Transcript [EN]: Sell More Tours through Partnerships (w/ Nicole Mahoney, Travel Alliance Partnership)

Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of the true travel business podcast. I am Mitchbach, your host as always. And today I am excited to be with Nicole Mahoney, who is the head of the Travel Alliance Partnership, but has done a whole lot more in her life. And we're going to be talking all things partnership building, DMC's, destination marketing, and everything else that she has a wealth of knowledge for. So Nicole, I am really excited that we have this chance to talk today. Welcome to TourPreneur. Thank you so much, Mitch. And I'm so happy to be here. I'm I'm excited to uh to talk with you and I I am so passionate about travel and especially about tour and the tour side of the travel industry and so I'm just really excited to dig in. So Nicole, you are a fellow podcaster. I've been enjoying getting to know your podcast, Destination on the Left, and we met at the American Bus Association conference, the beast of a conference this year. It was in or last year it was in Philadelphia. and we really bonded because in many ways we're doing something similar although quite different in terms of helping to connect to our operators and help them discover the connections necessary to build great partnerships and great businesses. So I was wondering just by way of introduction if you could give us a little bit of the rundown of your path in this industry and where it's led you today. Sure. Absolutely. I would love to. Uh, let me think where I want to start. Uh, well, first of all, I always like to start with I grew up in uh the Rochester, New York area, upstate New York. Um, specifically in the Fingerlakes, and tourism is all around us here. So, there are small communities all throughout the Fingerlakes. I live in a relatively small community in Canada, which is one of the Fingerlakes here. and I see um every day how important visitors are in the visitor economy is to our community and to our quality of life and to just enjoying what we have. And so that passion for um small business and the passion I have for you know a thriving main street and thriving economies is really what drew me into uh travel and tourism specifically. I started as a marketing agency and at first I thought well I'll use my skill set. I was good at public relations. I was good at event planning and I thought well we'll we'll start here and I'll help small businesses um really kind of attract visitors and customers and what they need in order to grow and thrive. And over the years um I have evolved our agency into much more than just a marketing agency. Now we are truly a partnership. We have a membership structure which I think is a little bit where you and I overlap except not exactly. Um but we do have a group of tour operators who belong to our part partnership as well as a group of suppliers representing DMOS uh accommodations um uh attractions and uh those folks all come together to collaborate to do more together than they can on their own. And we have several ways that they collaborate. Uh some of it's marketing related and some of it's just really business related and and how do we be better professionals, better business operators. Um how do we build successful companies that are really going to grow and last and make an impact? So that's the the short of it. If you could tell me about what TAP is exactly because I think it's a really interesting model for how our industry could work. Yeah, absolutely. So, TAP was started by a number of tour operators uh right after 911 and it was started in response to declining bookings. Um and so at one of the national um trade shows, couple of tour operators got together and they said, you know, it'd be great if we could buy and sell from each other. I don't have a full bus going out, but if you had a couple passengers that you could put on my bus and you know someone else has a couple they could put on my bus, I could have a fuller bus and I could make these tours actually go. And so a number of tour operators got together and they formed this company uh TAP Travel Alliance Partners with the idea that they were going to buy and sell from each other and help each other fill their tours. And this was really in response to a downturn that happened after 9/11. Um over the years uh they expanded into a number of different types of collaborations and one of them which I think is is really interesting now is this idea of having these corporate partners um that belong to TAP or come to TAP and the tour operators put their buying power together in order to get uh f more favorable rates or to get some sort of a a joint commission or a rebate. um based on their purchasing power. And what I like about that is it takes the small business and puts them together so they can be a little bit more competitive like a bigger business that has a lot more buying power, right? Um and so there's these relationships that they formed that help them save money and be more competitive. So there's that piece. They still have the marketing piece where they're buying and selling from each other. But now beyond that, they actually um put their tours on a shared website together and uh co-arket uh to travel advisors and to others um to you know buy their tours. Um so that's another way that they that they work together. And then they also have this kind of owners network which I know um Mitch you have an owners a more formal owners network um within your group but where they can share best practices and they have kind of this