How do you scale a company without losing your soul or passion?

Mitch Bach talks this week with Paul Whitten, founder of Nashville Adventures, about how a former combat veteran, Peace Corps volunteer, UK Parliamentary Fellow, and Amazon project manager translated the learnings from his winding life path into a fast-growing tour company built at the intersection of passion, profitability, and public history.

Paul identified a “Paul-shaped hole” in Nashville’s bachelorette-heavy market by blending deep historical knowledge with an approachable, beer-in-hand delivery style. We discuss why he rejects over-scripted tours in favor of hiring obsessively passionate subject-matter nerds (bourbon, ghosts, coffee, Civil War) and giving them ownership; how early growth came from soft-launching, the power of relentless relationship-building with distilleries, chambers of commerce, concierges, and DMCs (and the power of simply responding to emails!). And why enthusiasm, not hacks or ad tricks, is the true differentiator.

The conversation dives into scaling without losing soul, balancing founder-led guiding with team development, leveraging community partnerships and veteran identity, experimenting with new formats like coffee crawls and XR-enhanced tours, and using books and potential city expansion as strategic next steps. We also tackle the harder edge of the job: the tour guide’s role as a public historian in polarized times, handling contentious Civil War and civil rights narratives responsibly, creating space for civil discourse on tour, and embracing risk, naivety, and “pirate” rule-breaking as essential traits for entrepreneurial success in the tours and activities industry.

1. Connect with Paul on LinkedIn
2. Nashville Adventures Home Page
3. See Reality XR tours mentioned
4. More show notes and takeaways on tourpreneur.com

This is an episode all about the hard stuff. Politics. Disagreement on tour. Tour sites where the truth itself is in debate. Confronting places with complicated, dark histories.

Most of the advice out there is: avoid this stuff at all costs. People just want to have fun, they're on vacation. Guides should stick to the script and make sure they don't say something that upsets the guests. I'm not here as a tour guide to shove my opinions down everyone's throats. Can't we all just get along? Can't we just keep the discourse civil?

Our guest this week, Mike Fishback, is a middle-school humanities educator and curriculum designer who thinks this instinct is exactly the problem. "Civil discourse" isn't about keeping things polite — it's about strategies for engaging with and managing disagreement and difficulty in learning situations, like a tour. Mike learned through experience that it's unwise to sit back, cross your fingers, and hope you don't upset a guest. That there are powerful ways to lean into difficult topics that make the whole experience more meaningful — intentionally creating dialogue through artful questioning and participatory techniques. And he has the educational frameworks and two decades of lived experience to back every word of it up.

Mike also happens to have spent years as a client of mine — I was the tour guide for his group of middle schoolers on trips to New York and DC, and I saw firsthand how he engaged his students with really meaty, difficult topics in a way that didn't shut them down but fired them up.

The lessons here aren't for kids. They're for everyone. And if you've ever told yourself that your job is just to deliver the facts and keep things light, this conversation might be the most useful hour you spend all week.

More takeaways and show notes on tourpreneur.com

What if the most powerful segment in travel has been hiding in plain sight for decades?

Tourpreneur's Mitch Bach talks with Carolyn Ray, CEO of Journey Woman, about her transformation from corporate executive to full-time traveler and advocate for the 50+ woman traveler—a demographic that represents half the world's population yet remains largely invisible to the travel industry.

After a life-changing trip to Kenya at age 50, Carolyn sold everything and reinvented herself, eventually acquiring Journey Woman in 2019 and transforming it from a 1990s-era newsletter into a multifaceted platform that includes research, advocacy, a women's travel directory, and speakers bureau.

Through her groundbreaking "Invisible No More" research, Carolyn became the first to quantify this market segment, revealing that operators who only market destinations are "doing half the job" because 50+ women travelers are looking for purposeful, intentional experiences beyond simple safety assurances.

She challenges the industry's obsession paid media and influencer marketing, and urges women entrepreneurs to reject outdated rules, trust their intuition, and put themselves unapologetically in the spotlight—embodying her company's core value to "make your own rules."

1. The "Invisible No More" study
2. Article mentioned: Is it safe to travel to the US right now?
3. The new Women's Travel Directory

This is a story of growth through creativity, experimentation, and using technology to stay lean.

