15+ years of industry firsts
Three times now, I've seen where the tour industry was headed before it got there, and built the thing that became the standard. Here's the through-line.
The through-line
I built conversion-focused websites made specifically for experience operators, then a platform to sell them at scale. It was acquired by a major North American reservation-technology company within months. Today nearly every res-tech offers operators a free website. That started here.
When COVID emptied the calendars, I pushed operators toward an underserved, higher-value channel: corporate groups. We built the playbook and a DIY kit for landing them. Now it's hard to find an operator site that isn't selling to corporate teams.
Every other tool in tour tech lives before the experience or after it. The during moment, when guests are most engaged, most grateful, most likely to act, has been ignored for a decade. Digital Guidebooks is the platform for that moment: more tips for guides, more emails collected, more reviews earned. I expect it to be the industry default by 2030.
The pattern
Each of these started the same way: noticing a moment in the operator's world that every tool had walked past, then building for it before the rest of the industry caught up. It started in food tours. It applies to any guide-led experience, anywhere meaningful time happens between a guide and a guest.
digitalguidebooks.com