advisory council if you will that they can lean on and they trust because they each know each other so so well. Um, so that that's the the tour operator piece. And then we also have um suppliers who belong to our organization um who want more access to these tour operators and the tour operators really appreciate the suppliers um and they and they're their go-to like first when they're working on a new tour. They're always looking to see who's in the tap network because these are people they just have deeper relationships with. And if what they're looking for isn't in the TAP network, they can usually find a referral, you know, through the TAP network that will get them um what they're what they need. Um and so when I first found out about TAP, one of the things that I loved about it, I attended a TAP dance, which is their annual travel conference, and it was the first travel conference I had gone to where the suppliers were treated um by the buyers. So the buyers actually treated the suppliers to some very special experiences um that the buyers paid for instead of the opposite way. And so what they were doing is really showing how much they value the whole ecosystem. You know, it takes the suppliers um and the buyers, the the tour operators to really make it all work in partnership together. and they really through their travel conference kind of showcased how important that was. A lot of the larger conferences, the tour operators are, you know, they're on in their own breakfasts by themselves. They're, you know, it's not the same. Um, not that they don't appreciate uh the buyers, but this is just a way or the suppliers, but this is just a way that they demonstrated it. So in 2018 um my marketing company started doing the marketing and helping organize the event uh for TAP. And then through the pandemic the tour operators that owned TAP um really felt they needed to focus in on rebuilding their own companies and keeping their own tour operations going. Um, and so rather than having them close down tap or let it go, um, my company ended up purchasing it. And then we've evolved it now into what it is today, which is everything I just described to you, including what we call strategic growth services, which is the marketing arm of the organization. And so now we're one company, travel alliance partnership, and collaboration and partnership is just core to every single thing that we do. Yeah. I mean, I love the idea of marrying your marketing efforts with what you're doing in terms of partnership building and putting it all together. Like, sounds obvious, but it's actually incredibly rare. Well, I mean, it is. And but I will say it's because um my team had a strategic plan. Um we had a vision of where we wanted to take the company. We knew how we wanted to serve the travel industry. And although we didn't know how we were going to get there, when the opportunity to acquire TAP came up, it fit within our vision. So, it made it um easier for us to say yes or easier for us to not just say yes, but to even see the opportunity in the first place to be able to explore it, to get to a yes. Um, and again, that comes back to having a strategy, uh, a vision for your company of exactly where you fit, how who you serve. um and how you serve them. And once we did that, to your point, Mitch, it did become and seem like it was very obvious, but it, you know, it it's not it's one of those, you know, it's a journey. It takes a little while. Um but as a company, we're able to do so much more um because we have both sides of it than we were as two individual organizations. I wrote a LinkedIn post about this just like a week ago because it's been on my mind. The idea of building a business that's partner first and not product first. So not thinking about a business as a set of things that you go home and create in your mind and then seek out the right partners, but rather finding these incredible partners at these conferences or at these meetings, wherever it is, and then saying, "What can we do together?" that actually the power of a really great business is in those relationships much more than anything else because products get copied all the time or they can change whereas those relationships are the foundation that are really hard to come in as a third party and imitate. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And I I think it's interesting when you think about partnership or collaboration as a strategic imperative. Like I keep coming back to strategy but we did a uh we've done a few um two uh studies on collaboration in the travel tourism and hospitality industry and one of them was on the operationalization of collaboration in the industry and by operationalization what we were exploring was how do businesses put partnership or collaboration into every aspect of their operation from, you know, from from sales to product development to um finance, IT, like we asked across all of the different sectors of a of a company. And what we were pleasantly surprised to find out is that, and I might get this slightly off, but roughly 80% of the um respondents said that they have collaboration as part of their strategic initiative, like it is part of their strategy. And almost 50% said it was a documented part, which that surprised me as well. Meaning to me, you can say it's part of strategy of how we work, but if it's documented, that means you really fought through at least where it fits. Um, and we saw when we asked for all different parts where you use partnerships, it was across the board operationally, um, you know, marketing, sales, uh, as