500,000 travellers served!

The “traveller counter” on the ToursByLocals homepage has been ticking ever closer to 500,000 - this past Sunday it clicked over the mark. If you look at our home page today, you’ll see the counter over the half million mark! That means since ToursByLocals opened its doors, we’ve sent over 500,000 people on private tours with our local guides.

While it was impossible to say exactly which one was traveller 500,000, we’ve identified a very special pair of travellers, who are currently on a cruise along the East Coast of Canada and the US.

They are Heidi and Larry Canarelli from Nevada, USA, and have taken 25 tours with us since 2013. This weekend they took a tour with guide Steeve in Quebec City and were surprised with a phone call at the start of the tour to congratulate them on being our 500,000th travellers. During their tour, we treated them to lunch at a Quebecois restaurant, one of Steeve’s favourites. 

The Canarellis are meeting with 5 more of our guides over the next 10 days, and each guide will present them with a small local treat to say “congrats!” Their trip ends in New York City with guide Matthew Cummings. We’ve arranged to take a photo by the Brooklyn Bridge with a banner we’ve had made up for the occasion, and they’ll be presented with a $500 gift certificate.

Meet the Canarellis! (Pictured here at the end of their tour with Steeve).

Lehman Brothers Remembered

Everyone has certain days that are special to them - birthdays, anniversaries and other important events. For me September 14 is one of those days. It wasn’t obvious at the time and in fact took several years for its significance to become apparent.

My September 14th happened in September 2008, when we were putting the finishing touches on the first version of ToursByLocals. The financial crisis was unfolding over the weeks previous and we were worried about starting a new business during such a time.

The situation came to a head on Sunday September 14, 2008 when the US government decided to let Lehman Brothers fail. Markets collapsed on Monday and ended down 550 points. The crisis continued with the stock market up then down, then up again. All the while, the headlines foresaw the end of western civilization. The world was definitely in a bad state and no one knew for sure what the future would bring.

In a state of blind optimism, we continued to work on ToursByLocals and released it for tour guides to sign up in October.

We knew the biggest issue we faced was a classic ‘chicken and egg’ problem - if we had no tour guides why would travelers come to the website? And if we had no travelers, why would tour guides sign up?

The classic response would have been to spend a great deal of money trying to attract guides - but we didn’t have much money and didn’t want to go the venture capital route. What we didn’t realize at the time was that the failure of Lehman Brothers and the slow motion crisis surrounding that provided a magic bullet solution to the problem.

The level of fear created throughout the world meant that it was easy to sign up guides. Travel was down so they had time to post a profile and set up some tours. Throughout the remainder of 2008 and 2009 our network of tour guides grew quickly. We ended 2008 with 33 guides but by December 2009, we had 456 guides with 977 tours published. The numbers doubled again in 2010. That we provided no sales didn’t matter because times were tough and no one had any great expectations.

As the world started to heal and we started to have the courage to spend money marketing (that’s a story for another time) our sales grew and the cycle of sales encouraging existing and new guides started to spin up.

And there’s a bigger lesson here - the best time to start a business is when things are in crisis. The bigger the crisis, the better the opportunity.

Going for the least worst option

ToursByLocals has an awesome network of excellent guides.

But they’re also humans - and despite everyone’s best intentions they fail occasionally and when they do, the ToursByLocals support team earns their pay.

This story is about Darryl (not his real name), our star guide of Houston, Texas. He’d always received great reviews and had helped us out on numerous occasions with short notice bookings and taking over tours that other guides couldn’t do. He’d even done press tours for us that resulted in over the top reviews and good PR for ToursByLocals.

But at 2 pm on June 23rd I received a fax from a hospital informing me that Darryl had been in hospital for the past 10 days and was just now discharged.

We were naturally concerned for Darryl’s well being and also for the fate of the many tours he had upcoming.

I showed the fax to Steve Redmond (guide support specialist in our Vancouver office).

He called Darryl to hear a horrific story of how Darryl’s wife had left them and took everything. He had been in the hospital for 10 days under treatment for depression and had no vehicle and no money. He asks for a loan to get him to his hometown where he’ll stay with his family.

