Collaboration over Competition: Why Atlanta Tour Operators are Selling Their City Together

This episode is sponsored by Aloja AI, dynamic pricing software to earn tour operators more revenue, automatically. 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