well as HR, IT, like in a lot of places where people find value and partnerships. Um, and I do believe it's it's the way I think this kind of goes back to what you asked me in the very beginning, which is, you know, how do you stay ahead? Like, you know, what's what makes a successful business, that growth mindset? And part of your growth mindset has to be, I guess, a collaborative mindset because that's how you're going to stay ahead. We can't figure it all out on our own. There's just too much. So the reason we are similar but different is because we both believe fundamentally that these types of collaborations and partnerships are the foundation of a really great business. We have nearly 20,000 people floating around our orbit. How many are in tap? Yeah. So we're very small compared to that. Uh we have um intap itself um I would say less than a hundred members because we have 21 tour operator members and we probably have uh 50 or so supplier members. Then we have folks who come to our event who aren't paying members. So they're still part of our uh part of our community, but they're not paying members. Um, and there's probably about a thousand of those. Um, so we're a small because for us it's about those deeper relationships. I know I can call up Mitch, you know, I have this issue and I can call Mitch. I know him personally. Um, so it's not about huge huge numbers. Now, if I add in my podcast and some other, you know, our e- newswsletter subscription and stuff, then that gets bigger. But that's not the community that we're cultivating. That's kind of like uh those are how people are um gaining awareness and then eventually if they're attracted to what we do, they'll raise their hand and they'll come into that smaller group. Yeah, that's how I think about it. I I I think small is the future. I mean, you even look at parallels in sort of social media where people are sick of the idea of the million follower person or whatever. like they actually just want a meaningful small group chat uh on WhatsApp or you know behind a DM wall or whatever. Like we're all I think wanting deeper, more meaningful and better smaller collaborations and relationships rather than always having to fish in this huge pond. Um yeah, I agree. It's it it's it's it's a model, but it's also hard to know like who to build as your partners, right? I mean, who's in TAP? You've got 21 tour operators. Those are all multi- tour operators that are like the tour operator members. They're all multi-day. Yeah. So, there's a certain type of tour operator that fits with TAP and it's multi-day. Um it's a certain it's a certain size. Um, I would say, and we don't have a hard and fast rule, but I'd say at least um a million dollars in sales as high as maybe 20 million, but not much higher than that, right? So, um, it's a smaller operator and um, they h there's a vetting process. So, we look for operators that are going to complement the operators we already have because the model really is they're buying and selling from each other. They're co-arketing together. So, we don't want to have 20 operators that all do New York City as for example, right? We want to make sure we have operators that represent a good um a good swath of what we have to offer not only in North America but even you know abroad trips etc. So, we're looking at balancing it all the time. Yeah, I love that. So, these operators, who are they collaborating with? Like who are the other members? So the op the tour operators are collaborating with each other a lot. Sure. Right. They're they're either buying and selling from each other or some of them they use each other as a way to create more programs without having to put on more tour planners to do the programs. So I know somebody in my network can do, you know, let's say I don't do the Northeast, I don't do New York City, I don't do New England. Um but I want to offer it to my customers. So I'm going to offer it. um you know through one of my tap tour operator partners and I'm going to put it into my catalog or I'm going to market it to my groups whoever it is because they also are operate in a variety of ways. Some of them do retail, some of them don't. Some of them, you know, just do custom group. Um it's it's a variety. Some do fit, some don't, you know. So, it's a variety and you just kind of get to know what everybody offers, what complements what you offer, and it gives you a way to extend your offerings without having to build a team to extend it. Um, and so, yeah, so they're collaborating with each other all the time. They also collaborate with our supplier partners if they're trying to develop a new program. Um, one of our tap tour operators, um, we were just at NTA contact in, um, Meno Island here in Michigan. And one of our tour operators is trying to develop a Michigan product. So before NTA contact, he he um met with a couple of our TAP suppliers who are from Michigan and kind of did some touring around and they're working to help him develop that Michigan product that he's looking for. Uh, so there's that type of a collaboration. And then the other collaboration that we do is really on the um what I talked about before with the buying power and really trying to find those relationships with uh corporate partners, whether it be a hotel partner, a cruise partner, travel insurance partner, um and figuring out how they can um maximize, you know, the money that they're making uh by selling through these other organizations. How does that work in terms of maximizing buying power? Because if you have a complement of different kinds of