Carlo Pandian (LinkedIn) is the founder of Slow Travel Italia. Four years ago he started with a single wine tasting in Verona, and today runs 160 experiences across 12 Italian cities, serving 15,000 guests a year with a very small team.

In this episode, he talks to TP host Mitch Bach about exactly how he did it: experimenting with neglected time slots (like 6pm) that competitors ignore, launching five tours at once instead of one to multiply his chances of finding a niche, using Airtable and automations to eliminate manual booking assignments and personalize communication at scale, and treating OTAs as a launchpad rather than a long-term home. Carlo shares how he identifies gaps in crowded markets by studying what's missing—not just in Italy but in places like Japan—and why he pulled out of Milan when the math didn't work. He explains his "requirements manifesto" for vetting partners, how he coaches food producers on storytelling for international audiences, and why the biggest trend he's seeing is travelers willing to spend half a day outside the city for a single product done deeply—visiting the olive grove, watching mozzarella pulled from boiling water, understanding one thing fully rather than tasting nine things superficially.

As always, more info and takeaways on tourpreneur.com.

In this episode Mitch Bach sits down with Marinel de Jesus, a former human rights lawyer turned tour operator.

She is filled with questions about the adventure tour industry:

Why do porters on the famous, touristy Inca Trail in Peru carry crushing loads for little pay and even less dignity? Why is it so difficult to find women adventure guides in so many parts of the world? What do indigenous communities actually want from tourism—and why doesn't anyone bother to ask them?

These are just some of the uncomfortable questions and themes she's carried with her as she's lived and trekked around the world. Originally from the Philippines, she became a human rights lawyer in Washington D.C., spending 15 years prosecuting child protection and mental health cases. Then her mother passed away—and she never went back to the office. But Marinel didn't just start a tour company. She moved into indigenous communities. She lived with Quechua porters in Peru and learned the dark truths behind the picture-perfect Inca Trail. She spent nearly 300 days in Mongolia during Covid, co-creating a nomad camp that started with tea and a blank piece of paper—not a business plan. She walked 100 days across Nepal with Mingmar, a female guide she searched for over a year and a half to find, proving that women belong on the Great Himalaya Trail.

This discussion challenges everything we assume about adventure tourism—the colonial narratives baked into our itineraries, the voices we never hear, the scripts we impose on communities who know how to welcome guests far better than we do. She makes the case for showing up with no agenda, listening before designing, and building something that matters more than scale.

Marinel's organizations:

1. Equity Global Treks (Brown Gal Trekker)
2. The Porter Voice Collective
3. Her vision for Himalayan Women Trail Leaders
4. Her film KM82 on the Quechuan Porters of Peru
5. The Khusvegi English & Nomadic Culture Camp she helped start in Mongolia

More show notes and resources on tourpreneur.com

This short episode was recorded live at GetYourGuide's Unlocked conference in September 2025.

When you meet Arturo Ardao Rivera, the first thing you feel is his energy. He doesn't come off as an engineer, which was his profession until he discovered a joy for tour guiding and running a tour business. Originally from Madrid, Arturo found his true passion when he created Rainbow Tours Stockholm. It has grown from a solo operation to employing 26 guides.

His story is one of rejecting some of his engineering tendencies (choosing feelings over numbers!) and leaning into strategies that appear unorthodox but have worked well for him.

You'll discover:

1. His unique "taxi tariff" model for private tours, and his approach to hyper-personalization.
2. Why he doesn't ask for reviews
3. Why he's not sold on the "get more bookings" industry mantra
4. Why he visits guides he's thinking of hiring in their comfort zone, not his
5. How guide applicants are asked to become undercover tour takers
6. How he leverages running two separate brands for pricing strategy
7. How he grow leveraging 10+ OTA partners, and how he's managing his distribution mix

Connect with Arturo on LinkedIn, and visit Rainbow Tours Stockholm!

It's 2026... welcome to a new year of Tourpreneur weekly travel business podcasts!

And we're starting the year off in a slightly different vein.

This episode is a must-listen to help you set a new and hopefully inspirational, deeper tone for your year ahead as a business owner or guide.

