Scaling A Travel Brand With Soul

This is the Travel Marketing Podcast brought to you by Propellic, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals, these lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further.

‍

BrennenLauren

Alright Lauren, thank you so much for joining me today.

Lauren

Thanks for having me.

‍

Brennen

I'm super excited to dive in. So you're in Madrid?

‍

Lauren

Yeah, Madrid, Spain.

‍

Brennen

Okay. So living up the travel piece of travel market, I think I'm really excited to dive in. I have a special affinity for tours and activities. It's a fun category because it's the sleeper that I think I was at ITB last week and my friend Sarah was on stage and she said 1% of experience bookings are made online, something like that.

‍

Lauren

Those statistics always blow my mind when I hear them. I live in a very obviously digital world, so it's crazy. yeah, tourism activities are the beating heart of this industry, but very underrepresented in a lot of things.

‍

BrennenLauren

Well, yeah. And when you look at the graphs of online travel and you say, okay, so we've got flights and hotels as two Goliath categories, tours and activities comes next and then car rentals. So it's not the smallest, but sorry, I was saying online that's for total booking volume, but it's still a very largely analog side. So when you look at a category like walking tours, the fun thing is there are some really strong competitors and then there's also opportunity for some smaller brands to really excel, but they're direct and indirect.

‍

But obviously today on the travel marketing podcast, we're going to be talking about direct bookings. So I think I kind of want to just dive in. One of my favorite questions to ask, I mean, you're overseeing Walks and Devour. Do they both generally have a fairly similar marketing strategy or are they pretty diverse in the way they approach things?

‍

Lauren

Yeah, no, we market similarly. The brands have their own differences, but our strategy tends to be pretty similar for both of them.

Brennen

Got it. So when we look at like brand versus performance marketing, As a whole, this is the opposite of a dip your toe in the water question. This is a philosophical deep. So brand versus performance, Lauren go.

‍

Lauren

Okay, let's caveat this with the way I came into this. I am not a traditional marketer. I came in as the co-founder of Devour. So one of our brands, I was the person who from day one was out on the ground giving the tours. And as that grew over the years, obviously marketing was a huge part of that, but it was very much rooted in brand. 

So yeah, I think for me, the curve has been as I've evolved into this role and worked more with the walks brand, under city experiences and Hornblower Group.

‍

We've obviously been very focused on performance marketing. And I've realized that is the luxury of performance marketing in some ways is predictability. It's predictable revenue. You can really take a risk in a way that you want to, but you kind of know what's going to happen, especially after all of these years in business. And so it's a backbone of our strategy. It's really, really, really important. It's changing. But for me, like the heart of what we do is brand. And I do think that's also really important for the future of where we are right now.

‍

As we see a lot of the changes happening right now and a lot of the SEO changes, AI coming on, it's more important than ever, I think, for the brand to become front and center in wherever someone's looking for you.

‍

Brennen

It's interesting. You kind of made a point to like, you can test things with performance. I think that's something that's underappreciated. It's that if you're going to spend half a million dollars on a campaign, for instance, and you're going to do that in a brand channel, you're committing to do it. The whole thing. Like you need to spend the money to get both the creative done and then distribution of the creative, but assuming that you're doing that on, you know, whether you're plastering it on the walls of the New York subway system or you're, you're putting it on a pop-up on click trips or something like that, whatever it is, you're kind of committing whereas with performance, you can have a half a million dollar budget. You can spend 30,000 of it and immediately say, okay, this is not working and you can cut it, right? It's interesting.

‍

Lauren

Yep, exactly. That is a luxury. And I think one of the interesting things that makes me think about is how can we do that with more of our brand marketing? Because it's true that it's more difficult and a lot of times you do have to upfront that investment. But there are certain things that we're really trying to do on a smaller scale to test. We're trying to work in a really agile way. This year, it's been a shift for our team and we've seen results. Like a small example is we started doing these webinars.

‍

The hypothesis was that we would do like a trip planning webinar for a destination that we're in and mostly people would come who are already booked with us for that destination. In reality, we actually captured about 60 plus percent of the people who are coming to these webinars who for whatever reason we're in our orbit but have never toured with us before. And so that was interesting. Then we kind of changed our approach there and it's been interesting to see how can we start measuring in a more quick and iterative way these other kinds of more brand oriented pieces.

