Transcript [EN]: Designing High‑Repeat, High‑Value Wine Tours Off The Beaten Path

For us, we really just decided that we wanted to really focus on all of the in between things. We also realized that our ideal client was typically someone who had been traveling to all of these places. They'd been to Venice, Florence, Rome, Chinqutera, Amalfi Coast, all of these places kind of sometimes again and again. And so now they were ready for something new, something different, something that they felt like was more exclusive and kind of stretched them a little bit out of their comfort zone. And so that's uh that's what we kind of set out to do. Good morning to another episode of the tourreneur podcast. And this morning I'm very happy to introduce Natalie Richard from Joy of Wine Journeys which is a multi-day reasonably luxurious wine experience company. Welcome Natalie. Where in the world are you at the moment? Currently, we're in Italy, but we have a tour group that's about to wrap up in the next couple days. And so, um, I've got a little break, so I thought I'd jump on and get to share a little bit. So, let's get into Joy of Wine Journeys. Where did it come about? How long have you been going? How did it start? What was the ideas, etc. Yeah, so we kind of came about it in a maybe a different way than some other travel professionals did. My husband actually started a wine import company about 17 years ago and uh started working with small family producers as an importer. As an importer, you can't really grow your business through direct sales. So, you can only grow through sharing stories and kind of growing the brand in that way. And so, we were doing a lot of wine events at, you know, country clubs and wine shops and working, you know, sales reps, this kind of thing, and sharing those stories. And, uh, people kept coming up to us and saying, gosh, I would love to visit these wineries. we, you know, had an opportunity to maybe meet that wine maker when they were in town and and said, "We'd love to go. Do you do that? Do you take people to visit the wineries?" And for four years, we said, "No, we don't do that. We'll give you a couple recommendations." And after four years, we finally said, "Well, what what if we said yes?" So, it was my husband and I and a couple couples in a van. He was driving us around. And we really just introduced them to our friends, the places that we love to go, the people that we had fallen in love with over the years, our favorite chefs, our favorite restaurants. Um, and it just was originally kind of a fun hobby for us. That was 12 years ago and then it's just grown ever since. Originally starting off with northern Italy and then from there it's grown to France and then it's grown again to now central and southern Italy. And so it's been quite the fun journey, but we never went into it with the intention of being, you know, in the travel space. But it's uh something that we've, you know, absolutely love and we're excited to be doing now. It never ceases to amaze me that where people come from before they start a tour business. Yours is a different story because you it grew out of another business. But the entrepreneurs listening to this, they all drop into running a tour business from all sorts of things in the world. Rarely it is a rare rare person who went to university and came out of university and said I'm going to run a tour business. It just doesn't seem to happen. Everybody seems to drop into it from another business. So you and your husband were running a importing business. Was that into the US or take it into the US? Yeah, we import wine from Italy, also France, Argentina, and New Zealand. Um, into the US. Yeah. So, you mentioned your husband. What's it like running a tour business as a husband and wife team? Great, great question. Well, we learned early on that we have very different strengths, which is fantastic, but also obviously can be challenging. So we found that we are really great at kind of divide and conquer. So he really runs the import company full-time. I run the tour company full-time and then we come together to do tours. So I do a small project for him on the import side once a month and he comes and he is the I joke with him. I say he is the hired talent on the tour. Um but he's phenomenal. Um we both really have specific roles even when we're on tour. So he is fantastic of course at his wine knowledge and sharing the family stories and geography and and all those types of things and sharing the stories of the places and the culture of where we are. Um for me I have to GPS to get to the grocery store. So I'm definitely not your girl um for you know the geography part of it. Um, but I definitely handle everything from the hospitality side to logistics to just making sure that the tour runs really really smooth and you know if someone forgot something or they've changed up, you know, and all of a sudden have realized they have a food allergy. I am I'm the one that's kind of behind the scenes um handling all of that and then you know with the guests of course during the tour uh we both host all of our tours um except for one tour that we do in frame. Sounds like a great division of responsibilities. Cuz I know personally if I was working with my wife in the business, I would be divorced about 3 months after we started. That's for sure. Yeah. It's not always been easy. When you look back, so you've been going 12 years ago. Mhm. Now you started sort of from an idea from the import business. When you look back at the very first trips you did, the itineraries you created, if you could start again, what would you say to Adam and Natalie 12 years ago based on your 12 years of experience now? Yeah. Um, you know, I think I would probably tell us back then to dream a little bigger initially, you know, with it just being uh, you know, a couple couples and like I said, driving around in a van and it was really we were staying at little agurismos and all of these things. And, you know, we when we laid out our first itinerary, we said, gosh, where where are the places that we want to keep going back to? What are our favorite places? And so, we designed our plan was to design one itinerary and it was going to be our signature tour that we did over and over again. And we did