hello everyone, I've been so scared to get my own services of city-walking tours going so I come here for advice.

I have the experience, as I worked with the platform Gyde and seek for many years until they closed. I applied to similar platforms that offer this "catalog of tour guides" to book for private customized experiences like Bylocals and Withlocals but apparently they don't need any new guides in Mexico City (there was 0 reply from them).

I launched my own company instagram and tiktok last year and i uploaded some reels as initial promo but then i had to get foot surgery so everything kinda stopped.

I want to start offering some ideas now, my main reference is other local guides who promote via instagram or facebook and they basically just post the date with the tour info of what will be seen during the walk and receive reservations via DM, they seem to be doing good, but this strategy is aimed at a local audience.

What do you think is a good strategy for promo? I don't want to just "steal" these other companies way of simply posting a tour and a carrousel of images for additional engagement, but I also don't know if investing my time doing reels is a good idea or I should just be focusing my attention elsewhere.

Also, if you have any tips on how to reach a more "international tourism" audience it would be appreciated. So far I've only thought of getting some google maps reviews from a few clients that I have a contact, but that would only redirect them to the instagram since i don't have a website yet.

Thanks for reading, any input will be greatly appreciated

Hey everyone,

I'm looking for a route planner for a multi-day, fairly long trip.

I’ve already used Komott and found a route that works for me. However, I’d like a planner where I can adjust the difficulty level and skill level so I can plan the route more precisely.

Since my group has varying skill levels, I’d like to be able to specify more clearly which route we’ll take.

I can’t just assume that everyone in my group has no problem with black-level routes.

Region: Germany, Austria

I'm proud to say that I was born here and have unmatched and intense passion for this city. I feel at home and safe here, unlike anywhere else in the world. Just wanted to have a slight idea of the overall popularity of experiencing an informative tour,, from a truly passionate Montrealer. (Personalised tours available upon request)

I am an American male who frequently travels to Jiaxing for business - 30 weeks total in the past two years. But I have seen almost none of the city beyond the 2-3 kilometer radius around my hotel in Jiashan. I will be returning to Jiaxing in September 2026 for four weeks, and I am interested in a one or two day tour of some of the interesting parts of Jiaxing, either as part of a group, or private.

I speak almost no Chinese, but I have managed to work and live in China for 30 weeks relying on translation apps. So while I would prefer a guide with fluent English, I will consider a guide with little to no English.

I have been to the Xitang water town and to the Jiaxing museum, so I would not want those to be included in the tour. My business makes musical instruments, so I have some interest in seeing traditional Chinese instrument makers, if they exist in Jiaxing. But my priority is seeing the city.

Any recommendations?

What’s the best “wow factor” you’ve added to a tourism experience that made a huge difference for customers (or experienced)?

I’m curious about things you’ve done (or seen others do) that genuinely surprised or delighted guests — and resulted in a noticeable increase in customer satisfaction, reviews, referrals, spending, or repeat bookings.

What was the wow factor, and what impact did it have?

Where can I find chinese travel bloggers?

Have had a lot of success here with tour guides operators. I’ve worked with a few tour operators on paid ads, and there are a couple things I keep seeing over and over.

First, don’t send people to some generic homepage if they clicked an ad for a specific tour. Send them straight to that tour.

Google usually works best when someone is already searching for what you offer and is pretty close to booking.

Meta is different. The photo or video can matter way more than the copy. People need to picture themselves actually doing the tour.

Also, make the important stuff stupid easy to find: price, duration, what’s included, where you meet, availability, reviews.

And track bookings, not just leads or clicks. Traffic can look great while the actual sales tell a completely different story.

One other thing I’ve noticed: someone already in the destination is a very different customer from someone planning a trip months from now. I wouldn’t market to them the same way.

Good day! I’m just trying my luck here in case anyone is looking for someone to accompany them on a trip or for a business trip. I’m a professional driver, and you can choose between two available vehicles an Xpander or a Triton.

I’m ready for long drives and am simply looking for extra income, especially during these challenging times in our country. Any opportunity would be a great help to me.

By the way, I’m from Manila. Thank you, and I hope someone might be interested! 🙏

I run outdoor kayak and eco tours around the Florida Everglades and most of our bookings currently come from a mix of direct website traffic and one or two large marketplaces. I used to hear a lot about Airbnb Experiences but I'm not sure how active it still is for tours compared to a few years ago. We are heading into peak season soon, so I'm reviewing where we should focus our listings before demand spikes. Has anyone here actually seen consistent bookings from Airbnb Experiences lately or has it shifted mostly toward platforms like Viator or GetYourGuide and others?