‍

Brennen

Got it. So before we dive deeper into, you know, brand performance and the allocation against channels within that, which is kind of the top track I want to go on, the ADHD mind of mine is very curious. So y'all went through an acquisition by Hornblower. Has that helped or hurt?

‍

Lauren

Ooh, that's a good question. Well, it helped, definitely. When we were both acquired, Walks was acquired in April 2021, Devour then was acquired in October of 2021. We were in the midst of the pandemic, neither brand knew that we had a guaranteed future. You know, it was rough times for everybody. And for us, Hornblower's backing and support and kind of welcoming us into the group was the way that we decided to move forward and Walks and Devour coming together to do that, that was an interesting time because we'd gone from cumulatively probably like almost 200 people when we joined forces in October, we were at 30. So we had to really, and as the pandemic, the travel came right back, we had to scale back up to that 200 number really, really quickly. So just such a unique scenario in that I can't really imagine even companies that are like, these large investments or VC backed. You don't usually have to grow that quickly, kind of knowing exactly what you're growing to. so, yeah, scaling back up was, I would say, the trickiest part. But the backing from Hornblower was positive. I do think that going from one brand in that I was Devour to suddenly having four or even five because our Walks brand has a very strong Italy presence where we go by Walks of Italy.

That was tricky lot of customers, know, there was customer confusion and who are all these brands? And so that part was difficult. I mean, overall, we're very grateful for the opportunity.

‍

Brennen

Well, I think, I mean, and I want to hit more on the budget allocation, but we can come back to that because what you're talking about is really preserving this brand identity piece during the phase of expansion. So you talk about having on the walk side of things, got multiple different positionings, depending on destination and location in a couple of cases. 

How do you keep the brand identity consistent, but still differentiate enough to make it worthwhile doing that?

‍

Lauren

Yeah, that's like the magic question. Both brands, as we scaled, it was very organic. We have very similar backgrounds, the founders of Walks, me and my co-founder, very similar. And so as we both scaled our businesses to other locations other than where we were founded, which the Walks was Rome, while Devour was here in Madrid, we really started with like micro sites and really local brands that would lead up into the main brand. And that we thought was a really great way to do things, but as I'm sure you've seen before, once it gets to a certain amount of scale, it just becomes absolutely untenable. 

So both of us at that point kind of consolidated back into these brand names, Devour and Walks, but we never wanted to lose that local identity because in the end that is what makes our tours unique. It's absolutely what we try to capture and where our brands absolutely align is in that sense of place that our tours have to capture. So it's hard because part of me wishes we still had all these microsites and different social media handles for every single destination. In reality, we have to figure out a way to strike a balance.

‍

Brennen

Yeah, absolutely. In terms of the locations. So there's an influencer that goes by Love in London that I know y'all work with. Jessica, it's funny getting back from ITB where we went to Hoffbrau. I remember the year before that I went to Hoffbrau with her and I had the chance to meet her in person at an Arival conference. I'm curious how pivotal and how not that partnership specifically, unless you want to talk about that, but as a whole influencer marketing is for Walks and Devour.

‍

 Lauren

Yeah, so we do a lot of influencer marketing and we always have before it wasn’t even called, you know, influencer marketing. We started really by having partnerships with bloggers from the early days, 20, 21, 2012, throughout the blogger conferences and getting bloggers to include us in their blog posts. And over the years that morphed into our affiliate program, we have a very strong in-house affiliate program and we work with a lot of great affiliates. I think over the years and more recently, a lot of those relationships that before were maybe strictly affiliate have now morphed into like this kind of fluid thing where sometimes they're affiliates, sometimes they're influencers, sometimes they're actually content creators. So there's a variety of overlaps, but it's key for our strategy. I always think we know there's a ton of travelers out there that love what we offer and the market is only growing. We want as many people in our store as possible. And so if we can hijack other people's stores and channels, we want to do that in the best way possible and make it a win-win for everybody. And so we are super open to influencer affiliate partnerships. I'd say the biggest change this year for us was really very much consciously diversifying from blogs. We saw as our own blogs declined in traffic, so did our affiliates' blogs. So really now we're looking into YouTube. Jess is obviously very, very prominent on YouTube, newsletters, podcasts, we're looking to really diversify what types of content we partner with influencers on.