that for northern Italy and that was our signature tour for gosh nine years. That's really all we did with tour groups. And we typically are doing now nine a year and they're 10-day tours, so long tours. And um so we were doing the same tour again and again and loving it. But then our guests were starting to, you know, go on this exact same tour more than and we never thought that that would happen. And then from that point, they started to say, "Okay, now what's next?" And we had been importing French wine for a long time. uh about seven years by that point. And so we said, well, let's give it a go. Let's go and design a new French tour. And so we did. We went and spent about two months in France. We had spent a lot of time there um throughout the years, but we went and spent two months really intentionally to, you know, meet with guides and test restaurants and meet with hotels and all of the things to really put together an itinerary that we were really super proud of. And then we launched that with a beta group of people that had traveled with us before. And so that really took off and those filled up very very quickly. And then this last year we had the same type of experience. People were coming back and saying, "Okay, we've done Italy with you. We've done France. Now what's next?" And so we thought a lot about gosh, like where else would we want to go? But for us, it's important that we're tying our tours back to the wineries that we represent. So we thought about Argentina, we thought about New Zealand, kind of looked into those different things. But then we just came back to the fact that Italy is is really our first love. And so we said, what if we went back and we just really designed another tour in Italy with central and southern Italy visiting some more of our producers. And so we rolled that out this year. So what started out as this little company has continued to grow now to include these three itineraries. And I don't know where we'll go from here, but I think we never thought of it doing, you know, growing at this rate or ever having any other tours. And so this has really been an exciting thing, but not something we ever anticipated. So for entrepreneur listeners there, what Natalie's just described there is what I call lifetime value of a customer. There's nothing more important in a multi-day business than your customer that you acquire for the first time. You've spent money. Whether you've measured how much money you've spent or not, you have spent money acquiring that customer. It's then all about getting the value out of that customer. And for a multi-day company, that's about building repeat business where the customer comes two, three, four times. You've measured then that customer on your system, how many times they visit, how much money they spend with you, it suddenly becomes exceedingly interesting to look after that customer very very well because they don't just come back themselves, they also introduce other people to come back. So at this point we're about 75% repeat business uh which is for us is completely blows us away. So you mentioned uh new itineraries, new destinations. How do you balance thing that people who are traveling to these destinations, France, Italy, Argentina, they want to see the big hits if they've never been there before. If it's their first time visiting, they've never been for. They want to see the big sites. They want to see the things they've heard of, but you also want to introduce them to small family wineries and restaurants out in the back middle of nowhere that can be quite special, but the customer also wants to see the big hits of Italy or big hits of France. How do you balance that when you're designing your experience? Yeah, I think first step is to know, you know, what your your thing is. And for us, we realized early on that for us, the bigger cities are not where we feel like we can add value. I think a lot of people do that really fantastic. And so all of our itineraries are actually connecting between bigger cities where like an example is our guests fly into Paris. We don't actually spend time with them in Paris. We have a private transfer that takes them to our first hotel in Champagne where we meet them and we like to do all the in between things and then our guests have a private transfer to the Nice airport at the end of our trip. And then a lot of guests will spend time in Nice. And so for us, we really just decided that we wanted to really focus on all of the in between things. And for us, we also realized that our ideal client was typically someone who had been traveling to all of these places. They've been to Venice, Florence, Rome, Chinotera, Amalfi Coast, all of these places kind of sometimes again and again. And so now they were ready for something new, something different, something that they felt like was more exclusive and kind of stretched them a little bit out of their comfort zone. And so that's uh that's what we kind of set out to do. I will say that one of the things we're continuing to look for is those partners that like are in those bigger cities because we don't do that. We want to partner with other people that we can refer business to and that we know they'll be really taken care of. why they want to visit Paris, they want to visit Nice, they want to visit Milan or Venice or some of these bigger cities that we are connecting through. No, I'm not a wine expert by any means, shape or for, but I've been to a lot of wineries. I've had a lot of wine experiences. How do you choose which ones to work with and which ones not to? What how talk us through that process? How do you go about finding, measuring, tasting, selecting? Yeah. Yeah. Um, actually this is a fantastic question that really is my husband's specialty with the import company. And so for him, he typically is tasting about 100 wines before he finds one that he's like, "This is, you know, of uh good quality, but also where it's sellable in the US where he knows that, you know, the customers that will likely purchase this." We have to sell from import to distribution to then they sell to restaurants or retailers. So it's a lot of times looking for that. But the most important thing is figuring out people that we want we feel like we can have a long-term