operators, how how are they all using the same supplier, for example, or some of them? They aren't. They aren't. So, it's like we look for where we look for where there's enough of them using certain cruise lines as a example. Yeah. Some some overlap, right? Exactly. I mean, there's got to be a good handful of them to make a difference, but um you know, most all of them use travel insurance. So, you know, that's kind of an easy an easier one. um some of the technology solutions that have that that we've been seeing lately. We've got some relationships with some of them um as a way and and that kind of helps too because if it's vetted through tap then um the partners, you know, have an opportunity to learn more about it, maybe might trust it a little bit more and give it a try rather than some technology solutions which can be a little um depending again on your mindset, you know, a little scary to try to to dive into. So to be able to have tour operator partners who have used something before and can you know you can call them if you're kind of stuck uh also helps. Are you saying there are some multi-day experienced tour operators that are afraid of embracing technology? I didn't say that. You did. You heard it here first. I'm shocked. Um, no. I mean, of course. I mean, listen, a lot of this technology didn't exist five years ago, and the technology that existed 20 years ago is pretty bad. Uh, and so hopefully it's been updated. I don't mean to disparage the companies that have been around for a long time, unless you haven't changed in 20 years. Um, it's rapidly moving. And, uh, so this partnership idea, is there an interface with destinations at all, DMOS? Is there any sort of confluence going into that? Yeah, the DMOS um for the for the tour side of of what we do at TAP um the the place that they sit is really in that supplier side that I talked about, you know, that Michigan um itinerary or product that that tour operator is making. Those are DMOs that are helping to make those connections. Um but also within our company we have you know the strategic growth services side of the agency and there are a ton of collaborations that happen on that side between DMOS. Um one of them is actually that we're doing right now is a Canadian public relations program PR program where we have uh I think it's 13 DMOS from New York State who have all come together and they want to market to Canada. Um, it's been interesting right now working on that with them, of course, with all everything that's been going on in the news. Um, but this group is committed to Canada. Canada is an important market for them. And they found if they could first of all put their resources together, they could hire um, you know, hire us to do their public relations work for them. Also, when you go into a market like Canada and you're trying to sell a state like New York, it's easier to sell if you're in a group and you've got, you know, multiple um options of things for people to do than if you're just one standalone. And so, that's really actually what first got my piqued my interest in this whole idea of partnership and collaboration was watching DMOs do it and understanding that travelers don't travel by, you know, county lines or geographical lines that you can't even see. they're invisible. Um, and so watching DMOs come together and figure out even though they're funded through different types of taxpayer basis. Um, figuring out how they can work together to attract those visitors and kind of really buying into this rising tide lifts all boats. And so, um, I see DMO collaborations happening like that PR program, but and so many more all the time. I love that. uh since you are pretty well verssed in kind of collaborating or connecting with DMOS as organizations. By the way, for our audience, if you have listened to the last 10 minutes and wondering what the heck we're talking about, destination marketing organizations, they are sometimes called CVBS, convention and visitors bureaus. They are sometimes national entities, sometimes regional, sometimes citywide. They're there to promote a destination and they're theoretically there to encourage and support everybody in the tourism ecosystem in the destination as well. Lake day tour operators, this is always a sticky point for our community members and partially it feels like every DMO is just different. But keeping in line with this sort of uh tour operator focus, what are your thoughts on how tour operators should be thinking about collaborating with DMOS? What are the the best of all possible worlds? And I don't know, what are you seeing that's less than best? Yeah. Well, DMOs are a great resource and sometimes um the fact that you just had to explain that what a DMO is to your audience is part of the challenge. A lot of people don't know what a DMO is or that they even have one in their own market, but um the majority of markets have them. Like like you said, it could be a regional one, it could be citywide, it could be countywide. Uh here in New York State, they're by county, but we've seen them in many other ways all across um the world, actually. And for a tour operator, if you could find your local DMO. Now, first of all, if you're a multi-day tour operator and you're trying to go to a destination, the DMO is a great resource because they're going to know who's group friendly. They're going to know who the contacts are. If you're looking for a certain brand of a hotel within a market and you just want to make sure that the proximity is right to, you know, whatever your hub spoken to, um, they're going