‍

Brennen

Got it. Okay. I'm curious here. You're talking a lot about content and it makes me think of what we as travel marketers run into as something that's fairly challenging. That is in a sense, despite what we feel, I mean, airlines compete on price, that's a commodity. Car rentals compete on price, that's a commodity. Hotels can be a little bit more differentiated, but tours and activities, specifically walking tours, food tours, we're selling a destination and what that destination has to offer.

So how is something distinctly a Walks and Devour experience where there couldn't be another brand?

‍

Lauren

Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. We're constantly trying to answer it, to be honest. When we started, our brands were both, I would say, really in like blue oceans, right? The key features of Walks were really around the exclusivity. So this access that your average person cannot get, relationships with attractions that were very difficult and relationship-based to get, and we have that for our clients, as well as the guides and the book of, the kind of ease of booking online and all of that back in 2011, 2010, that in and of itself was differentiation. 

And for Devour, the idea of connecting people through these food tours, food tours were really just kind of an emerging thing, so we had just, we were often the only food tour in the regions that we started in. Now we're many years ahead and it's the Red Ocean. And that's a question we are really, it's constantly what we're thinking about. How are we differentiated? Sure, some of those core things still stand, we have incredible guides. We recruit, train, and invest in our guide teams like I would say few companies do and that shows.

‍

Brennen

I've been on some pretty crappy food tours to be quite honest, not with y'all, but they can be bad. I mean, you'll get someone that's like in college doing it as a side project. It's their third tour and they'd receive very little training and it's very obvious. And so even knowing that you've got a system and an approach to recruiting that prevents that is a level above what you can find necessarily with some of these 50, 60, 70 location food tour brands that you're going up against. You only have what? 15 locations?

‍

Lauren

Devour 18 Walks is in 22.

‍

Brennen

Okay. Got it noted. All right. So looping back to kind of the marketing conversation, because the product is marketing, right? I mean, you can't sell a bad product, I mean, you can sell it once, but this is a fairly volume based game. So selling it once is not going to really pay everybody's salaries. When you look at kind of brands and you look at performance, going a little bit back to that conversation, I kind of have two questions. The first one is how do you know it's working? Like, you know, there's.

‍

All these things you can talk about like incrementality testing, MMM. There's like all these different concepts that float around in the space, but like really tactically in an actual company running an actual marketing department, if you make a $50,000 branded best met on any brand investment, how do you measure performance?

‍

Lauren

I mean, of course, anything's going to have its suite of metrics that we're tracking, engagement being one of them that pops to mind for a lot of our campaigns. But at the end of the day, we're being graded and judged by revenue and the percent of revenue that comes direct. So, I mean, if we really want to simplify things, we are tracking where's revenue at today? Where's it supposed to be at? Which again, after this many years in the business, we have a pretty good idea of that. Know our goals.

‍

And yeah, that's where it becomes where we're in the sense with performance marketing, you can pretty accurately say we're going to put this in and we're going to get this out and it's going to go in this kind of weekly, monthly, daily pattern with the other part of the budget that goes towards our non-paid activities. It's more tricky, but we are working on at least becoming better at predicting and quickly measuring where it's at. So I don't know that fully answers your question, but Yeah, I mean, it is part of that balance between the two making sure that you have enough that's predictable and then the part that's a little more risky that that's also divided into the within the risky things. This we have an idea of where it's going to go and this one's a little more of a okay, let's see.

‍

Brennen

I generally will have this philosophy that you're going to do 10 things in marketing and one of them is going to work and that's fine. Like that's, it's the long tail effect. look at something like a VC fund and you say, okay, you're making 20 investments of equal size, 15 of them are going to fail miserably, 4 of them are going to do well and 1 of them is going to hit it out of the park. If you can have the same odds with marketing, like that's actually not a bad thing. I think there's this, I mean, you're in a senior role, but a lot of people that listen to this are not in senior roles and I work with managers. They expect everything to work perfectly.

