Course Syllabus

You’ll commit to following the program for three weeks, participating in live classes each day, Monday-Friday, or viewing the recordings at your convenience. This is a participatory, small-group class: we’re all going to build companies together, and offer advice and support!

Monday Introduction to the Local Tours & Attractions Industry, and Tourism after COVID
If you come from other areas of the travel industry, or from another career altogether, we’ll break down very clearly how this particular segment of the travel industry works, and explain the varieties of ways to run a business in this space. We’ll address the challenges and opportunities ahead for a post-COVID industry by looking at new guidelines and predictions for how travel will change.

Tuesday Types of Tours + Discovering & Developing your tour product
There are dozens of different kinds of tours: what works for your region? What tours, historically before COVID, were selling? We’ll share incredible tools for finding and developing a tour experience.

Wednesday Designing Your Tour Experience: researching, mapping, and organizing your ideas
This is the fun part! We’ll give you a variety of tools for crafting the perfect tour experience, and guide you through creating an experience that works.

Thursday Delivering a Tour: voice, storytelling, wow moments, technology, and presentation
The actual tour experience is absolutely everything. Your product is nothing without top-notch delivery, and this is what TripSchool is known for: helping you deliver a knock-out travel experience using our special blend of storytelling, technology and wow moments.

Friday Roundtable Q&A w/ Experienced Tour Business Owners
To end the week, we’ll bring in some tour operators to tell their stories about how they started, and the challenges they’ve faced and surmounted. You’ll be able to ask anything you want!

Monday Business Plan, Structure, Insurance, Licenses, Contracts, Taxes and Accounting
We’ll help you understand the legalities of starting a tour business, and share the software, apps and wealth of online resources that can help you get up and running quickly.

Tuesday Finding your  Customer, your Niche, and Developing a Brand Story
Finding out who your company is for is one of the most important steps in this journey. We’ll use special strategies and tools to help you understand who your customer is, and how to tell your brand’s story to them, and then hone your business to meet that segment.

Wednesday Operations: supplier and Vendor Contracting & Partnerships
Your tour is nothing without everyone that helps you put on a great experience. We’ll go behind the scenes to show you how tours are put together operationally, from an adventure tour to multiple locations, to city food tours.

Thursday Marketing: Logo, Website & Social Media
In today’s market, you live or die by your website, and it’s important to tell your company’s story with an interesting logo that tells your brand’s story accurately. We’ll guide you through the dozens of fantastic resources online to help you develop this, share design best practices, and run through successful case studies. Plus we’ll go over developing a social media strategy.

Friday Online Sales: OTAs, Reservation Technology, and your Website
It’s not enough to put an email address and phone number on a website; in the past five years big tech players have transformed how tours are being marketed and sold, and you need to learn and understand how bookings get made online, and the technology options out there for you. It’s a quickly evolving landscape, and we’ll introduce you to the industry discussions taking place.

Monday Individual Coaching & Assessment Day
After two intense weeks of information, this will be the big, formal check-in day, when we take a look at your progress building your company, and give you pointers for this final week of prototyping and workshopping your ideas together.

Tuesday Business Plan Presentations
Today you’ll present your business plans, and we’ll critique them as a class, to learn from each other.

Wednesday Marketing & Online Strategy
Next you’ll all present and workshop the work you’ve done on the marketing side of your company.

Thursday Resources & Next Steps
There are so many conferences, associations, organizations and other companies out there to help you. We’ll share the partnerships we have, guide you through the landscape, help you make connections and give you our secret sauce of incredible online resources to make your business run smoothly.

Friday “Graduation” day!
Congratulations, you’ve created the foundations for your tour business! While there’s a long road ahead, you’ll have the pieces in place to take advantage of when travelers begin returning. Well done!

We have a track record of passionate graduates who appreciate our approach.

(and hundreds of incredible unsolicited testimonials on a separate page if you’re curious!)

This is our most unique and intense online class yet.

Life threw us all a curveball. We had intended to offer this class in person, over one week in May. We had a dozen hopeful students in a sold-out class, and then everyone’s world was turned upside down! But we’ve made lemonade from these lemons. We’ve expanded the class from one to three full weeks, more than tripling the instruction, while offering the class at a more affordable price.

We at TripSchool believe in giving you incredible value for your money, especially right now. We have spent two months offering the travel industry over 20 free professional development sessions, keeping everyone’s spirits high and the learning happening. We are still committed to continuing to offer free content, but we also believe that right now is a privileged time for some of us to invest in the kinds of learning and foundation-building that will bear fruit when the travel industry begins to return to normal.