideal target guest. So our guideline take this year on this is we want to have at least 50% of our images of smiling guests, specifically your ideal target guests. I want to see myself reflected in it. So if I'm a baby boomer and that's who you're trying to serve, I don't want to see pictures of young kids having this experience. I want to see myself and be able to imagine me in the experience. So smiling guests having a great time and guides as well. So smiling. Yes. And guides 50% of the photos and then the other 50% and of course, be those lovely, ideally high quality, high resolution photos of some of the things we might see from animals to buildings. But we're really making a mistake if we're not showing this, guys, and it can be tough in the early stages. Hey, I don't have those photos yet, so we do the best we can. But the first time that you have guests or the next trip that you've got going out, get a photographer on that on that trip Another quick element, I would say things like reasons to act now and risk reversal are often absent. So reasons to act now is this whole concept in sales that you probably at least a little bit familiar with having to do with scarcity, having to do with urgency. And with group tours, we have such great natural in-built scarcity. There are only so many seats, there's only a limited number of departures. But we're simply not emphasizing this enough on our sales pages, the risk reversal elements in terms of basically any time we're going to make a purchase, we're concerned about, hey, could I get this cheaper elsewhere? What if I changed my mind? And what if this thing sucks, right? These are all risks that someone's weighing in their head, whether looking at your page. And so we can counter some of those with guarantees, with having our policies nice and clear, like a clear cancelation policy and framing that in a very customer friendly way So free cancelation up to carry out a 14 day cool off period. So for the next 14 days, if you change your mind, no problem whatsoever, you can see how we're reversing risk and we're increasing the likelihood that they're going to take the next step in that sales funnel or convert. Yeah, the yeah, there's a few other elements, but basically we break that down step by step. And yeah, I would say that other common mistake is just this sort of dry logistical overview of your group. Tour itineraries drive me crazy because they're like, We're going to go here, we're going to look at this, then we're going to go to this, then we're going to go to this. Then I go to this and it it's really a bit of a buzzkill, right? It's sort of that logistical overview. Some of that logistical information is essential. Yes. But we really want to involve this future pacing. So in another section we talk about magic moments is the last element I'll share. How can you actually let's just let's just do an example because I think in the in our this workbook for tour descriptions and we're actually we're talking with Brian and just as a gift, we're actually going to give give this away to all the listeners just as a little taste. They hope you all can to go in and use these 12 different elements, work on your sales pages and increase increase sales for your company, increase conversion rate. So we'll be sure to tell you how you can get your hands on this. But one thing I want to focus on here is, yeah, here it is, Provence to the French Riviera. This is a walking tour notice. This is how they begin their tour description. I want you to pay close attention. Beauty may be what first brought pleasure seekers to this rocky shore, but southern France is something you indulge in with all your sins. The song of the cicadas, the scent of lavender farms, the beating sun of the trail broken by a plunge into a sea cove. Or maybe the first juicy bite of a cool apricot wild provence, the chic Riviera are beginning to end. It's a feast. Wow. What we are doing in that paragraph is we're highlighting the magic moments that you are going to have on this tour. And how clearly could I imagine myself in each one of those moments, smelling the lavender, hearing the cicadas that plunge into the Mediterranean? And that's how they're beginning that. That's a multi-day tour over like seven, like six, seven days. I could put anything I want at the beginning, but that's cool. That's one of those elements is we're looking for those magic moments and future pacing. Yeah, huge difference versus that logistical. Okay, we start here, then we pick you up, then we move you here, then you're going to be at this and you get to look at this. So that's what we're talking about. And with the power of TATP, it's amazing some of the copyrighting that we're now having. I based off of these best practices, we're able to implement this without having to hire a copywriter. So it's a pretty amazing age that we're living in right now. Yeah, that's incredible. All right. So you have this really fantastic resource you shared with me ahead of time. I've been through it. It's like 40 pages long. I mean, really in-depth. This is this is not one of those little cheap things that people give away to capture your email address. This is super, super helpful information. The resource is called the Irresistible Tour Descriptions Workbook and tell people where they can get it. Yeah. If you go to our website and we've got a special URL. Guest focus dot com