Although we were sympathetic to his problems, our main concern was that had a tour for 9 people on June 26, 3 days hence. The group needed to be picked up at the cruise terminal, toured for the day and then dropped at the airport, which as 110 KM from the cruise port. Plus the group needed tickets to NASA (we had advanced Darryl $350 to buy tickets but this was gone and he had no tickets).

We had to act fast, following our guiding principle to do whatever is the best thing for our customer (or sometimes the least worst).

First option - work with the guide to solve the problem and get them to deliver the tour. This is the best outcome as our travellers are often invested with a particular guide - they have ‘met’ them through email and have spent time planning the ideal day.

Darryl seems fine now and assures us that he is looking forward to delivering the tour - provided we could solve 2 problems….

Solving problem 1: no vehicle
Steve calls several Budget Vehicle Rental outlets in the city. It’s hard to find one for 9 people, but he finally does. Total rental cost $200. But this won’t work because the person who shows up at the rental office has to have a credit card. We can’t pay remotely. Darryl has no credit card.

OK, I have a friend in the city who will meet Darryl at the Budget office, pay for the vehicle with her card and add Darryl as a second driver. I’m going to have to do a solid for her to make up for this.

Solving problem 2: no tickets
Steve calls attraction - we can pay for tickets over the phone and have them picked up at the venue. No problem (we’ll work out the $350 we’ve already advanced Darryl later).

So we’re feeling pretty good right now and Steve calls Darryl with our solution. Except he doesn’t pick up. And doesn’t answer our voicemail. Or our email.

It’s now Friday at noon and we haven’t heard. So it’s onto plan B - maybe things will still work out, but we need a back up plan.

Second option - find another supplier
Steve calls several tour operators who list a similar tour - Houston Tours can do it for $730, but they need to know soon. Steve checks in from home on Saturday morning - since Darryl is unreachable, we confirm with Houston Tours and message the traveler. They’re hard to reach because they’re on a cruise ship.

Steve reviews Darryl’s email with the traveler and speaks to the Houston Tours guide to brief him on what the group’s expectations were.

We finally hear back from the traveler to confirm they understand the new situation. The Sunday tour goes ahead and at least from the Houston Tour side, everything went OK.

We follow up with the traveler and discover that they were unhappy with the situation - they really wanted Darryl as their guide. We issue them a 50% refund.

But the alternative would have been so much worse - imagine 9 people from a multi-generation family stuck in Galveston with no tour and no way to get to the airport for their international flight. We would have saved ourselves $500, but the consequence of deeply disappointing a customer would quickly swamp that saving.

Bottom line, we’re out $820 plus at least a full day of a staff member’s time, 4 hours of my time, a basically unhappy traveler and what was a great guide (he's fine, but no longer with ToursByLocals). But I do get to write a blog entry about affair. And give props to Steve and the rest of the Customer Service team for being awesome.

Always keep your shirt on.

I don't usually make a habit of wearing my ToursByLocals shirt when I'm out and about.

However, I'm going to change that habit. And if you've got a company or cause to support, you should too.

Recently, I was on a wine tour in Mendoza, Argentina with guide, Juan Cruz (a great guide by the way - see  his ToursByLocals profile for the tours he offers in Mendoza) and ToursByLocals Chief Technical Officer, Dave Vincent.  In the tasting room, the woman across from me looked at my shirt and said "Are you with ToursByLocals? We're used you 3 times and had a great experiences all 3 times".

ToursByLocals CTO, Dave Vincent with Mr. and Mrs. Webber

The customers were the Webber's - they'd booked one our guides in Lisbon a year earlier and were repeat customers on their South American cruise. Pretty amazing to run into customers 10,000 km from home!

From this chance meeting we got some very positive feedback on 2 of our guides and discovered what was, from my point of view, a less than stellar experience with our guide of Valparaiso, Chile. It turned out the guide was 2 hours late and did not communicate his problem appropriately. Being late is a cardinal sin of tour guiding. Once it happens, it's almost impossible to make up for.

Fortunately for us, the Webber's are great customers who understand that things don't always go 100% all of the time. And the guide did manage to redeem himself by making up the lost time and providing a great tour.

If I hadn't decided to wear my shirt I'd never have known any of this. I wouldn't have been able to talk to them and their 4 travelling companions about ToursByLocals and reinforce our company's image. And if the late guide was a problem for the Webber's and their group, I'd have the opportunity to try and turn their opinion of ToursByLocals around.

