My son Andy is finishing his second year establishing his own business: organizing and guiding tours for American students on foreign study programs who want to turn their long weekends into excursions that bring today’s culture vividly to life. His three-day tours cost 200 euros each, and include hostels, picnics, tours, and so on.
Over the last two years, Andy has learned a lot about student travel and that market niche in Europe. As I did when I was his age (24), he finds that the best way to sell his tours is to give talks about traveling, which has the added bonus of introducing his audiences to his tour business. Andy gives talks for American foreign study programs on campuses all over Europe. His mission: to get students off on the right foot as they use their home city as a springboard to experience the cultural capitals of Europe. Administrators appreciate the practical, hip, and credible information Andy imparts in his lectures. Andy’s pay: He gets to pass out his Weekend Student Adventures tour brochures.
Andy basically lives in hostels all over Europe and runs his business from his laptop at cafés offering free Wi-Fi. Here’s a report directly from Andy on the train in Spain. It comes with a chance to view some thrilling new video clips that a student working with Andy has just made (I particularly enjoyed these for a chance to share the joy of a 20-year-olds view of Europe that Andy offers his travelers):
I’m writing this on the train from Barcelona to Valencia, almost finished with my marathon speaking tour. Just yesterday, I was in Prague, which is facing the brute force of Europe’s Siberian cold front. Sub-zero temperatures would freeze any uncovered fingers, noses, or ears within minutes. Memories of that bitter cold, combined with Barcelona’s relative warmth, are making my short visit to Spain particularly sweet.
With my crazy schedule of zipping from one campus to another on successive days all over Europe to give my talks, I’ve constantly benefitted from the infrastructure investments made by European governments lately. From Spain’s AVE bullet train (which I’m on right now), to the real-time bus-locator app I found so helpful in London, to the Dublin airport’s sleek and shiny new Terminal 2, my whirlwind tour simply wouldn’t have been possible without Europe’s streamlined transportation network. In the last month, my talks — which I’ve billed as “Cultural Integration Seminars” — have taken me through campuses in Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Galway, London, Paris, Prague, Florence, and Rome, to name a few. And the transportation connections really couldn’t have been smoother.
At the start of each semester, I tour throughout Europe giving these talks to help students kick off their semester right. I do my best to prepare and inspire them with a travel philosophy that helps break them out of their American shell. It’s such a sad lost opportunity when students, blessed with the chance to have a foreign study experience, fall into a routine of just hanging out with other American students. In the end, they return home unchanged. My talks — and my tours — are designed to encourage them to find a more fulfilling experience.
After my last talk later this week in southern Spain, I’ll fly from Málaga to Geneva to lead one of our Swiss Alps adventures in Gimmelwald. It starts next Friday, kicking off semester four for WSAEurope.
Andy Steves' Weekend Student Adventures
Things are going well! In the last three weeks, we’ve sold more spring 2012 tours than we did for all of the fall semester of 2011. These numbers give me confidence that we’re going in the right direction and we’re getting some good word-of-mouth among students abroad. Our hottest tours for this semester will be St. Patrick’s Dublin and Easter Rome (two specialty tours we had great success with last year). Rounding out our destination roster are Paris, Barcelona, Prague, London, Amsterdam, and our Swiss Alps ski trip. London has always been a challenge to sell, though — it seems students don’t value a tour so highly in a country that speaks English. While London is quite expensive, Prague is a much cheaper place to operate tours, yet delivers much more perceived value to the students — as the Czech culture, language, and currency tend to be far more intimidating to the average backpacker.
We’re testing a few new things to improve tour sales. Our new virtual student gift card for parents has been very popular. This lets parents live vicariously through their students’ adventures with WSA, as they can keep up with trip photo albums, blog entries, and Facebook and Twitter posts.
And we’re really excited about the newly finished highlight reels of our tours made by our video intern from last semester, Connor Reidy of Boston University. His acumen as a video producer really communicates the fun of our tours. So far, Paris and Amsterdam are now complete and posted. More clips are coming soon! Even if your student travel days are long gone, click over and enjoy the artistry of these short clips. And if you know any students studying in Europe, please encourage them to follow us on Facebook and check out all the free resources at http://www.wsaeurope.com/.
Happy travels! Andy Steves signing off…and just pulling into Valencia!
We just enjoyed our annual all-staff meeting and our art department shared some of the best of the new photos in our arsenal. In our business, photos are a powerful way to share our enthusiasm for a destination (and to sell things). We hired Dominic Arizona Bonuccelli, our favorite travel photographer, and sent him on several of our tours last summer–turning him lose to capture the magic. Sit back, click through these shots, and enjoy a few images that bring home the joy and beauty of European travel.