‍

I’m hiring for Head of Growth role right now, just wrote the job description and I just want to see why something might work. I don't need to know that it worked. We need to learn from it, but I don't need to know for sure that it's going to work for the investment to be made, which I think is like an unreasonable threshold that a lot of marketing leaders put on. And it's nice to hear that you are open to, I guess, testing.

‍

Lauren

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I think that also comes from possibly the entrepreneurial background. Test, kind of fail fast, iterate. But I have to say that both the managing director of Walks & Devour, Roisin, she is of the same mindset and our company's SVP of marketing for Hornblower, Lis Casafi, she's also of a similar mindset. And so it really reinforces that to me as well, because that's what it's all about, right? Like you said, one of the 10 things is going to work. We have to make sure that we're doing 10 things.

‍

And I think that's where a lot of marketing organizations can get trapped is they won't do the 10 things. And if they happen to do the six that don't work, then they have a bad reputation in the organization.

‍

Brennen

Yeah, for sure. So this is definitely everything you're dealing with is a multi destination approach and it's actually different destinations for the brands, which makes it even more complex. How do you, I guess, you know, this is on the SEO and content marketing slides. You mentioned this, we're seeing this top of funnel content is kind of falling off the map right now. You're getting AI overviews answering it. You're getting people going directly to LLMs or people just giving up going to the library and renting a book on the destination. What do you to have content coverage in all these different cities and be able to maintain the quality or content of any kind?

‍

Lauren

Well, I mean, for many years we lived in a golden age, especially since both of our brands got into content marketing in early days and so had a real foothold. And the fact that we could get people on our tours when we were ready about where to wash your clothes in Barcelona. Mean, those were golden years. They're gone. And I think we've just accepted that pretty quickly and pivoted into the next thing. Certainly top of funnel content is really not any, not really our focus at all. We're middle funnel, bottom funnel, especially.

‍

And so it's really looking at, where are the opportunities for bottom of funnel content? I'm very interested in expanding our YouTube presence this year. It's one of our goals. But also I think in the multi-destination strategy, what's difficult is we can't invest in all areas equally. They don't all account for a similar amount of revenue in our business. And so with our limited budget, we're constantly having to make decisions over where we invest in content. So it's not equal across the board. And how we do it, I mean, we have an in-house marketing team of about 10 of us and the majority are content-based roles, although the majority of the budget does go to paid marketing so it's interesting.

‍

Brennen

The dichotomy of life.

‍

Lauren

But yeah, so we have an in-house team and we work with a lot of freelancers as well. And then I know that we've talked about this before, but the guides as resources, we do try to bring our guides in if and when possible into the marketing world. Mostly that comes across in content creation for social. That's where a lot of guides are able to either learn or maybe already have the skillset, our blog post or other kind of webinars or other types of content that we're making.

Generally, we go with a professional copywriter or an SEO expert in those. But certainly, we try to put our guides in there where possible because I think it really just doubles down on what we're trying to do with the brand.

‍

Brennen

Gotcha. Okay. And then, mean, you're mentioning we've talked about a lot of channels, I guess, if we scale back a little bit, where are y'all? So influencer marketing, SEO, advertising on which channels?

‍

Lauren

Advertising on Meta and Google mostly, Bing and few others.

‍

Brennen

And anywhere else where you're heavily or even passively looking at investing, spending time, energy, any other channels like organic social things of that nature.

‍

We do spend a lot of time, have to say, on organic social, but we're also aware of its ability to feed into our page social. So it's done in a very symbiotic way, which is nice because yeah, then we can actually see some numbers behind all of the many hours spent, but we do spend it. Yeah, we're on Instagram, we're on TikTok, we're on Facebook still. Those are our main platforms. And then YouTube is again, I mentioned this briefly a second ago, but YouTube is something that Devour started doing, I think Walks as well, back in 2016-17. And we both, brands, produced our suite of videos, and then it was left because of the pandemic, and then it got a bit hard. But we both think that for these types of experiences that are so emotional and experiential and about connection, that video can capture that.

‍

Brennen

What type of video is it? Is it like destination content or tell me about what's on the channels?