partnership with. And so a lot of these, you know, wineries that we work with, they're familyrun wineries. They're multigenerational and they've a lot of times never had their their wine in the US. So there's this opportunity to be able to grow those brands, but it's a slow process. So slowly sharing those stories. every once in, you know, a couple times a year, they'll come over to the US and they'll actually go to uh, you know, country clubs or wine dinners or these types of things and share their stories. So, it's got to be a partnership where they realize that it's it's, you know, it's slow moving, but it's definitely worth it to get into the right spots. So, how do you mix the challenge? This is me going by my own week experience of visiting wineries and vineyards. How do you mix the challenge where there's some really really good vineyards producing great wine, but they're not really set up or focused on hosting guests or hosting tourists? Do do you then working you get the wine for them, but you use it in another environment or how how do you go about that if you find a great wine but you just know straight away they are not set up to host your guests? Yeah, I mean we we work with I think we work with 30 different family wineries right now and we don't include all of them are not included in the trip. You know, some of them are very very tiny. They definitely aren't they don't have a facility to host us or you know maybe they they could host us but it would be just outdoors. Some beautiful tables but just with weatherwise it's too much of a risk. You know some people are fantastic at making wine but they're not so maybe great at hosting. That was my point without being blunt about it is I've met some of these wine makers and they make fantastic wine, but I wouldn't let them near customer. Yeah. Yeah. So, we um we Yeah. Look for people that have this isn't what we originally look for when we're looking to work with them from the wine standpoint. It typically always comes first. So, we're already importing their wine. We already have success and then we're going back and saying, "Okay, wait, could this be a partner for us when it comes to actually connecting the dots on one of our itineraries?" And so when we just finished and launched our new central and southern Italy tour, we um you know, we went and we um sat with each of these wineries, we'd been there multiple times, but we went and we looked at it in a different with different eyes. Like where would the the guests sit and how would we greet the guests and how would we show them an experience that was different than just going to any other winery that they've been to before? What are some special things that we can do that are more local that we can kind of bring into this specific, you know, area that we're at visiting this winery? and what stories do we want to share that we feel like will really connect with our guests. You know, some of these conversations we have and then you know the first time we go u we kind of walk through that and then afterwards we really kind to have the same conversation and tweak it and say okay with the next group let's try it this way. And so it's been a lot of that throughout the years and now it's easy for us because of the fact that we go back to the same wineries. We get there and they they know the routine. they know exactly kind of what what we do and so it's for them it's easy and for us it feels very you know streamlined and easy and everything flows really well but it's it took some work to get there. You mentioned you had a 75% rebooking rate which is fantastic and again for listeners you want to measure your rebooking rate. It also measures your referral rate. So the people that these great customers introduce to come back to the business as well. And the reason you do that is because that tells you how much new business you have to acquire each year, which tells you how much to budget for. So all of this flows as a system. Let's talk about your customer. These people that keep coming back. Who are they? Describe your perfect customer. Who is the perfect customer for this business? So our average customer is average age 63. Um they are typically retired because these are a little bit longer trips and they like to add to the front or the back end. For me, my favorite part is a lot of them are celebrating a big birthday or a milestone anniversary or something like that. They're likely empty nesters. They are excited about traveling or excited about traveling again. Um, most of them are very welltraveled where they have been to lots of places. They've probably been to Italy lots of times, mostly Tuskanyany, like Ko, some of these other places. And like I said, now they're ready for something a little bit different um to visit kind of those in between places. Our people are they're uh wine lovers, but they are not wine experts by any means. They just love to eat and drink. And that's really part of what we love is uh to show them uh you know, the favorite places that we we like, the wines that we like. You know, we try to really challenge our guests throughout the trip. All of the wine is included. But my husband also is all about kind of educating in a very approachable way. So, we do some fun, you know, there's wine pairings with every meal we have together that we select ahead of time. And, you know, he might challenge them a little bit to talk about new world wines or old world wines or different vintages and just different things to kind of help them just learn a little bit as we go, but it's definitely not the type of thing where, you know, we do an industry tour once a year with somales and people that own wine shops and that kind of thing. And that's a whole different tour. That's like really digging deep, but this is much more. If you like to eat and drink, you are a person. So sticking with your customer, you've been going 12 years and now so that's a reasonable time. Has there been any changes in the customer profile, the demands from the customer? Is there any change you can identify in the customers? Yeah, absolutely. So when we first started out and I like I had shared before it was, you know, us and staying at Turismos and driving around in a van, this kind of thing. And it's definitely