forward slash group travel this one word. Guest focus dot com forward slash group travel. And then you can get your hands on this on this workbook. And like I said, put it, put it to work. And I think it'll be inspired by really having a step by step process to improve your tour description instead of whatever, combing through hundreds of different blog posts and internet things. We put a lot of work into this. And if you follow it and you'll, you'll, you'll definitely see an increase in the conversion rates on your sales pages. Yeah, that's wonderful. What you guys put out so much great content, much of it available free. I know you have a YouTube video series, similar things, blog posts. You also offer opportunities for people to get on the phone with one of your highly trained expert coaches. So what does that process look like and what kind of commitment is involved? Yeah, sure. So so that's basically the second open offer we had. We we now have a team of 12 tour and activity business coaches who've all built and grown their own profitable tour businesses. And some of them have sold them. Some of them started new ones, but along the way they all had mentors and coaches. And so we've been able to to round out this really incredible group of people who are all excited about giving back through this guest focused coaching program. So it's a combination of having access to those, having access to these incredible mentors in combination with a kind of like what you see in this workbook, like really a step by step process to help you build that thriving, profitable tour business. And anyway, so we won't go too far into the, the program, but I use the example of Costco, right? Costco gives away lots of samples. Hey, try this new sausage roll thing because you mean like, oh, damn, that's pretty good. I think I can picture myself enjoying some sausage rolls. So we love to give away free samples. We love that the best way that we can show you that we might be able to help you grow your business is by actually helping you grow your business for free ahead of time. And so we give away our coaches are on board for this, but we have a free 45 minute strategy call where you can hop on with one of our coaches and basically get a second set of eyes on your business, talk through some of the challenges that you're facing and come away with two or three quick with So it's a great little free sample. It's a great way to meet some of our coaches. I like to do a lot of these calls myself, so we might be able to have a conversation too and you can learn more about that. I guess. Focus dot com for its last book. A call is actually the shortcut right to it, but you can learn more about us in the program I guest focus by that forward slash book a call yeah we'll get you to a the link and you can see if some of our coaches are available. Yeah, I highly encourage people to do that. Also to follow you. You're a great follow on LinkedIn. What other platforms are you on or is the company on where people should check you out? Yeah, well, a lot of our resources in up on the Guest Focus website, we're investing more energy into YouTube right now. So I've just finished recording another round of a videos that were all focused on some of these biggest mistakes, kind of like what we dove into today here a little bit, one of the most common mistakes and what to do instead. So that's a great series. It's just available for free over on YouTube as well to search I guess focus and time to there. Yeah awesome. Well, Kelsey, before we let you go, we do have some final questions we ask everybody and these are just for fun. So you can answer all we've got here. Yeah, yeah. So it's lightning round for starters. Do you book a window seat or an aisle seat? Or window seat. Three kids. Most kids. My wife always gets the window and then I'm forced to take all the kids to the bathroom. I feel you. I am right there with you. I totally understand that. So what's one thing in your carry on that you wouldn't travel without? The first answer that popped into my head, no question. Or just the fact that there are AirPods. I am not endorsing Apple in any specific way, but those wireless headphones, gosh, that's that has made such a difference in terms of quality of life, not having the wires tangled. So they're they're a go to. Yeah I feel yeah. If you had a free airline pass and a week with nothing else to do, where would you head next? High on our list is getting back to the Galapagos to do some diving, both diving enthusiasts. We had an incredible opportunity, my wife and I, to to visit the Galapagos. And it was one of the top trips in terms of just different landscapes, unbelievable wildlife and intimacy with wildlife. I had no concept of just how close you get with these animals because there's no fear of human beings at all. And they have a really developed, amazing tourism industry. They're getting back and getting under the water be a priority. That sounds amazing. So your kids are young and you may be a few years off from being able to do some of that stuff you would really love to do with them. But I am interested to know if there's something that you've seen or done on the road in your career that you wish you could go back and experience again with your kids or with somebody you love in general. It's fun, these lightning rounds. The first thing that popped into my head, I would have told you