KPMG India/PHDCCI recently published a ~60-page report titled “Heritage Reimagined: Driving Immersive, Tech-Enabled and Experience-Led Tourism.”

It covers heritage tourism, Hyderabad, AI guides, digital twins, AR/VR, gamification and even quantum cryptography.

It looks polished. Big Four branding, LOTS OF FANCY GRAPHICS, lots of citations.

So I did something simple:

I opened the citations and checked them.

I’m not saying the entire report is fake. Several headline statistics do check out.

But I found enough problems with source interpretation, sample populations, technical claims, AI analysis and basic proofreading that I genuinely wonder what the final review process looked like.

Some examples

KPMG presents	What I found
65% of “Gen Z travellers” will pay a sustainability premium — Deloitte 2025	Matching Deloitte result appears to be 64%, from 2024, and about Gen Z consumers, not specifically travellers
“Millennials and Gen Z global food trends”	Several statistics inside the chart are actually reported by American Express for all global respondents
Cultural encounters/gastronomy described as trends among travellers	Underlying ATTA research surveys adventure travel tour operators, not travellers generally
India has 145 ticketed centrally protected monuments	Contemporary 2026 Government of India statements say 143
Telangana foreign tourism: ~60k → ~150k, presented as growth	Official series is roughly 68,401 → 160,912 → 155,313. So 2024 actually declined from 2023
Digital twins were “initially developed for monitoring nuclear plants”	The cited source does not establish that history; the modern Digital Twin concept is generally traced to Michael Grieves / PLM work around 2002

The most revealing issue: changing the population

KPMG says:

“65% of Gen Z travellers are willing to pay a premium for environmentally sustainable products and services.”

But the matching Deloitte finding appears to be:

64%
from 2024, not 2025,
and referring to Gen Z consumers, not specifically travellers.

So we effectively get:

2024 → 2025
64% → 65%
consumers → travellers

The 1% difference isn't important.

Changing the population being measured is.

A consumer-attitude statistic does not automatically become evidence about tourism behaviour.

The American Express charts have a similar problem

KPMG has a chart titled:

“Millennials and Gen Z global food trends.”

It includes percentages such as 69% preferring street-food vendors, 53% exploring bakeries and 50% using grocery stores.

But American Express distinguishes between:

“global respondents”

and

“Millennials and Gen Z surveyed.”

Several percentages KPMG places under the Millennial/Gen-Z heading appear to actually describe the full global sample.

Again:

The number may be real.

The denominator isn't the one the chart implies.

Telangana is a good example of selective framing

KPMG presents foreign tourism as:

~60,000 in 2022 → ~150,000 in 2024

under a section about “growth and momentum.”

But the official sequence is approximately:

2022: 68,401
2023: 160,912
2024: 155,313

So yes, there was huge growth versus 2022.

But there was also a decline in 2024 versus 2023.

Leave out the middle year and the narrative looks much cleaner.

The AI section also deserves scrutiny

KPMG is very enthusiastic about:

AI heritage guides, AI storytelling, LLMs, personalised itineraries, generative imagery and autonomous AI travel agents.

But this is cultural heritage.

Where is the equally detailed discussion about AI inventing:

• historical events,
• dates,
• genealogies,
• translations,
• religious interpretations,
• cultural practices,
• or synthetic reconstructions?

Where are the controls around:

authoritative sources, curator approval, citations, provenance, uncertainty indicators, community consent and human review?

The report spends far more time explaining how AI can make heritage “immersive” than explaining how institutions prevent AI from manufacturing history.

Interestingly, KPMG also discloses on the final page:

“Some images in this report have been created using artificial intelligence technology.”

Good that they disclosed it.

But the report doesn't identify which images, which tools/models were used or provide image-level provenance.

For a report built around the ideas of heritage and authenticity, that's worth noting.

Then there are the spelling, grammar and QA errors

These don't prove the analysis is wrong.

But in a professionally produced KPMG report — especially one that lists a Research Team, Compliance Team and KPMG Design — the volume of obvious errors is surprising.