to be able to help you and they will save you time. So when I was talking about tour planners before, you know, that's a lot of work and especially post pandemic trying to keep track of contacts, you know, turnover. DMOS are keeping track of the turnover because their job is to market all of these places. Um, and so they know who who the sales director is. They know who you can talk to. So that will help with the multi-day trips with the day uh day tour operators. DMLS will promote you as an attraction within their own city. So, you know, if you're a walking tour in a city, a historic tour, a foodie tour, um you do a sunset sale, whatever it is, um make sure your DMO knows because they will include you and it's usually free. The majority of them are are funded through an occupancy tax. They get a piece of the occupancy tax. So, the majority of them do not require a membership. Um, some do, but most of them don't. And for free, they will promote you either on their website, um, if you get a really good relationship with the DMO and they have, you know, a travel writer coming to town, they might call you up and ask you to show this, you know, to have this travel writer experience your tour, which gets you more exposure that way. So DMOS are um great cheerleaders for the destinations but also really really good partners um for every tourism asset that's within uh within their destination. So highly recommend if you don't know your DMO, find them, meet them. Yeah, I mean I think you're right. Step one is know what a DMO is. And it it's terminology, but it's also I think a lot of our members have I guess kind of given up on them over the years because probably the default setting is, oh, we'll add you to our website either for free or whatever. But the website isn't developed in a way that it feels like bookable or like discovery is really hard. It's like I've I've gone on to these websites. They're big long lists sometimes of just like things to do and and you kind of get buried. Are those websites successful? Are you seeing conversions happen through them? And if an operator has a sort of I guess average feeling towards them, what are some ways that they could improve that or be proactive? Yeah. Well, first of all, for your question about the websites, um, so a DMO's website has a different purpose than a tour operator's website. DMOs are not selling the product. So, that's an interesting, um, kind of position that they're in. They are marketing the product of the destination, where to go, what to do, places to stay, but they're not the booking engine. And, um, so their job really is to get people to click off of their website onto your website. So those listings are important, but a listing I can see if you're especially if you're in a big destination and you're some small, you know, it's your small listing among hundreds that um again back to what we talked about earlier, that's not helping you stand out. And what I uh recommend is that you really get to know your the the right people at the DMO. A lot of DMOs, especially if you're in the tour business, um would have someone that's in charge of travel, trade sales, group sales, um something like that, a title like that. That would be somebody worth getting to know because they will be great referrals for you. And then the other person I would try to get to know would be their the uh communications manager um or marketing manager, you know, it could be any type of title along those lines. And the reason why is because the communications manager and a lot of these websites will have blogs for example and a lot of them like to do roundups, you know, so like um dog friendly places or, you know, best food stops or they they'll come up with very creative ideas. Um maybe it's a Mother's Day, you know, maybe it's event related. Um maybe it's a Halloween post or something if you have a haunted if you have a haunted tour, let's say. Um, so getting to know their blog content, then getting to know their communications and marketing folks will hopefully get you um into maybe some of their own blog posts or into their social media posts. They're always looking for content to share about their destination. And so the easier you can make it for them to find the content they need that aligns with what they're trying to market, um, the the more they'll appreciate you and the more they'll think of you. Um, and then the other thing a DMO can do is, um, like I mentioned with the travel writers and different tours that come to town, like tour operators, multi-day operators. A lot of DMOs will have a fam tour and they'll bring a number of multi-day operators into a town and if you have a good relationship with your DMO, hopefully they'll put your day tour on their fam, right? it'll be they'll have part of your tour as part of the experience and that gets you more referral business that way as well. So, um I think it's Mitch like a a lot of anything you'll get out of it what you put into it and so the more you work the relationship the more ways you'll find to to work with them. I that's gold because I think sometimes people give up too quickly or they're always talking to the same person through one channel. Maybe it's because that's the person who shows up at the conference that they go to or whatever. And maybe they're like not actually the most ambitious or creative person like on the team. Whereas like actually the people over doing the blog could be surfacing a a a feature article on you that cuts through that that listing page of death where you don't stand out and you just sort of wither. Um