‍

Lauren

So we've done a mix over time. We experimented with shorter form kind of maybe SEO driven content where it's like, you know, five best top SD in Barcelona and you're following around the guide and you're having this kind of snappy dynamic video and that's done really well. We've also more recently experimented with a longer format, like 15 minutes and a little more storytelling, think like Anthony Bourdain kind of storytelling content. That has been interesting enough. It's been, I would say possibly a little bit too much for us…

‍

Brennen

High in the sky.

‍

Lauren

Yeah, people want, you know, the snappy and short and they're looking for trip planning as much as they're beautiful videos, they haven't always had the same type of traction. So as we go into this year, we're looking at probably staying at the shorter formats.

‍

Brennen

Okay, got it. And then using things like YouTube reels and Instagram reels and TikTok for that?

‍

Lauren

Yeah, we use Reels as well, but I mean, the primary videos, yeah, the shorts, the primary videos on YouTube are meant to be kind of like standalone videos. But I mean, we do distribute them through newsletters, through social, and really try to make sure that anything we put out there isn't in isolation.

‍

Brennen

Gotcha. Let's see where to go next on the paid media side. You mentioned that you're running on a Google and Meta and a little bit of being and maybe a couple other channels in like the whole picture of your direct marketing direct customer acquisition path. How key is paid?

‍

Lauren

It's pretty key. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, it varies based on the destination because there are destinations where we don't even have paid turned on. So it's very much like, well, when we look at our budget, if we are to distribute it among all of the locations we were in, it would just kind of eat away at where we could actually see the impact. Again, it's like everything has to be done.

‍

Brennen

Why is that?

‍

Lauren

In terms of, where have we seen that we can get the ROAS that we need? If we have that information, then all right, we're going to allocate X amount here. That means that we have this amount left. Where do we put it? I mean, we go through versions of that and at the end of the day, like we just need more budget.

‍

Brennen

You are incredibly well disciplined for an entrepreneur.

‍

Lauren

Well I work with some very well disciplined people, I feel like the people in paid are very data driven, more so than I… 

‍

Brennen

I think so… I don't know. I'm as like, and you've been in this position… I mean, it's, you know, if something looks like it could work, you kind of just want to do it and you want to ignore that there's some sort of fixed budget that's been set. I am impressed by your ability to make decisions in situations where I would just…

‍

Lauren

I wasn't always like this. If we could rewind, you know, 10 years and you asked me what the Devour marketing budget was, I wouldn't even have a figure because it was like, what do mean budget? Like you just spend and if things, if you get more money, you spend more, you know? I think it also comes with working with a much larger organization. 

‍

Brennen

Yes, having a parent company.

‍

Lauren

It's good. It's a very healthy habit but yeah, sometimes you just want to press the button.

‍

Brennen

But it's, yeah, it's, it's different for sure. You clearly have done a really strong transition that's hard for a lot of entrepreneurs into operating a marketing department from operating the whole thing. It's admirable for sure to have gone through that and still be such a key piece of the company after building such an incredible thing. 

I'm curious in terms of just broad strategy, the way that you approach paid social, what type of content are you putting on Meta?

‍

Lauren

Yeah, so I mean, we would love to be doing much more video and we do have our vertical reels and videos that do well and that's just been limited simply by time and people to be able to do these videos. But we'd like to get that better because we see great results with those. We also see a lot of good results with carousels and those are obviously a lot lower lift. So right now we're experimenting with quite a few different carousels. Try to refresh the creative every… couple of weeks or so, at least get something new in there. 

But yeah, it's a lot of trial and error still. And we're still in early days of paid social with Devour, Walks we've been doing longer. So it's like you say, very kind of iterative and seeing what goes well. And another part of the strategy that we've kind of adapted a little bit this year is doing a lot more UGC. So when we work with an influencer, whitelisting the content for a certain amount of time to be able to put it over on paid social, we find that that gets a lot more engagement that our, yeah…

‍

Brennen

Tell me about that transaction from a purely business standpoint. What does the negotiation look like to get access to use the content for your own paid social?

‍

Lauren

It depends. As with our influencer partnerships in general, we find that it's an industry in which each person has their own rate card and they can differ extremely from one to another. So it's the same thing. We will just include in our kind of RFP, like, hey, we want to whitelist this for X amount of time. Usually it's a couple of months. What are your rates for that? And if they come back with something that's reasonable, great. And if not, we might go back and negotiate a bit back and forth and see if we can come to an agreement.