Examples directly from the report include:

“Adventure Travel Tarde Association”
instead of Trade Association

“Actvity Popularity Rank”
instead of Activity

“heritage securtiy”
instead of security

“Through thoughtfully interventions”

“Combing asset and experiences”
apparently meant to be Combining assets and experiences

“ways that aligns”

“travellers increasing value experiences”

“multimedia light and sound show at Golconda fort show”

There is also a Hyderabad digital-twin sentence saying the model is:

“comprising data points”

with the actual number missing — even though elsewhere in the same report KPMG gives the figure as 10.7 billion data points.

And one chart is titled:

“Foreign Tourist Arrivals to India 2019–2025”

while the chart itself stops at 2024.

One typo means nothing.

But when you combine repeated proofreading failures with source-population errors and questionable citations, it raises a fair question:

How rigorous was the final review?

The bigger problem

The report repeatedly seems to follow this logic:

Technology exists
↓
It could be used in heritage tourism
↓
Therefore engagement improves
↓
Therefore spending / dwell time / competitiveness improves

But those arrows require evidence.

A $300bn global gamification market doesn't prove gamification works at Indian monuments.

An AI itinerary generator doesn't prove visitor satisfaction improves.

A digital twin existing doesn't prove more tourists visit.

A survey of 360 Chinese heritage tourists doesn't automatically predict visitor behaviour in Hyderabad.

Evidence that a technology exists is not the same as evidence that it produces the claimed tourism outcome.

To be fair to KPMG

Several important statistics I checked do hold up.

India's ~2.948bn domestic tourist visits, ~9.95m foreign tourist arrivals, several Telangana project values and some of the headline market estimates are broadly supported.

So the correct criticism is not:

“KPMG fabricated everything.”

It is more subtle:

>

And once a polished KPMG infographic gets repeated elsewhere, people stop checking Deloitte, American Express or the government source.

That is how an interpretation error can eventually become an accepted “industry fact.”

My takeaway:

Don't assume a statistic is reliable just because the logo on the PDF is prestigious. Open the footnotes.

If I've interpreted any of the original sources incorrectly, post the source and I'll happily correct the post.

KPMG should be held to the same standard.

Hi all, I'm just getting started setting up an independent activity after having guided for other operators.

I'm on OTAs and in the process of getting a direct site set up, but am curious if I should think about promoting my tours more actively. A lot of friends and family think I should set up social media pages.

I don't want to be an influencer and the idea of having to constantly come up with new content is honestly pretty daunting. Is it really that necessary?

How do you all promote? For those that do use social media, any advice to make it easier/less time consuming?

Thanks in advance

Hey guys,

We are a new OTA company and have quite a lot of products we would like to get up on GTTD. We need to work with someone who is a Google partner.

Can someone reach out to me for a chat about a monthly ongoing retainer.

Thanks

Hi guys! so a few years ago my friends and I took a trip to Austin. We went on a wine tour (they have three different wineries they take you too btw but we only did two), where a van picked us up and transported us to two different wineries, after they dropped us off. I was wondering if anyone knew the name of the company? im trying to find it but i cant 😭 please help! i want to do it again for my bday next month

I run small group city tours in Miami (mostly Wynwood + Little Havana) and we have been relying on one major booking platform for most of our international traffic. It works okay during peak months but commissions feel high and visibility outside top ranked listings is pretty limited unless you already have a strong review base. I am trying to diversify before the summer season kicks in and avoid depending on a single channel. For other operators, what's been a good alternative to GetYourGuide that still brings consistent international travelers also i have heard people mention Viator and a few regional OTAs but curious what is actually working in 2026.

Has anyone got any tips on some more unique Rome tours? I've been a couple times before and done all the major stuff, so looking for some smaller / stranger / unique tours and sites.

Good for people in their 30s.

(Also - I'm a London tour guide, so If any Roman guides want to work something out, I'd be very happy to take you around London in exchange.)

I'll be visiting Rome in early December and I'm thinking about booking a guided tour through the Vatican Museums.

I love guided tours if they're good but will I still be able to explore it by myself after or is it better to just get an Audio guide and?

I'm building a marketplace for local-led city experiences, and I keep coming back to one question: is the itinerary actually the product?

The big platforms seem to package the route first. Same landmarks, same timing, then a guide gets assigned. My bet is the opposite: travelers remember the person, the judgment calls, the neighbourhood story, the stop that wasn't in the description.

That sounds nice in a pitch deck. I'm more interested in whether it is true from the guide side.

When someone books with you, what usually closes them: the itinerary, your reviews and identity, price, or the fact that you can adapt the day? And if a platform centered your profile instead of making you interchangeable, what would it need to prove before you trusted it?