that this was the answer before you asked it. But getting to the Himalayas. One of the amazing things about working for Backroads is, is they this was the multi-day active travel company is had a network of leader houses across Europe across Asia. And so in the weeks you had off or months even off, you were able to sort of leapfrog to some of these leader houses and be a base for adventure. And so we did some trekking through the Himalayas, I think it was the Annapurna circuit, but my goodness, what a spectacular, spectacular mountain range and really accessible and yeah, pretty kid friendly. I mean every parent's got a different a different definition of what kid friendly. I'm guessing mine is a little bit broader than than most. But and I would love to maybe even with the eldest or as the girls get a little older, I have circling back and getting out and just walking in that in those highlands and Himalayas would be up there. Yeah. Oh, that sounds amazing. If you ever put that together as a family tour, let me know. I'll bring my crew along and. And we'll have a good time. Sounds amazing. Wonderful. Thanks so much for having me. And I. I love what you're doing with this with this podcast. You know, anytime we can help bring people together who have this shared, shared, often passion for creating experiences for people, I think there's so much good that can come from it because it's so easy to work in isolation. It's so easy in this day and age to feel this sense of overwhelm. Right? And like I said, there's a million different things it feels like I need to do in my my tour business. I don't know where to turn. Self-doubt creeps in even when we do make a choice, our God did I make the wrong choice? And so building out that community through through the podcast, through your publications, this is this is all a wonderful thing to do. And I hope that people listening are as appreciative as I am of your project. Well, wonderful. I appreciate that. I'm certainly appreciative of your time and expertize. We'll have to bring you back. I feel like we could go on for hours and hours talking about all your great wisdom. So thank you so much for being with us today. My pleasure. Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Kelsey TONER. I know. I sure did. And more than that, I hope you took a lot away from it. Kelsey had so many great things to say, so much great wisdom and insight that I think is going to make a dramatic difference in your tourism business, if you will lean into it. So I want to take a few minutes and review some of the most important things that I took away. I think you would be wise to take a note of two. So first, when I asked Kelsey about some of the most common mistakes he sees a tour company owners make. He said, If we really want to serve people at the highest possible level and have a product market fit between our group tours and the individuals who are buying them, we need to be super specific with the individuals we are selling to. He went on to say, If we try to be too many things to too many people, we end up serving no one well. And we fall into this broad category of bland, generic, multi-day tours. You know, I couldn't agree with this more. I've been saying for years that a tour or attraction that advertises something for everybody really means that everybody is going to be mostly bored most of the time. And I think that is the same principle that Kelsey has his finger on here. It can be tempting as a business owner to try to serve as many customers as possible, but people are different. People want different things when they travel. They want to travel in different ways, even to the same destination. And so success in tourism requires understanding who your customer is and optimizing your offerings to please them and not worrying about all the people who aren't your ideal customer because they're never going to buy from you anyway. Now. When we were talking about guest research, Kelsey said the single most important question is asking about people's challenges and frustrations by focusing in on what people don't like, their frustrations and things that drive them crazy. You can start to assemble an offer and a tour that takes care of those things and you can give them an easy button. And he went on to say, You want to out care your competition. You want them your customers to know that the tour has been designed specifically around their needs and wants. That's when people pull out their credit cards. Now, if you have ever tried to sell anything online, specifically try to sell your tours on your website, you may have noticed that lots of people come and look at the product, but not many of them actually press that purchase button. Not many of them are actually willing to spend their money on the tour and it may well be because you haven't proven the value of your travel product in comparison to another competitor's travel product or in comparison to the person's ability to just go to that place on their own, put a trip together by themselves. So what you have to demonstrate is that you have figured out what their pain points are. You have solved those pain points in advance. So traveling with you is like pressing the easy button for those people. Now we talked to them about product differentiation and Kelsey said your tour should be uninteresting or unappealing to the majority of visitors to that destination. That's