But yeah, it's very one by one with the influencer strategy as we've just found that there's so much variety in what people quote.

‍

Brennen

Well, and is there any sort of attribution you do? There discount codes, things of that nature? How are you kind of measuring the success of each of those partnerships?

‍

Lauren

Every now and then we'll do a discount code, usually for a very short period of time and something that, yeah, when it's gone, it's gone. We don't like to have anything out there long term, unfortunately, mostly because of the coupon scraping sites. We've had some bad experiences in the past. So we do do discounts every now and then depending on the relationship, but mostly it's just UTM links or affiliate links. If they're affiliates, then it goes right through the affiliate program.

‍

Brennen

Yeah, it's just, what do you use like ShareASale for that?

‍

Lauren

We used TapFiliate.

‍

Brennen Lauren

Got it, cool. 

It's a little easier in the grand scheme of travel experiences. You've got a ticket to an attraction on the very least expensive end. And then you've got a $250,000 ultra luxury 20 day family vacation on the other end. On the ticket, someone might see an experience going to the Coliseum and say, Hey, I'm going to just buy this. It's $15, whatever, whatever I don't know how much it costs. Let's pretend it's $15 on that. On a $250,000 trip, which again, that's absurd…

But some people spend $250,000 on trips and someday I hope to be those people. But you know, that could be a multi-month discussion. That could be a multi-month research period and it often would be done for a third party, like an agent. So attribution is exceptionally difficult. You kind of sit like, if that's like a, you're like on, you're a step above the ticket, but you're definitely far from like this six month purchase window.

‍

Lauren

Yeah, it does depend on the tour in the market. some of our products, for example, we have some very like exclusive products in Rome where you're going into the Vatican with the key master, things like that. We do see that six months out, we're getting bookings and bookings

‍

Brennen

But even so, like they might not have been considering that purchase for six months, right? That might've been it.

‍

Lauren

Yeah, yeah, consideration periods are significantly shorter.

‍

Brennen

So how do you like, what is your attribution model? Do you base it on the last thing that they touched? Do you base it on the first thing they interacted with? How do you attribute purchases?

‍

Lauren

It's mostly the last touch. It can be really frustrating, especially with email because I'm a big believer in email marketing. It's something also I'm looking at very strongly this year in improving and testing more different flows and things like that. It can be a little bit of a downer when you look at the dashboards because it's like, oh, nothing's driven from email, but it is. So yeah, I mean, it's a good question. We are looking at one of our projects for Q2 is looking at our Google Analytics setup and seeing like, where can we actually tweak this so that we're getting a little bit more information, but it's challenging.

‍

Brennen

My recommendation is to get off of Google Analytics.

‍

Lauren

It's not the first time I've heard that.

‍

Brennen

God, remember when you had a great product and then Google said, sorry, we're taking this away, making something really bad in place.

‍

Lauren

I've never gotten my head around it since…

‍

Brennen

Yeah, I think that they were sick of holding a bunch of free data for people. And I think that the GA4 expiration window of two to 14 months reduces that. And it also increases their sales of BigQuery for holding and maintaining that data. It's kind of frustrating, but it makes sense from a business standpoint. So speaking of reporting, do you use any other tools for reporting? Are you primarily sitting in GA4?

‍

Lauren

No, we use Tableau for a lot of our reporting. So, I mean, it will feed from GA4 wherever we need it to come from. also have...

‍

Brennen

But you build custom dashboards, things of that nature.

‍

Lauren

Yeah, we have a lot of people on the more distributed team within Harmblower Group who are owning that area. And so we're able to ask for our custom dashboards.

‍

Brennen

Most of your tours are group tours, right?

‍

Lauren

Yeah, we do do primarily group tours, but we have introduced a special line of private tours this year, which is interesting because we brands used to do them in the past. And then again, I think the pandemic just put a halt on anything that wasn't kind of straightforward so private inherently has its little thing. And so we stopped, but now we're back. And so we've got our line of private tours and we'll see how it goes, so we are launching them in April.