Lauterbrunnen Valley, Swiss Alps
Venice, Italy
Rialto Bridge, Venice, Italy
Vatican Museum, Rome, Italy
Trevi Fountain, Rome, Italy
Dublin, Ireland
Toledo, Spain
Arcos, Spain
Istanbul, Turkey
Cappadocia, Turkey
Civita di Bagnoregio, Italian hill town near Orvieto, Italy
These Sicilians are evangelical about their cheese. If I didn’t stop the car and get out, I would never have met them.
When we travel, it’s important to balance our desire to stick to a set itinerary with the freedom to embrace spontaneity. It takes discipline to let serendipity trump carefully laid plans.
For me, a fundamental goal in my travels is to have meaningful contact with local people. When an opportunity in this regard presents itself, I jump on it. Driving by a random cheese festival in Sicily? Stop the car. Get out. Eat cheese. Experience it. Hiking through England’s Lake District and popping into a pub for a drink? Don’t sit at a table. Sit at the bar, where people hang out to talk. Dinnertime in Mostar, Bosnia? Don’t go to the touristy riverside places again. Turn away from the cutesy Old Town and head out to “The Boulevard” — the front line of the recent sectarian troubles — and be the first American tourist to eat at a new local eatery. Talk with the owner about how Muslims and Croats are now (tentatively) coexisting in peace. Connecting with people is what enlivens your travel experience.
As both transportation and communication speed up, it’s more important than ever to slow down and smell the roses…or even the people. I was sitting solitary on a bench enjoying the floodlit facade of the cathedral in Reims, France. It was dark, and I was munching on a late dinner — a rustic baguette with cheese. Suddenly the bum on the next bench leaned over and offered me a swig from his crumpled-up plastic bottle of red wine. I didn’t take it…but the gesture and his smile, juxtaposed with that glorious Gothic facade, warmed my meal and helped complete an experience that gave me a memory I’ll enjoy for the rest of my life.
Especially when you get out of your comfort zone, you replace general stereotypes and media-created images with more accurate impressions from firsthand experience. Before going on my recent trip to Iran, I figured people there would be angry at an American they’d meet on the street. What I found reminded me that only by actually going someplace in person can you understand the sentiment of people living there. We were stuck in a traffic jam one day in Tehran. I was just sitting patiently in the back seat of our car when the man in the next car motioned to our driver to roll down the window. He handed over a bouquet of flowers and said, “Please give this to the foreigner in your back seat and apologize for our traffic.” While certainly not what I expected, this was typical of the warmth and friendliness I experienced throughout my adventure in a country that is supposed to be our enemy.
Like skiing with bent knees makes the moguls fun, good travelers enjoy the bumps in the road. They risk making mistakes, get out of their comfort zones, and have a positive attitude. I like to say that if things aren’t to your liking, change your liking.
With about 40 guidebooks selling strongly across the US, our publisher (Avalon Travel) makes time each year to come up to Edmonds for a summit and brainstorming conference. We’re so thankful to have a partnership where we combine our talents with theirs. After a festive party at my house with a dozen of my staff and a dozen of their staff actually talking about something other than making–and selling–great guidebooks, our Avalon friends have flown back to their home office in the Bay Area. They left us feeling synchronized and stoked for a great 2012. You, my traveling readership assembled in our virtual Facebook Hall, are the closest thing I have to a stockholders meeting, so here’s a dry–but, I hope, interesting–summary of the guidebook world and how we fit.
For thirty years now I’ve been seeking out Europe’s back doors. While I no longer wear my “I’m not a tourist, I live here” tee-shirt, I still travel with the same philosophy. (This cool door, which graced the cover of my guidebook Europe Through the Back Door in its third edition in 1982 is from the ruins of “King Arthur’s castle” at Tintagel in southwest England.)
The year 2011 was a big one. At the start, the giant retail chain Borders was sick but still floating, while our cruise guidebook and color pocket guides were just ideas. At the end of the year, 600 Borders stores were gone, but our new books were a reality. In the wake of the Borders collapse, electronic sales did not take up the loss of overall retail sales in the book industry–but our guidebooks saw no drop in sales (meaning we gained in market share). Our new Pocket Guide series (starting with Pocket London, Pocket Paris, and Pocket Rome) and our Mediterranean Cruise Ports book are in the bookstores and selling strongly today. In fact, in January our cruise book logged in at number 12 on the national list of the top-30 guidebooks.