great great stuff. Uh so partnerships I feel like everyone's nodding their heads and yet at the same time and again I'm trying to make sure that we speak to both day tour operators and multi-day tour operators because they both exist in our community. The day tour operator is often more focused on competition and beating their competition, lowering their prices or making sure those jerks down the street don't copy my tour. What What is your take on balancing a healthy sense of competition but also knowing when to cooperate and cut through that and reach out a hand of peace? Yeah. Well, I have some ideas, but before I get to some ideas, I also have a very um strong point of view on competition. And I believe that the best collaborations actually can come from uh collaborations with your competitors. And I call it coopetition. Um and coopetition is basically when competitors cooperate to create something more together than they can on their own. I also believe, and listen, I'm a marketing agency. Like that's where I started. I if you've have you ever looked up marketing agencies like there are so many out there. There is a lot of competition in the marketing agency world and I um believe that there is room for everyone. There is enough business to go around. If every single tour operator or travel company in the world called me up and said we want you to be our agency, I couldn't handle it. Right? So there is enough business out there for everyone. So therefore I say do not discount your competition. However, healthy competition can be good. I do have healthy competition with you know others in my space. And um one of the ways that you can differentiate is to look for other types of collaborations within your community. So let's say uh let's say there's three sunset sale tours, right? And you're one of them and you really want to stand out. Well, maybe you have a really good relationship with a particular hotel that perhaps most people can't get to, right? Maybe they can't afford to stay at that hotel, but you have a good relationship there. So, you get referred their guests take your your sale, but also you can have people who are staying at other hotels come take your sale out of this very beautiful pitch picturesque place. um that's a collaboration between you and this very upscale hotel. Um that then can make you stand out from these other sales, let's say, because you're coming out of this very um beautiful place that people wouldn't be able to see had they not either stayed there themselves or come on your sale. Um, so just trying to think about collaborations and relationships that you can make that can provide referrals back and forth, um, but also can add on to the experience and make the experience something that will help you stand out is how I would think about that. I love that. I think it's just you it's it's it's a little bit of you never know as well. Like do a nice thing for somebody. It's like stop stop stop for once thinking oh those people down there I only have to always beat them but throw them a bone and see what kind of comes from it. Just be nice. It's sort of also I'm a New Yorker and it's like once in a while two people look at each other and they smile and it like changes everything cuz normally walking down the streets of New York City is sort of like a a combat sport, you know? But like once in a while there's a smile and you're like, "Oh, wait. We're humans. That's right. That's right. Absolutely. Be nice. I know. Our radical advice after an hour of talking. Be nice. Just go be nice. What um you know, what strategies should this kind of multi-day operator that's in your network think about when they're saying, "Well, who should I begin with in terms of like my my first partner?" when it's operator to operator and multi-day to multi-day uh thinking about kind of creating these types of collectives and cooperatives because I think for me this conversation isn't necessarily about driving a thousand people more to you because I think it sounds like your cooperative is the right shape and size for what you're trying to accomplish. So I'm wondering like an operator out there that wants to go and like model this behavior, where should they begin thinking about that next partner being? Yeah. Well, I see this happen at those conferences that we've talked about. You know, if you're in the states here, um American Bus Association or NTA, uh Travel Exchange or Tourreneur Tourreneurs Conference coming up in Charleston, South Carolina. Oh yes, of course. And so, um, I've never been to Torpneur, but I'm sure this happens there as well. And that is people will end up at these conferences talking to each other. I just witnessed it. I mentioned I was at one just this past weekend. And one tour operator is putting together Route 6, a Route 66 program um because next year is a big anniversary year for Route 66. And this other operator who's from the Pacific Northwest, I I witnessed this conversation in the hall, said, "I really want one of those programs, you know, for my customers. I'm going to reach out to you because I'd like to put your tour into my catalog and promote it to my customers because I want one of those programs, but I don't want to create it for myself." And I witness that sort of thing happen all the time. It's not just at tap. Um, it happens naturally. But what I would say is those conversations start. Um, and what what you need to do is get a comfort level with that person that you're going to partner with because especially when it comes to tour operators, one of the things that that I've