evolved from there. So at this point, we stay at fivestar accommodations. Um, you know, we're eating at Michelin restaurants a couple during the trip, but we're also, you know, we still keep those fun little oeras and the stuff that, you know, is, um, you know, a little bit harder to find those hidden gems. Um, we're still introducing them to our friends, all of those things, but we've just really kind of upleveled the quality of the accommodations and some of the meals. We've included a lot more wines. Our our transportation, we have a private driver now with a luxury bus for these type of things. And so, even our price point has really, you know, in the last 12 years has gone completely different. Um, but we as long as we're continuing to deliver on the value and our guests are still saying like, "Wow, I can't believe that, you know, the price is what it is." You know, even encouraging us to continue to up it. I think that we're doing something. Let's discuss that. The guests are saying to you, they can't believe the price is on the downside. That's their opinion. No, on a good side. Like they are saying, "Okay, I we're getting so much value." Yeah. No, that's what that's what I mean. Yeah. They think it's a low price. Yeah. So we keep upping it and upping it and upping it. Good. Yeah, we've upped it pretty much every year for the last 12 years. But now, yeah, it's it's extremely different from where we started to where we are now. So again, for our listeners here, and I for those that come on the coaching calls and those that meet me in person, I go on about this time and time and time again. As a tour operator, your job with pricing is to find the ceiling. And what a ceiling is is as high as your price can go until your customers start pushing back. So you keep raising your prices until the customers start mentioning that they're finding this quite expensive or your ratio of inquiries to bookings starts going down. And you can see it's because of price. This is so so important to find out where your maximum price is. It doesn't mean you then keep selling at your maximum. You can come off at a few percent, but you know you're at the market price for your customers by doing that exercise. You have to do that exercise. It's slightly different in multi-day because you've got such a long lead time. You can do it all year round. That exercise for day tours, you have to do it when you're really busy. You can't do it in the offseason. They have to do it in the busy season when they get lots of lots of bookings. Most operators never ever in their whole career of operating tour companies do that exercise. And what it means is you've left an absolute fortune on the table because you've never actually found the market price for your for your product. And you can't find the market price from your product by looking at other tour companies and other people's. That can give you a rough ballpark idea. But your customers, what you deliver is different. So you have to find your own market price. And it's quite a brave exercise to do. You have to have a bit of get up and go to do it. But it is so critical that people actually do this. Every time we raised our rates, my husband and I both we we looked at each other and said, "Is this too high? Maybe this is too high." And never a complaint. We all do it. Every tour operator does it. We're all guilty of it. But we're not we are not our customer. You have a you have to really decide who your customer is, your customer profile. Really understand that. And for many operators, they have multiple customer profiles because they're dealing with different customers. You've got a very narrow, you know, your customer inside out. That is not you. That is your customer. Therefore, you have to price where they are willing to go, not where you or your friends are willing to go. It's a very different thing that we're dealing with. You're in outbound international tours. Anybody who runs them knows that they don't always go swimming really well. things go wrong more in outbound international tours than other type of tour operating for the simple reason you're dealing with so many different logistics flights travel weather how are you dealing with the craziness of looking after people outbound into different countries uh first off you know confirm confirm confirm again reconfirm again even you know we book typically you know some of our accommodations and things year out you know are sending them a message you six months out, we're sending, you know, three months, one month. I'm sending them a message the day of see you today to make sure that we, you know, everything runs smoothly that way. You know, we, you know, definitely had, you know, a few things here and there that have happened unexpectedly that were just completely out of, you know, our control over the years. But, you know, I think for us it's um it's been a little bit of um I think a little bit of I would say a a good thing in some ways from the standpoint of we realize who our real partners are in these circumstances where you know something doesn't go quite right. The fact that we could reach out to a local guide uh that we work with or one of our hotels that we've had a really great relationship with and they kind of jump in and come to our rescue. Um, I can give you one specific example of a crazy thing that happened and probably one of our craziest things that we've experienced in the last 12 years is we had a new relationship with a a bus company. We had used another company for a couple years now in France. And last within the last couple months, the bus company, they upped the level of their buses. It's some new bus and a new driver and came back to us and said, "Actually, your contract was for that old bus, which wasn't an old bus to begin with, and a different driver. So now your rate is more than 20% more. And so for us that wasn't, you know, that's not what we had planned. That's not the type of partner that we want or typically want to continue to work with. And so we went with another bus company that we were was well vetted. We were we walked through our our local guide, went and met with them. She did videos of the bus. We would have all of the things. And the day of the tour, the bus arrives and it is not that