Currently, of the best-selling travel guidebooks in the US, the top-30 titles are dominated by guidebooks to Disneyland and Hawaii–and by Rick Steves books. While Frommer’s and Fodor’s are still there, Dorling Kindersley, Lonely Planet, and Let’s Go (which used to be larger players) have no titles on the list. While print is a smaller part of the Lonely Planet mix–and they are well-distributed worldwide–in the US market for guidebooks about Europe, they have faded dramatically. If you take out Disney and Hawaii, Rick Steves guidebooks hold the big majority of the top-30 spots on the list.
You could make the case that the last four years have been the biggest in publishing history since Gutenberg. First, the economic crisis really shook things up; 2008 saw a big drop in sales industrywide. Then the Kindle (which is just four years old) and its ereader competition changed the way people read. The phrase “There’s an app for that” became a part of our lexicon. Millennial Generation travelers, who are value-oriented and get their information in different ways, are coming on strong and are a market segment to be respected.
With the advent of ebooks, it’s exciting to follow trends in publishing. Overall for 2011, print sales were down 6 percent while electronic sales grew, varying widely from genre to genre. For example, while about 50 percent of fiction sales are ebooks, children and travel ebooks are still only 10 percent of sales. Although romance readers are gravitating to tablets, guidebook readers still prefer print. As fiction goes electronic and travel stays print, the travel genre is of relatively more importance to brick-and-mortar bookstores.
Meanwhile, we’re ready for the future. The powers in electronic guidebooks are Rick Steves (Avalon’s parent company, Perseus, is enthusiastic about being a force here), Frommer’s (whose new head is a futurist with a passion for moving beyond print), and Lonely Planet (now owned by the BBC).
With each annual meeting our publisher brings us their wishes for new books, although the list is getting smaller since we’re satisfied that we’ve covered Europe well. The 2013 publishing season will likely see a new Rick Steves’ Barcelona and a Rick Steves’ Northern European Cruise Ports–and in the pipeline are new Pocket Guides for Athens, Florence, Venice, Amsterdam, Istanbul, and Prague. The biggest untapped market is not covering new destinations, but introducing more people to the destinations we already cover, in part by making it easier for them to purchase and download guidebooks while they’re on the road.
At the end, we all agreed to hold the line on prices as much as possible, that my gang will continue to focus on generating good content while Avalon will publish and distribute it (as they do so well), and that Europe as a destination fits the teaching soul of the Rick Steves enterprise.
Having sat through a day and a half of meetings, it’s clear to me that the brand “Rick Steves” would be nothing without the hard work and wonderful talent of our co-authors, our editors here in our office, and our good friends at Avalon Travel. Here’s to great guidebooks making happy travels for 2012!
For 30 years, I’ve spent all my travel time overseas…mostly in Europe. Finally, it’s time I saw the good old USA. On March 3rd, I’m setting off on a 20 cities in 20 days road trip, giving talks in mostly smaller cities and towns — all the way from Seattle, Washington to Tallahassee, Florida.
I’ve never been so excited about an upcoming trip — not only to be bringing my travel lessons to smaller cities, but to actually be driving across the entire USA. For the last few years, I’ve noticed that every time I’m hired to give a talk in a “smaller market” — places like Fort Wayne, Indiana, Fort Smith Arkansas, or Peoria, Illinois — I encounter lots of local pride, a super friendly welcome, and an auditorium packed with enthusiastic travelers. I was enjoying these middle-America gigs even more than my regular stops in the big cities.
So, for 2012, rather than do my usual “8 major markets in 8 days” tour of the big PBS stations during March pledge drive season (which I’ve been doing for more than a decade), I’m thinking bigger and smaller at the same time. On this year’s 20-day trip, I’ll have fun helping support smaller public TV and radio stations, giving lectures, and making impromptu stops at independent book stores that rarely get a travel writer visiting in person. I’m thankful for all the hosts who have already made it easy for us to book exciting events at each stop along the way. (My schedule is jammed packed.)
Beyond all that, my “Rick Steves’ Road Trip USA” agenda is to inspire people to get out and see our beautiful world — and to inspire myself to explore and appreciate the great diversity and hospitality of my own country. Our Road Trip USA page will track my journey, and I’ll be blogging daily right here. And, each night along the way, I look forward to giving talks that help Americans enjoy maximum thrills for every mile, minute, and dollar they have for their next vacation.
If you live along my Road Trip route, tickets are now available at each stop. If you have friends and family who live nearby, share the news. And, wherever you live, I hope you’ll travel along with me virtually.
Hop in, buckle up, and hang on. It’s going to be a fun ride.