heard a lot from tour operators who are putting their customer on someone else's tour is they want to make sure their customer is going to have as good of an experience um on that person's tour as they would on their own tour because it's their reputation. you know, it's their quality and they want to make sure that the quality is matching uh the experience and the expectation if they're going to make the the uh or send a customer on someone else's tour. So, you'll want to make sure you vet through that with whoever you're talking to. And that's one thing that through TAP that we do, everyone knows through TAP that they're all um operating similarly and a sim similar level of excellence. Um so, they had there's a different kind of comfort level there, but anyone could do this. Um it's really just again comes back to relationship building and building that trust and then start with one thing you know. Well I think also in the multi-day world the lifetime value of a customer is so huge. It's one of the benefits of getting to be uh a multi-day operator and they outgrow you at a certain point unless you're a very very large operator. It's like, "All right, how many times can I go to the Grand Canyon with you? I want to go on a safari." Well, partner with the safari operator instead of losing that customer to uh people who just go on to go back to Google to figure out their next holiday because they've done everything with you. Just it seems really obvious to form a network of like-minded operators that are operating a similar kind of experience that you can as a business relationship recommend. Not just being nice, but creating these sort of ecosystems that allow that customer to stay trapped in your in your web of delight. Exactly. And it and to your point, it isn't just a referral. Um, a lot of times you're selling onto their trip, right? So, you're making a um, margin of some, you know, whatever you either a commission or some sort of margin on selling that on selling that as well. So, you're taking care of the customer, but you're also it's a business relationship to your point. Um, yeah. Yeah. And it should be like it should be like I I I think sometimes operators are a little too on like the nice side or the polite side of like, well, no, they're a friend. I'm just trying to help everybody out. is like, "Well, do you want your kid to go to college? Do you want to retire at some point? Or, you know, do you want to keel over one day in front of Microsoft Excel planning your next trip?" Um, like we we we should see these as as just a good part of like giving yourself a good life and and that word of mouth that word of mouth relationship is um like the best way to sell. When they've just had a fantastic experience with you to be like, well, this is where you should go next. Absolutely. Any final words of advice as we wrap this up in terms of thinking about what this kind of nexus of marketing and partnership building together um really means when it's done well for an operator. I am going to go back to kind of how we started which is um I know it can feel overwhelming with all the changes in marketing, all of the changes and running a tour business um can feel very very overwhelming and as a business owner one of the things that I've learned is when I start to be fearful of things, I start to maybe shrink a little. like maybe my mindset shifts to a scarcity mindset where I feel like, you know, I need to hold on to this and hold on to that so I don't I don't lose it or I can't spend this money or I can't take the risk of going into this partnership. Um, and I think the best way to be successful is to catch yourself when you're doing that and to move your mind from either a scarcity mindset or from that fear, operating from fear to more of a abundant mindset or a growth mindset to to figuring it out. Um because we're not serving anyone by being small and being afraid, especially not serving ourselves, but then we're not serving our customers. It's not going to get us um where we want to go. And so trying to stay open um and it can be challenging. I I I do it myself. It's not easy, but really having the awareness to say, "Okay, um I'm right now making decisions based on fear. I need to shift my mindset to the growth mindset. And how would I look at this differently? Um to me, if you can master that, um you can get through, you know, you can pretty much get through anything. You can figure out what's happening with the marketing. You can figure out what's happening with technology. You can figure it out because you've shifted your mindset more into that growth and kind of problem-solving uh look. So, that's my my best advice. Go with the growth mindset. That's beautifully said. As we wrap up, Nicole, it's been really great to have you here and just um probe you with all of your insights, but how could our audience continue to get to know you and what you're doing at TAP and everything else better? Well, I'm um happy to uh have anyone email me if you'd like to. My email is Nicole. That's n i o l e, no h in my name. Uh at tap intoravel.com. Um you can find our website at travelallianspartnership.com. If you want to check out our tour operators and all the product that they sell, that's at tap intotravel.com. Uh and I'm always on LinkedIn. Follow my podcast. Um I love to hear from folks and uh thank you so much Mitch. This has been a great conversation and I always learn when I teach, right? So when I share, I learn more cuz it it helps me too. So I really appreciate the time. Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today.