‍

Brennen

So I'm kind of curious because talking about North Star Metrics and the reason I ask if you've got a group is because if you're listening to this and you're newer to travel, you might learn that a lot of times you've got tours that are going to run if there's one person on them or 10 people on them or, you know, bus tour, a flight's going to fly, a cruise is going to go. So the marginal gross profit you can generate by putting additional people in that increases as you put more people in the tour. 

So I'm curious what North Star Metric you use? Do you use revenue or do you use something else that represents how profitable that revenue is as a North Star Metric for your marketing?

‍

Lauren

For marketing, we are looking at revenue. Of course, I am thinking about our gross profit and our net profit, but I wouldn't say that everybody on the team is. They're thinking about revenue. Let's get the pax, pax, guess, is the other one, people. Yes. you know, because revenue depends on price, we do some dynamic pricing, prices might go up this year. And so it's like, wow, we're doing great. But in reality, have less people. So those two things hand in hand are giving us the pulse of are we getting the people in the seats on these tours and are we getting the money that we need to get because they're there. But then yes, I mean, so our operations teams are very much focused on gross and net profit. Business is focused on EBITDA. I mean, all the metrics are being owned, but yes, marketing is mostly about revenue 

‍

Brennen

Got it. there's just this conscious understanding that if like there's a destination that's getting a bunch of two or three people tours to focus on that one and kind of build it up a little more, right?

Lauren

Yeah. And I mean, the thing is we have really robust operation systems so that that ideally doesn't happen. There's a whole inventory team that's predicting and adjusting inventory as the month goes on based on what's happening. And also there is the possibility of consolidating tours. So there's a lot of levers when it comes to occupancy to try to keep our profitability up there, but it's not in the, kind of luckily not in the plate of marketing.

‍

Brennen

Yeah, it's different when you look at like a multi-day group tour where the tickets are free for $5,000, not 30, 40, 50, $100 because the stakes are higher. I'm always curious to hear how, cause if you, if you get a, one of those tours, that's like a multi-day group of five, $10,000 tour and you have a guarantee that it'll go and you get two signups instead of 20, you're not in a good situation.

‍

Lauren

We lose a lot of money.

‍

Brennen

But I mean, your costs for operating a tour, it's not low, but it's definitely lower than that. And you've got the ability to, you know, for, to protect your brand and just say, let's do it anyway, right?

‍

Lauren

I mean, luckily, yeah, and I mean, it's part of the brand that we do do it anyway. For food tours, luckily, the fixed costs are very low in general and more kind of variable depending on how many people are on the tour. With a lot of our walks tours, we do have to invest in that inventory, the tickets and some of the special access regardless. So it has some sunk costs, much like these larger multi days. So that can be complicated. It's something that while, we don't lose that, you know, however much it is in that one departure because we operate at such scale, if we're not staying on top of these things, it just, see the waste in the organization over time and it sinks those numbers and they're not where they're supposed to be. So it's a real big focus of our business.

‍

Brennen

My next question is not useful for anybody listening to this, except for me. How in the world do you like to negotiate with a restaurant to do something completely different? That's like a whole new thing that was created in the past decade. It's like a thing that it's normal now to walk, you know, I've gone on a number of food tours and it's like, obviously, you know, you've got this relationship with the restaurant, might bill a master account or something and they'll bring you a taste of everything. But like, how did that come about? I'm so curious.

‍

Lauren

It was so hard. In the very early days, we didn't even do that. We would just pay the bill and we would kind of ask them to split the edit. We'd use that friendly face and just nice communication. Over time, we got everything written down, which with some of the smaller restaurants in these, you know, in Madrid, in Seville, in Rome, they're tiny, like mom and pop businesses that live month to month as far as their expenses go. They're very skeptical of when we were in the early days asking them for any type of agreement, they'd be like, what's the catch? But I think like with anything, it's all about relationship building. And one of the key pieces of our business model for both Walks & Devour and part of what I think builds our brand as well is that when we work in any destination, we have local staff members that are on staff. They're not freelance, they're not outsourced to build a tour. We have people who know who are often from and who live that destination and who will build those relationships.

‍

Probably some of the hardest work in a business are these roles, these local city managers, but they're key. And so those relationships, it's really that they're not trusting walks Devour. They're trusting Lorena or Maria, and it's a big ask for them to build those relationships.