bus. It was a completely different bus. It wasn't a terrible bus, but it was not that bus. And we have a high-end clientele, so we have a certain standard of what that bus should be. And so we um really I had her kind of on the ground reaching out to the bus company and trying to figure out. So we get going and we get to our first winery and we make a stop and things were going well. We get in the bus and we had lunch and then we headed on to our next winery and all of a sudden the air conditioning is not working and um you know we're trying to figure out what's going on and the bus drivers you know trying to figure it out and uh we make a stop and the bus had a belt for the air conditioning belt that completely broke. So we're now in a position that we have, you know, 20 guests, luxury guests on a bus that we're not happy about and we um have 30 minutes to get to our next winery. And so this was a nightmare. So I had, thank goodness I had a bunch of portable fans in my bag. I try to have this kind of Mary Poppins bag that just has all the kind of things hopefully that we need. I had some like cooling towels. You know, we had bottled water. So we're trying to just, you know, keep the guests as happy as possible. And they were a lot of them were repeat guests. So they were understanding. They knew this was not our norm by any means. And so we were able to get to the winery. And in the meantime, we reached out to this local guide. reached out to our hotel we were going to. They called in vans from two three sorry three different places. They all arrived together. The guests got into air conditioning vans. They actually sent cold bottle water for our guests and then they had another hour drive to the hotel where they checked in and everything ended up, you know, running as smooth as it possibly could. But that was a disaster situation. And so I got on the call with the owner the next day with the bus company and really kind of laid it out there and before you know it, the next day that actual bus that we were shown shows up and that's our bus that we had for the rest of the trip. And so that was a nightmare. But thank God we had partners that were able to step in when something went wrong. We had someone local on the ground that was also able to kind of step in when there was a need. And we've we've now gone back to the fact that we we can really trust our partners and of course you know continue to look for good partnerships that we don't end up in this type of situation. Sometimes these things that go ary or go not the way you want to go are sometimes experiences though for the customers and how you re they can see things are not going right. They're not stupid. They can see things are not how it should be. But if the company tries its hardest and does everything possible to fix what shouldn't be, I'm not convinced it's a bad thing. Some ways it's a good thing. It actually deepens the relationship with the customer cuz most people, not all customers, we know that, but most customers, balanced individuals that they know things go wrong. It's more about how you fix it can actually deepen the relationship with the customer. It's true. And you know, even by the end of the trip, it was something that they were, you know, there was jokes that were being, you know, joking around about it. And I think that, you know, we did apologize of course to the guests and we did a couple other special things um throughout the trip just to, you know, add extra value in where we felt like that of course was not the best experience. But um yeah, the response was you you guys did the best you could. you handle this situation and um there wasn't you know there wasn't complaints um which it really could have gone so much worse. So for us knowing that we have partners we can rely on definitely makes you know doing international tours so much better. So you've been going 12 years now which is a reasonable stint. If you were advising a reasonably new, say someone has been going, we have a lot of tour entrepreneurs in the membership who have been going two years, three years, a lot of people started coming out of co, so they're they're really in that multi-day world of doing one to four tours a year. They're just really getting going. What would be the hard lessons that you've learned that you would like to pass on to the guys and girls still getting started and getting going? Yeah. Um, I would say there's kind of three specific things that I would tell them to focus on. So, one of them I would say is to really be open to feedback. Um, you know, I think sometimes you go out, you build something and maybe it's your baby and you're like, "This is what I think is going to be perfect." And we've just we've grown and evolved our tours so much over the years because we listen to what the guests are saying. And then at the end of you know during the tour obviously and make tweaks as we you know can even little suggestions here and there um you know after the tour we get their feedback and my husband and I we sit down and we talk about how can we how can we make it better every year how can we make it better and not based on what we want but based on what the clients are actually asking for um you know our ideal clients and what they're asking for and um and looking how can we just continue to improve and so I would say number one would probably be to really um be open to feedback even if it's sometimes hard to hear that something you created was not absolutely perfect. The second I would say is quality over quantity. So one of the things that we have really focused on is making sure that we almost are continuing to take some things out of our tour. I think initially when you build it you want to add in anything and everything that you think would be so cool that you want your guests to experience but then they're exhausted because you're trying to put more and more in. Um, we're a wine focused tour. It's food and wine, but we we visit five wineries in the course of 10 days. We're not the type of tour that we're running from winery to winery. We're the type of tour that you sit down and have a tasting after you've had a beautiful tour of the property with the wine maker. You're sitting with the family and introducing having lunch and having, you