There is a third way to sell tours, somewhere between fighting for your own search rankings and handing your bookings to the OTAs: selling your city together with the operators around you. In Atlanta, a group of operators who tested it this past summer is now talking about turning it into a company of its own. Stephen Chester, who runs ATL Cruzers and Peachtree Trolley, is one of them, and he built his business without paying for online marketing in a city where visitors usually come for something other than sightseeing.

The conclusion is that a small operator's reach comes from relationships, and those relationships multiply when operators stop treating each other as competitors. A group of complementary operators can answer a big group request that none of them could take alone, and it carries more weight with the buyers who move volume into a city. Listen to this one if you run tours in a place people visit for work, family or a ballgame. You'll come away knowing who in your city you should be working with, and why the slow early years are part of the deal.

Resources:

• ATL Cruzers
• Peachtree Trolley

Dan Christian talks to more of the travel industry than almost anyone, from CEOs to small tour businesses, and after two years of conferences dominated by AI, he wants to change the subject. For this year's Travel Trends summit, he built a full day around a different question: where are humans still relevant? Mitch, who leads that session, makes his case here that the industry has spent too long chasing the instant, on-demand service customers now expect, when what travel offers is the chance to be with other people again. Dan describes executives in an off-script room admitting they have no idea where AI is going, and he explains why he wants the industry's conversation to shift going into next year. Treat it as a preview of the summit, from two people who think the human side of this business deserves more of the conversation.

Resources:

• Register free for the Travel Trends Summit, October 28 and 29
• Dan's invitation to the summit
• Travel Trends Monthly Report
• About Dan Christian
• Travel Trends Podcast

A Google Business Profile does a different job than it did a year ago. Travelers now describe the exact trip they want in long, specific searches, and Google answers with AI that draws on what it knows about each business, trusting what comes from the business itself first. A profile set up years ago and left alone is feeding those answers with whatever it said back then. Lisa Landsman, whose job at Google is explaining it to small businesses, takes Mitch through the questions tour operators have been asking for years, and a lot of the answers have changed.

Things are moving fast enough that some of it may be outdated by the time you hear it. The upside is real for anyone running something specific: you no longer have to sound like every other tour in your city to show up. Listen to this one if you set up your profile once and haven't opened it since. You'll come away knowing what Google wants from your profile now, what its review rules allow, and where to spend your next hour on it.

Resources:

• Lisa Landsman on LinkedIn
• Gemini connected to your Google Business Profile
• Ask Google Help, in the Google Business Profile Help Center