ToursByLocals CEO on Brand Transformation and Rising Demand for Authentic Experiences

In 2019, ToursByLocals received $33 million from a private equity firm and had plans for a full rebranding of its website. Then came the pandemic.

ToursByLocals connects travelers with, you guessed it, local guides. During the pandemic, the company used some of the funding to focus on keeping their guides above water. Now, five years later, the company finally followed through on its promise to rebrand.

In an interview with Skift, ToursByLocals’ CEO Lisa Chen explained the rebrand and also said that the company is working on integrating AI while keeping the customer experience human.

Chen, who took over last year, gave an inside look at what we can expect next from the company, including more partnerships and new tools for travel agents.

Skift: ToursByLocals underwent a significant branding overhaul in the past two months. Why?

Lisa Chen: It goes back a few years — before my time. Tritium Partners, which is a private equity company based in Austin, Texas, invested money in 2019. It was an incredibly inopportune time, being two months before the pandemic.

The original intent of funding was to completely overhaul the technology platform, the website itself, as well as the brand. We are now knee-deep, and I would say, sort of starting to be on the other side of that path. We completely re-platformed our technology stacks. We went to the cloud. We’ve overhauled our UI on the site to be much more modern. We’re using much more modern technology tooling, we brought in additional leaders that we sorely needed as head of product and head of engineering, and we rebranded all of it. It was a very ambitious project.

The reason we wanted to rebrand is to signal to our travelers, who are largely luxury travelers, that we are growing. We had fantastic growth last year and we’re doubling down on growth, on providing really excellent experiences and connecting and focusing on authentic, local experiences. And we wanted the brand to signal that much more clearly and distinctly than the old brand.

Skift: How are you incorporating artificial intelligence (AI)?

Lisa Chen: I’m dating myself, but I was around when the internet kind of came to be. I started my career in 1994 and my first job was in PR. I kind of feel deja vu again when I hear people say, how are you using AI? It’s like we used to say, you know, how are you using the internet?

It is going to be pervasive. We are using tooling that makes use of AI capabilities and machine learning capabilities, so it is threaded throughout our business. But our purpose is to keep travel human.

Right now, it’s more on helping us do our business more efficiently. We are threading it throughout our business. We have 165 people spread out throughout 10 different countries, and I like to keep in touch with them. And so if I can have ChatGPT write an email for me, that frees up 20 minutes of my time to talk to a team member. That’s keeping travel human right?

Skift: You had a particularly successful year last year. Why do you think it went so well?

Lisa Chen: It was our best year ever, and this year will be better yet. I think there are a few things.

One is that I think we’ve seen a shift in travel. We’ve gone from the bucket list and Instagram photos – you know, people pointing their finger at the Leaning Tower of Pisa – to actually investing in hyperlocal, authentic, meaningful, intimate experiences. We are the perfect fit for that. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is, I think in relation to where you want to spend your money, there is an orientation around giving back to local communities. All of our travel guides are locals. We curate. So it’s not like an Airbnb community where you have really bad ones and really good ones. We do curate, and we are very aggressive in terms of educating and engaging with them. Essentially, you’ve got extremely experienced local guides who are providing these intimate experiences off the beaten path. 

The other thing that happened during the pandemic is that travel became a must-have, and so this notion of how people spend money is much more centered on travel. I also think there’s a little bit of, if I don’t do it now, something might happen to the place, geopolitical instability, climate issues, like there’s this sense of urgency. So I think we’ve benefited from a lot of these macro trends that are going on.

Skift: What can we expect to see from ToursByLocals in the coming years?

Lisa Chen: There are a few things. One is sort of reaping the benefits, having just completed our digital transformation and continuing to build out the tooling that will allow guides to be even more successful.

But we’re also working even more with travel agents. What’s old is new and new is old travel.

Even they, you know, were around before the internet. They almost died off. But travel agents are having a resurgence. They’re having a renaissance and we think they’re a huge market for us. We were hearing about millennials using travel agents in a way that their predecessors, generational predecessors are not. Our data shows that 38% of millennials and Gen Zs are now opting to use traditional travel agents to book travel because they like the personal connection and the ability to curate with their travel agent.

One of the things that we don’t have, which we’re building out right now, is a shopping cart. Right now, you have to find [tours] one by one, [a shopping cart] would allow them to put multiple experiences in the same cart. We would roll it out for both customers and travel agents, but it would truly be a benefit for travel agents.