know, a three-hour visit, not a 1-hour I'm standing in a winery. Someone's just, you know, pouring me wine, someone who just happens to work there. So it's this quality experience over adding more and more and more in. So I think that's one of the things even with quality over quantity even when it came to like marketing for us we kind of it was easy initially to feel like we had to be doing all of the things versus saying can we just have a few different things that were our best kind of marketing sources and can we just pour more time and energy and effort into those things versus trying to do it all. Same thing with, you know, our um relationships with travel agents. Any we we don't need a bunch of them. We just need some really good ones. So, I think maybe not being overwhelmed with trying to have so many, but having more quality. And then the last one I'd say that kind of ties in this too is really prioritize relationships. That is really the number one thing sharing the story of, you know, the crazy thing that happened to us. We knew we could rely on those relationships, but it's also we're looking for partnerships that with a hotel that we're it's a it's a win for both of us. The same thing with local guides, with our chefs, with we, you know, these small businesses. We're bringing a lot of money to their business and for them it's it's an honor to be able to host us too and for them to share their stories. So my three things are to really be open to feedback. The second one is quality over quantity. And the third is prioritizing relationships. Great. So on that for the tourreneurs, the marketing one you mentioned, it's very easy for new businesses to think they have to be doing everything marketing. You don't, but you need to be doing marketing a lot of it. But it does need to be reasonably focused. And the best way to focus your marketing is to really really understand who your customer is. We discussed it earlier in this this recording. We need you need to understand who your customer is because once you understand really who your customer is, you can then figure out where they are. And not all customers that you target will be on every platform, every social types of customer respond to different types of marketing. So after you figure out who your customer is, you need to figure out who where they are. And that changes your whole marketing journey. Why is that important? Because it means your cost of acquiring the customer gets lower when you really know where your customers are. So your lifetime value of your customer is much higher because you're not having to spend as much uh money acquiring a customer. to put some numbers on that for the listeners particularly in multi-day I know multi-day companies who are acquiring customers as low as $50 $60 per customer which is outrage out outrageously good if they're spending thousand thousands of dollars and I know other companies who are spending5 600 $700 acquiring customers so there's no a right and a wrong in that it's just what it is it's where you need to understand where your customers are the other thing you mentioned is partnerships in multi-day particularly partnerships are the maker or break of the business. You can't run everything yourself in someone else's country. That's impossible. Uh you just can't do it. You have to have these depth of partnerships and relationships that are b built over time. You really are only as good as the people who are working with on the ground. What's in wine tourism specifically that is absolutely booming. You see sectors of our industry go through peaks and troughs. You have sectors that absolutely boom and then they level off and then they just It's rare you see one disappear. It's rare a vertical or a sector disappears. But you do get sectors that boom and then level off and a bit more flat after that. So what does that mean to tour operators? It means make hay when the sun shines. When you're in a sector that's going through a lot of change and a lot of growth and a lot of interest, you have to run. If you're ambitious, everybody's different. Some people just want to manage what they've got. But if you're in a sector that's growing, you have to run hard. You have to really grab the growth when you can get it because they're no guarantee it's going to be there in the same way in x number of years time because trends change, customers change, things go up and down. We know all the international stuff at Heltons and politics and all the rest interferes with this business. So when you're in a sector like wine at the moment that's growing quite considerably, you have to run faster than you probably want to to grab that opportunity when it's there because the opposite when you're in a sector and we'll have many operators listen to this who are in sectors that are not growing like that. You have to work a lot harder when you're not in a sector that's growing as great as that has got that same interest. You're going to have to do a lot more marketing in a sector that's not growing. So if you're if you're listening to this and you're lucky enough to be in wine, food, adventure, workshops are growing like a train. Anything to do with workshops are growing like a train. Wellness, if you're in one of these sectors and you're thinking you're going to be running four tours or five tours this year, start thinking about running 10 or more because the market is there. Any market is compounding each year in double figures percentages. You have a market and if you're not capturing it, it's your marketing because the market is definitely there to to be had. After that rant, let's uh what's up for No, let's talk about technology because multi-day tours and technology is important. Are you are you using any technology? Yeah, absolutely. We use Travel Joy is for our CRM and we actually just started the process of switching over to Wii Travel. We like that a little bit better because we can charge in euros and definitely with the fluctuation, you know, in um all of this right now, charging in euros is fantastic. So, we just have switched over um and um we're using that for payments. I I don't quite love the platform for the CRM part of it. Uh so, maybe we'll end up keeping Travel Joy for that element. I don't know. We'll