G Adventures’ founder on the rise of solo travel, the company's connection to a popular dating site and the reasons why advisors are essential
Ann Ruppenstein
Something travel advisors may not expect to learn about G Adventures is that the adventure tour operator organizes trips for a popular dating site.
“We do singles tours for match.com — we have for years,” reveals Bruce Poon Tip, the founder of G Adventures. “Those are kind of meat-market dating and that’s how we’ve previously viewed single travel because we’ve been working with match.com for so long. We don’t sell them — match.com sells them to their members and so we’ve always viewed singles that way. And there’s a bunch of singles operators where it’s more for partying, singles, young people, and we knew we didn’t want that market.”
Knowing what they didn’t want to offer helped establish what they did want to create when developing the company’s first travel style exclusively for solo travellers.
“We bought a company called Just You, which is the world’s leader in 50 plus singles, and it’s the first time we kind of got an inside look, because we acquired them, that we got to see the benefits and the excitement around that market,” he explains. “When we started doing research, our research was showing us there’s a full spectrum of reasons why people want to travel alone. Some people have a partner who doesn’t like to travel, but they want to travel in a group for security, because they want to continue travelling.”
The newly launched Solo-ish Adventures travel style has 13 trips in destinations like Costa Rica, India, Peru, South Africa and Vietnam. The trips feature elements designed to make solo travellers feel at ease such as female-only CEOs (chief experience officers) and complimentary arrival transfers.
“I think what people don’t understand about us, and what community tourism really means, is we’re in constant dialog with local communities, whereas building travel for years has just been a one-way conversation,” he notes. “When we decide we want to build a product, we don’t build it from Canada and just say we’re going to go here. We put it out on the ground to our local offices, and create conversations with Planeterra representatives in those countries. The experience isn’t compromised for comfort. People don’t understand how seriously we take product development compared to other companies. They’ve just worked so hard to get it right.”
Fresh off of hosting the second GX community tourism summit in India, G Adventures is already looking ahead to next year’s event, which will be held in Jordan. For Poon Tip, GX was meant to show people that tourism can change the world in a positive way.
“I hope that they leave with a better understanding of the impact of community tourism, seeing it firsthand, so they can be ambassadors to that message. We do training and PowerPoint presentations and keynote presentations but there’s nothing better than seeing it firsthand and hearing the stories from the people you meet. You can only feel those when you are here. Maya Angelou had this saying about how people always forget what you tell them, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. And I hope people just remember that, how it made them feel, and go spread that message. That should move people off of cruise ships and resorts to want to live a real life experience.”
Notably, G Adventures will mark its 35th anniversary next year, which will be an extra big milestone after the pandemic dampened plans for a big 30th anniversary celebration.
“We wanted GX to show a different side next year. India and Peru are very big destinations for us, where we have a lot of capacity and we have a lot of talent, and we have a lot of people to be able to pull off an event of this scale and this size, but in Jordan, we don’t — but we wanted to challenge ourselves because we wanted GX to be a vehicle for change, and so we wanted to show capacity building. That’s why USAID came on, which is amazing. USAID is interested in investing in community development all around the world. If we can go to countries where we can show that we can build the facilities and capacity to host it and then teach the local market, that’s why we’re pretty excited about Jordan.”
While his books and the documentary The Last Tourist clearly showcase his views on all inclusive resorts and cruise holidays, he acknowledges that the vast majority of travel advisors will still sell various types of travel experiences.
“I really know our place in the industry, and what we do is still very niche. So I don’t expect agents to drop everything because their business may go under. We need them to stay around. But what I want agents to know is we have a very complex brand promise and that’s why we created GX so people can see firsthand what we do. Agents are super important to us because of the complex nature of our brand promise, and we need them to be our face and the voice of our message,” he says. “I want agents to just understand how important they are to us, how much we invest in them. There’s no product that’s more in need of an agent, it’s a high touch product, and you need an agent to prepare you for one of our trips and to find the right person that’s made for one of our trips.”
