Hey, Tourpreneurs. It's Mitch Bach. I'm with Krestores, and welcome back to another episode of the Tourpreneur Travel Business Podcast. Today's guest is a podcaster who has turned into a podcast guest. Dan's podcast is an incredible wealth of information about how our industry works from travel advisors to a large group multi day operators to anybody and everybody in the industry from travel tech to the people that are making things click and work underneath the surface. And Dan finds them. He meets with them. He travels to more conferences than I've ever seen anyone travel to, sets up his podcast recording booth, and takes the wisdom of that conference, bottles it up for you, and it is a must listen.

So, Dan Christian, it is an honor to have you on The Tourpreneur Podcast.

Thank you so much, Mitch, and thank you, Chris. It's a real honor to be here. I'm a huge fan of Tourpreneur and all the initiatives that you guys have. So it was wonderful to have you on our podcast. I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.

So we're very excited because Dan might be known as a podcast, podcast host, but more to it than that. While you may know Dan as a podcast host, he actually has an extensive history in the industry working for large tour operator brands, working as a marketer working as a marketer for them, starting his own agency, working as a consultant. And today, we are going to take Dan's wisdom and sort of unload it for our industry, which is the multi day operator, the small day tour operator, the medium sized company that is still looking for those secrets to growth, scale. And since Dan has worked at some of the largest companies in the industry, we wanna take those secrets and unleash them for you all. So, Dan, is that a good way to kinda summarize what your background has been? Tell us what what what we sort of missed in in the Dan story.

No. Thanks, Mitch. That was excellent introduction. I guess the one thing I would just add that comes up all the time is that I'm not a journalist by background or training, and I think that actually adds a unique perspective to the podcast because I'm a travel industry executive term podcaster so many of the questions that I'm asking the guests are the questions that I'm genuinely interested to know in a corporate role in terms of how to advance and grow a business And so when we started this podcast, it was essentially that. It was myself having conversations with executives in the industry to understand what was happening to their businesses post COVID and the trends that they were seeing, which just turned out to be really valuable and insightful to a wider audience. And as you kindly mentioned, it's really grown and expanded from there. But at the core of it, that's exactly what we try and achieve with the show. And, I was at Lonely Planet for a number of years before, g Adventures and the travel corporation, and I used to ride my bike into work when I lived in in Melbourne, Australia, and I used to listen to podcasts myself.

And I used to take those lessons and apply them to my role to advance in the industry. So I'm often thinking of that younger self and who's listening to the show so that many ways they could advance their careers or grow their business. So I'm always kinda, I guess, mindful of those audiences, and I was keen to have this conversation with you because I actually put, kind of the top five recommendations together that I thought would be most valuable for, people in this industry to be able to grow their companies or advance their careers. So depending on what angle you're coming to this, I think there's gonna be lots that we'll cover together because you guys obviously have a great deal of expertise as well. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to this collective discussion.

Dan, so your podcast is called Travel Trends, and I've always wondered about this. We are in such a large and fractured industry. We're looking in all different places at all different kinds of countries, customers, company shapes. Talk to me about this idea of boiling it down to trends or direction lines that people can follow as business owners to really understand where their business should go. Because one of the things that we notice often in kind of our community of tour business owners is everybody has different needs, everybody has different companies, and so one trend for one person is not the right trend for another. So tell me how you kind of think about this word and this idea, of where industry is going on that macro level.

Yeah. For sure. I think some a bit of an origin story just for all of our listeners to help understand, especially yours that are kind of maybe getting to familiar with myself and travel trends and even for our travel trends listeners that are, joining us as well. But one of the things that really intrigued me in my corporate role is the fact that you're always chasing there's there's 2 ways that large tour operators make significant profits. One of them is through interest and the other one is through foreign exchange, which are two things that most smaller companies just starting out or trying to scale, it's so much further down the path for them. They're focused on making their business profitable and scaling their business and a number of things that we'll talk about. But if you look at it from a a macro level, globally, these companies are looking to grow new markets and they're trying to grow with different currencies, different source markets, and different destinations. So when you get to a point when you're managing, you know, a $2,000,000,000, 40 brand global company, the most important thing is actually understanding your cash flow and being able to immediately address if there's a shift in customer behavior.