when you're zooming in and customizing the design of your tour around your customer. Well, I'll tell you, this can be counterintuitive. It can feel wrong. But I think he's absolutely right. The people who are going to love your trips the most are the people who feel like they are most tailored to their way of travel and they're going to be the ones that book with you again. They're going to be the ones to tell their friends about you. They're going to be the ones that bring friends and family members on future trips. Those are the kinds of customers you want to have. They're going to be the backbone of your business, and they're going to help you build a tourism business that is thriving and sustainable in the long term. Now, Kelsey and I talked them about the power of small details in crafting those great guest experiences. Kelsey said, You're on the lookout for those tiny details that often aren't hugely expensive but make the biggest difference. And he went on to say, There are three things you need to look for special moments, special people and special access. I feel like we could do an entire podcast episode just on those three principles, but suffice it to say, Kelsey is exactly right. You don't have to spend a ton of money to create a highly satisfying and highly rewarding tour for your customers. You just have to know who your ideal customers are, what they really want, and then keep your eyes open for those even small ways you can deliver those highlighted experiences for them that are going to make them feel like you built that trip just for them. And that's going to make them want to come back to you over and over. And finally, when we were talking about how to craft compelling tour descriptions, Kelsey said the conversion rate is hugely tied to the images and videos we put on the sales page. The biggest mistake we see is very generic stock images that don't show the ideal target guest and he went on to say, we want to have at least 50% of the images showing our ideal target guest. I want to see myself and be able to imagine me in the experience. Again. I think kelsey is exactly right here. And, you know, he was talking about our sales pages on your website, but it doesn't matter what your primary method of sales is. This could be the brochures that you put together and send out. This could be a flier or a leaflet you do for a specific tour. It could be what goes in your e-newsletter that you send out. It could be your social media. It could be what you're showing in travel presentations that you do for groups in your community. But if you're only showing the most beautiful pictures, then people are not going to be able to visualize themselves there. And more importantly, they're not going to be able to understand the work you have done to make that trip special for them. So if you will lean into authenticity in the media that you use to sell your trips, I think you're going to find a lot more people responding to it in positive ways. And as Kelsey mentioned, he is making his company's workbook the Irresistible Tour Description Workbook available free to our audience that you can get it on his website at guest focus dot com slash group travel. I'll also put that link in the show notes for you. I highly encourage you to go pick up this wonderful resource because it's going to help you make some dramatic improvements in your travel marketing, in your product development, and hopefully in your profitability. And you don't even have to spend a. They do it. So there's no downside for you. Guest focused dot com slash group travel. Well, I hope today's conversation has given you some inspiration and some ideas. And hey, maybe you even have some questions about some of the things you heard today that you'd love to hear more about Well, I would love to hear those ideas and questions from you. You can reach me directly at podcast at group travel leader Ecom. I read every email that comes in to that address. I love hearing from you guys and hey, you never know. The thoughts or ideas or questions you send may just be the inspiration for a future episode of Gather and Go. And hey, while you're in the mood to give us some feedback, would you do me a favor? Go to your favorite podcast player, give us a rating. Leave us a review. That is super helpful. And I am so grateful to every one of you who has done that already. I'm grateful as well to Kelsey TONER for joining us on the next episode of Gather and Go. I'm going to bring you a fascinating conversation with Sam Lacy of the Bourbon Capital Alliance and Bardstown, Kentucky. He's going to provide a wonderful case study for how his city has found the intersection of the bourbon boom and the tourism to really elevate the entire destination. You're not going to want to miss that one. Until then, though, remember this. At the end of the day, we are all on this trip together, so let's make it a good one. See you next time on Gather and Go. Scatter and Go is hosted and executive produced by me. Brian Shaw. Our publisher is Mac Lacy. Daniel Simmons is our creative director. Ashley Ricks is our circulation manager and graphic designer. Our sales team is Kyle Anderson and Bryce Wilson. To advertise on the podcast, call Kyle or Bryce at 8592530455. Gather and Go is a production of the group travel leader. For more information on our podcast magazines and events, visit us online at Group Travel Leader. Com.