So always wear your shirt, or your badge, or your cap. You never know when it's going to help you out.

Seven years on .....

Every once in awhile I get an email from the ToursByLocals system saying "the ToursByLocals Blog is not being kept up to date! A stale blog will cause poor SEO and gives customers the impression that TBL is not a vibrant, active website. "

Our excellent company blog is written by Sara Cooke and she posts a new entry every couple of days - but it does happen that a sick kid, holiday or other event gets in the way of that schedule and there might be a delay that triggers the above email. 

I'm really happy that our system doesn't monitor my blog posting frequency - what kind of email would be sent to someone who takes 7 years to post a new entry?

So what's been happening the past 7 years since my last posting? And why restart blogging now?

Well, we've been busy working to achieve our mission of 'Private tours everywhere people travel'. While we're at most only 1/3 of the way there, we've grown ToursBylocals dramatically since then. We now offer tours in over 900 areas, located in 134 countries.

Seven years ago we were just 2 guys in an apartment bedroom. Now we have a staff of 34 located in Vancouver, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, London and Delhi.

It's taken a lot of effort but it's been worth (almost) every moment. And we're no where near achieving our potential.

And why take up blogging now? Firstly, it is good for business. Secondly, after 40 or so years of experience, in the most humble Canadian way possible, I think I have some useful things to say. And for 15 other reasons why blogging is good for me (and you), see this great post on Becoming Minimalist.

I commit to not letting 7 years go by until the next post!

PS. Please visit the ToursByLocals blog. You can subscribe by clicking the RSS feed at the top of the page.

Got PageRank?

During our initial phase, the key marketing tactic for ToursbyLocals.com is to drive traffic through our site, primarily through online means.

You can do this at no effort by buying 'pay-per-click' ads on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN (these are the 'sponsored results' you see at the top or side of the page after you type in a search term.

For example, if you type the search term 'private tour iceland' into Google you'll likely see our ad either on the top or right side of the page. If you click on it, you'll go to a special landing page all about our iceland tours. These are the 'pay-per-click' search result and you'll cost us about $0.50 if you click on our ad.

But if you click through 2 or 3 pages of search results you'll find the same URL. These are the 'organic' search results and clicking them is free!

Free is good.

The problem is that very few people will click even 1 page into a search result so if you want visitors to your site, it is critical to get listed on the first page.

So how to do that? There are a lot of important elements to consider, but one thing that makes your whole job easier is to achieve the holy grail for search engine marketers -high Google PageRank.

This is Google's estimate of how 'important' your page is. When we first started started tracking ToursByLocals.com on November 8, 2008, it had a PageRank of 0.

After sticking at 0 for 6 weeks, my Christmas present was to see that it had finally registered and is now at 2! This puts us within striking range of the top PageRank sites that we compete with on various terms. Since my main activity over the past 6 weeks is to get as many sites as possible to link to us, I credit that for the improvement.

Happy New Year!

Well 2008 is finally over. There's been no end of doom and gloom and all the usual suspects are going on about how bad it was and whether or not things will be better in 2009.

I don't have a crystal ball to tell me what's going to happen, but I like to be optomistic.

ToursByLocals.com is the 4th major business I've started. When I think back on it, all of them were started during times of uncertainty - but just when things were starting to turn around.

Didatech Software (which became Ingenuity Works) was in the planning stages during 1982 and actually started operations in May 1983.

The economic news during the planning phase was all dire. The US economy (and as always happens, the Canadian one as well) was in a deep recession. Inflation was high and banks were failing (in the US). In June 0f 1982, the prime interest rate reached 21.5% and US the unemployment rate reached 10.5% in December of 1982.

What a time to start a business! But start it we did. And it gave us a great ride until we cashed out in 1999.

The next business, GroupInfoWeb.com, was started a few months after the great Internet bubble burst in May of 2000. It was a tough go. I remember a meeting where we were set to sign a big contract - 10 AM on September 11, 2001.

That contract didn't get signed for another 12 months.

And then MyTripJournal.com... which was launched after September 11th hammered the travel market, followed on closely by the SARS epidemic of 2003. But after that, travel rebounded and things worked out well (we cashed out in 2007).

So what's the point of all this rambling?

If my history is any indication, 2009 will be a year of recovery. Maybe next year, all our troubles will be far away.