Our opening guest is the inimitable Dr. Anu Taranath, a professor, author, and facilitator. She's truly one of a kind. She gave the opening keynote at last year's Tourpreneur conference, and blew everyone away.

So Tourpreneur's Mitch Bach was excited to sit down with Anu to challenge Tourpreneurs to think new thoughts about what they're doing as business owners. Yes, our job is to bring joy and entertainment and storytelling to our guests. Yes, our job as business owners is to show up for the daily grind of practical, nuts and bolts business. That's the spine of many of our lives out there.

This episode will ask you to go deeper.

If you rest on only the level of entertainment, and 'customer service' and professionalism, you're missing an opportunity for greater meaning, both in your business and your guests' lives.

Anu asks you to think of your role as creating not only staged performances, but also spaces and containers to "rehumanize humans" and "normalize the normal"—that is, the kinds of human questions about culture and difference that are normal reactions to a travel experience that stretches people.

It's an invitation to take off the armor — yours and your guests, and create something more meaningful together, something deeply human.

As always, more show notes and links on tourpreneur.com.

Pete Syme interviews Andrea Lamparini from WeRoad, a hybrid tech company and tour operator that's rewriting the rules of group travel for millennials and Gen Z. The conversation reveals how WeRoad has achieved exceptional growth by building a community-first model where strangers become friends through small group experiences, using travel coordinators instead of traditional guides, operating as a curated marketplace where top coordinators design their own trips, and leveraging technology to scale operations with one-third of their 200-person team dedicated to tech. Andrea shares how they maintain quality with 4,000+ casual travel coordinators who each lead just one trip per year, why they leave 30-40% of each itinerary unstructured for group decision-making, how their supply model works across 68-70 DMCs globally, and why they're expanding into B2B channels including travel agencies, employee benefit programs, and corporate partnerships that already represent 17-18% of revenue. The discussion covers their VC backing (rare for a tour operator), plans for US expansion in 2026, the power of their We Meet app hosting 50,000 community members at events this year, and Andrea's key lesson learned: curating their marketplace offering earlier would have prevented the conversion drop caused by overwhelming choice.

Top Ten Takeaways

1. Travel Coordinators Work Alongside Local Guides

WeRoad uses travel coordinators who are the same age as travelers, depart from the same home country, and focus on facilitating group dynamics rather than delivering local expertise. Local guides are still included for museums, parks, and other sites where specialized knowledge is needed. Travel coordinators create WhatsApp groups one month before departure, balance introverted and extroverted personalities, and coordinate the 30-40% of unstructured time built into every itinerary. WeRoad has 4,000+ coordinators working casual contracts with a commitment of just one trip per year.

2. Quality at Scale Without Full-Time Staff

Coordinators go through online applications, webinars, group interviews, and a final boot camp weekend with 100 candidates. Most visit destinations for the first time, but rigorous hiring and training ensure consistency. Local DMC partners provide backup if logistics fail. Top performers can become "producers" who design and scout their own trips.

3. Groups Decide 30-40% of Their Itinerary in Real Time

Accommodations, transport, and core experiences are fixed, but dinners, half-days, and optional activities are decided by the group during the trip based on their interests and budget. Travel coordinators provide options and handle bookings with local partners, personalizing the experience to match group energy.

4. A Curated Marketplace Scales the Portfolio 5x

WeRoad's internal team creates 200 itineraries while travel producers create 1,000+ more. This model scaled their catalog 5x without adding internal headcount. All producers use standardized supply agreements ensuring every DMC meets centralized requirements for safety, insurance, compliance, and capacity.

5. Supply Quality Is Non-Negotiable

WeRoad works with 68-70 DMCs globally, visits partner sites, and monitors quality constantly. The rule is simple: mess up once or twice and you're out. Because each group makes different choices during unstructured time, suppliers must be flexible enough to support varied activities in every destination.

6. Community Extends Beyond Travel Through We Meet

The We Meet app hosts 10,000+ events across Europe where 50,000 people connected this year. Travel coordinators organize pottery classes, running groups, hiking, pub quizzes, and weekend trips in their home cities. This keeps...