go with that. Um so far, I like We Travel. We also use uh Trai for our itinerary builder. Enjoy that tool. I like the fact that it's an app that our guests can use while they're on tour and then you know we use Quickbooks and you know that type of thing as far as within the business too. So there you've just described the technology stack of four different pieces of technology and obviously you're using a website and email and so just in your tour business there's probably seven or eight different pieces of technology all in and news on we travel they raised $98 million last week so I would expect quite a bit of investment to go into the platform and see the things that you're making. Yeah, that'd be great. Not keen on maybe improve rather rapidly because when you've got $98 million of new cash coming in, things tend to change fairly fairly rapidly. So that that's great to see a multi-day operator with a a stack that's working for you, but you're still open enough to look at new solutions and what's going to work. Your point on what to charge in is a point that comes up all the time in the tour group. It is a pain point for multi-day operators. Do they charge in the local currency where their customers are coming from or do they charge in the currency of where the customers are going? For obvious reasons, the currency markets are moving this year quite dramatically which can really eat into the profits of the tour operator. There is no hard fix rule for this. It's what suits each individual operator. I personally always used to build in a margin to allow for currency exchange. It was quite a big margin. I always added 10% in just to allow for currency exchange. I never ever experienced a 10% currency swing in the time I was operating. Sometimes there was quite big swings, but I never experienced more than a a 10% currency swing. But with new technology today, there's lots of ways that you can manage this uh currency exposure for the for the way or if you're comfortable and your customers are happy, the easy way is just to charge in the destination. And if you're going to Europe, it's reasonably easy because it's Euros cover so many destinations in Europe one way. But I've seen that conversation in the group reasonably every week, every two weeks that conversation comes up in the comes up in the group. And we have many partners and entrepreneur that actually specialize in dealing with currency movements, technical fintech type partners that can minimize the risk of moving currency going across different places going forward. For those listening, I believe the risk of currency transaction will disappear in the next few years. If the USA government goes fixed in law with a thing called stable coins that we won't go into, but if they go fixed in stable coins, the risk from currency movements will disappear for operators. But it's a it's certainly a thing that's hurting some operators at the moment. What do you see going forward is the natural progression for the type of tour you're doing this wine and food tour with a high-end customer in different destinations that they've known since children and always had a ambition to go to or like you said maybe been to multiple times before. How do you see that evolving? What do you need to do to make that better going forward or different going forward from what you're doing now? Right now, what we're really focused on is kind of making these partnerships for, like I was saying, in the bigger cities. So, we need to find a great partner. I want to find a great one in in Venice I can refer business to. We definitely almost all of our guests stay an additional day and they go to Venice. I need a guide that is on the ground phenomenal that I feel very comfortable referring business to. Same thing in Milan, same thing in Paris, same thing in Nice, same thing in We've got a great partner in Florence. So, I'm excited about that. great partner maybe in you know Katana around that area would be fantastic. So we're looking to grow kind of those partnerships on the front and the back end of the tour because there's already demand for it in the future. We've got a few um ideas for other wine areas that maybe we'd look to partner with someone. Um we had a really great partnership this last year actually. Um I'm sure you know Gregory with Bask Bites. Y he's phenomenal. um we partnered with him this last year and did a we called it joy of wine goes baskque and so um kind of worked together. He um is a fantastic guide and does kind of these um you know three four day trips and now he's starting to do more and more of these multi-day and so we worked together and built an itinerary. He built the itinerary. gave some feedback on, you know, what our guests might be really looking for and then my husband and I we went along and we were kind of co-hosts and so it was a very cool um opportunity to collaborate in that way which we hadn't done before and so we're kind of open to that too with the right partners. So those are kind of the areas we see that we're planning to focus on growth over the next you know couple years. Great to hear that you're one growing. Again, it's all about partnerships and for the listeners, we've just had a a request there from multiple locations for the best guides to know about wine, their their destination, wine and food, reach out and get in conversation and hopefully develop more partnerships within the tour ecosystem. So, back to your guest. Guest comes has a great experience in Italy or Argentina or France. What do you want that guest to go away with? What's sticking in that guest's mind? Or what do you want to be in that guest's mind as they leave that tour or leave that experience? I want them to feel like they made friendships um not only with other guests because that's really cool to see. Um, and so many of our um, our guests, they do end up really connecting and then they travel together um, and you know, kind of resign up for another tour together or we have a lot of these fun reunions that are going on with guests that maybe just met for the first time or guests that have been traveling, you know, together before. So, you know, we've been invited to a lot of those or get pictures of a lot of those. So, that's really kind of cool. But we also want