Brennen 

Yeah, you’ve all definitely taken a different strategy from what we've seen from some other operators in your space where there's a destination conquesting and opening up 50 places in a year or 30 places in a year. I mean, we all know who we're talking about, right? I think it's interesting that you've stayed so focused on product quality and that's impressive. And I get a talk, this is, episode number 39, 40, maybe 40 that we've recorded here. And I'm always fascinated by the level of care that operators that even the marketers that didn't build the company like yourself did, how much they care about the product and how passionate they are about the product. And then doing the work to sell it, of course, is the hard part.

‍

Lauren

Yeah, no, it's really special. I feel really fortunate to work in this industry and with the teams that we have because like they do, like you said, they care and then they love what we do. And I think, you know, where we're in such a beautiful business of putting smiles on faces and giving people these once in a lifetime experiences and also that like expanding people's minds. I truly believe that travel has the ability to do that and much needed. So it's a really special thing to be a part of.

‍

Brennen

Yeah, I've got one more thing I'm curious about. And this is not our like thing we talked about. It's potentially a conversation topic. I don't interview a lot of entrepreneurs on this. I interviewed a lot of career marketers, which is amazing. Like both have amazing different values that they can bring to the conversation. But since I've got you here, one of the questions I ask more senior marketers that have gone a more traditional route, unlike yourself, is to tell me about how you got to where you were in your career. But I would love rather than asking you that question.

‍

I love to see what you have to say about building your own company. Honest answer and share that with the people that are listening to this.

‍

Lauren

Yeah, it's so far been one of the best experiences of my life apart from probably being a mom. And it's just something where you're constantly learning every single day. And if you're not, that's a problem. But it's that whole idea of hypothesis experimentation. Okay, let's move this. And I think one of the reasons that the brand, because there are a million food tour companies. And when we were coming up, there were a lot starting at the same time. But I think the reason we were able to build a brand to build some critical mass to then get acquired and just keep building the brand after the acquisition is really around the idea of that kind of spirit of trying and being with the customer. In the early days, like we were guides and same with the Walks co-founders. They were guiding the tours, not because they wanted to guide the tours forever, certainly not, but because it was the way that you could just get that feedback in real time and literally like you could see someone's eyes be like, I don't know, look at an olive and you could tell that they maybe didn't like that. You could change the taste. 

We can't do that anymore. With scale, you have to get a lot more precise and you know, there might be something lost too, but it's such a challenge to be able to grow something and keep the quality, keep the soul. And I think for me, like I'm just challenge oriented.

So it is a weird thing you mentioned earlier, like you don't find too many entrepreneurs who come along with an acquisition and then stay and then maybe even go into a different role like this. I wouldn't have said that this was going to be the way it was if I had to make a guess a few years ago, but I think we still operate so much like a, I won't say a startup, but like a scale up. Walks & Devours culture is very much that, and we've been allowed to thrive by Hornblower in that way. And so for me, it feels similar to the entrepreneurial journey, just with a few more guardrails, a few more people but still a ton of fun, a ton of challenge and like literally learning every moment of the day.

‍

Brennen

That's amazing. I appreciate that. I think that was an exceptional way to kind of put a bow tie on everything. Is there anything else you think we're missing?

‍

Lauren

No, I mean, it's been such an interesting conversation. There's so much we could explore, but yeah.

‍

Brennen

Yeah, we could spend hours here. Last question for you, what's your next trip?

‍

Lauren

Good question. Yes, I am going, well, going to Cordoba for the day for a work thing. That's Spain. And then Edinburgh for a work thing, but I've never been invited to Edinburgh.

‍

Brennen

Amazing. That's a great city, I was there a couple of months ago for one of the Arival events. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate you linked at what's the best place to follow you and keep up with what you're doing.

‍

Lauren

I think on Instagram, you can find Devour Tours and Walks Tours on Instagram. If you want to keep up with me personally, I'm on LinkedIn.

‍

Brennen

Awesome. Lauren, thank you so, so much for joining me today.

‍

Lauren

No, thank you for having me. It's been great. Thanks, Brennen.

‍

Brennen

Awesome.

‍