them to feel like they're making friends with the locals and they meet one of our wine makers and they're just super down to earth, you know, good people and they make quick connections and they w they're welcomed as family when they they arrive and I think that they tend to when that wine maker's in town, they tend to go to an event or something they've got going on and they're giving hugs and they're like we we have these friends all over Italy or all over France. We want them to feel that way. We also want them to feel like they definitely got, you know, their their money's worth. they this was a fantastic value for them. They got to have this amazing experience and we also want to make sure that they that we have you know delivered something that was above their expectations. So we try to underpromise and way overd deliver and that's been good for us. So yeah I guess I would say those are the things the underpromise and overd deliver is always a good thing in tour design and tour deliverings. As we start to wrap up now, let's make some destinations really happy and other destinations not so happy. What's your favorite region for wine in Italy? Ah, okay. So, I'm going to say Piedmont. Um, the reason why I say that is my husband and I, we have an apartment there, so we go 50% kind of back and forth. So, like two months, two months, two months. Um, great friendships, but um, we're both big fans of Nobiolo. So the grape that goes into Barbaresco, Barolo, you know, those type of wines. And so, um, yeah, those are our favorites. And it plus I think it because it's our second home, it also has a a pl a deeper place in our heart. Okay, let's pick on the French. Now, have you got a favorite French region? So, I am definitely I'm I'm a Champagne girl, so I definitely enjoy our time in in Champagne. We have two different wineries that we work with there. Um, and I would say also Burgundy. Um, I'm in a little bit of a if I'm going to go red, I'm going to go towards Piedmont with Nevi. If I'm going to go white, I'm definitely going to go towards a burgundy, a white burgundy or or a champagne. Okay, different question this time. If resources were unlimited, you had enough people, you had enough time, you had enough money, unlimited resources, what would be the next three wine destinations that you would open tours in? It would be New Zealand. So, we have a great partner in New Zealand, a winery partner, and we have guests that would absolutely love to go to New Zealand. Um, for us, where we are struggling a little bit with kind of um from an infrastructure standpoint, how to kind of group that together. We've spent a good amount of time in New Zealand, but yeah, that would be a great partnership. If I could find a really great on the ground guide in New Zealand that could help us with kind of piecing these things together, um, and also, you know, helping when we're on the ground, we would travel with the group. But yeah, that would be fantastic. We've got demand. So, I guess that would be Yeah, that would be good. New Zealand. Great. I'll give you a suggestion. The most insane wine destination I've been to in the world, Georgia. Mhm. It's just like I've never met people so in insanely interested in wine and the amount of w you just walk down any street and there's wine everywhere. Every third shop is a wine retailer or a people just sitting drinking wine of ridiculous quantities. But I've never been anywhere that the whole population is so engrossed in in wine. So to wrap this up, give us a wine maker story or a story from your 12 years of all of these different destinations. Give us a story that sticks in your mind. Early early on, we had these two travel buddies that were traveling together and one had recently lost his wife and the other was saying, "Let's just go and let's, you know, explore. We have traveled a lot for business before, but let's just let's take a trip." And so they, you know, the one left his wife at home and went with his his buddy to go on the tour with us. And so this is when we were really early starting out and and they had a great time on that trip. Since then, he went back a few years later. The other gentleman had a new girlfriend and they went with the wives this time or the girlfriend and the wife this time on another trip. Same tour. Then the two a year or two later they went again and they brought her sister-in-law and the brother-in-law and some other people. So then last year they went again but this time to Basque with Gregory and us and they brought the whole the daughter and the son and this daughter-in-law and and now this year they've already signed up for Central and Southern Italy and they filled an entire tour with just family and friends. And so for us to I mean this relationship started 12 years ago and now to the point where they've been on I think I think I just named off like six trips with us over the years and we've just we've grown to love them as people and when you've traveled that you know these 10day trips together you really get to know them. Obviously we're now getting to know their family even more and so for us that's yeah that's been really exciting and the friendships we formed out of this. My husband and I never went into it with that real intention. we thought, well, let's deliver a great experience. But I was saying, we're constantly getting invited to reunions of people coming together or come visit us at the lake house or whatever it might be. And so, we formed some really deep friendships that have been super fun for us, too. So that description you just gave there was full of fun and relationships and friends and how it grew and it's all sounds nice but in my brain I'm just because it's the way I am. I'm just going lifetime value of a customer started there and it just went bigger and it went bigger and then the referrals and then now they're filling a whole trip. So by looking after customers exceptionally well you can end up with customers actually contributing to your business hugely. Natalie from Joy of Wine Journeys. Thank you for your time. I know you're busy. You're about to go straight out and lead another tour in Italy. Thanks very much. That was excellent. Thank you. This has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much, Peter.