72: All About Being A Tour Guide, with Ed Moser

Are there places in your local community that you think are fun, intriguing, or interesting for a visitor to discover?

Locals are offering tours to all kinds of their favourite things; from historic sites and museums, to breweries and food outlets, to edible wild plant nature walks.

Ed Moser is leveraging his love of history and politics to run a side hustle business as a tour operator based in Washington DC.

Plus, he’s taken his knowledge and vast storehouse of stories about the area, and has written multiple books providing him a nice compliment to the tours while providing additional income streams.

In this episode you’ll learn,

the best ways to market a tour,
pros and cons of the various platforms (AirBnB, Paypal, Eventbrite, MeetUp) from fees to the marketing opportunities,
potential earnings and workload,
how he put a positive spin on things when in the early days few people showed up for his tours, and
how he’s earned a TripAdvisor Travellers Choice Award for 2023

What You’ll Hear:

02:21 From an article, to a book, to the guided tours side hustle

05:16 How Ed’s tours are different from the rest

06:21 He cross-promotes his books with his tours

08:29 Marketing through MeetUp

09:09 Eventbrite has been the best to receive bookings and prepayment

10:34 AirBnb Experiences also provides bookings and prepayment

11:59 What Ed charges for tours and his earnings

13:24 You can customize tours for the seasons, specific groups, and create speciality tours

18:45 Earnings will really vary depending on number of hours worked, part-time or full-time

21:45 Using the MeetUp platform and dealing with payment

23:44 A discussion of platform fees - AirBnB, PayPal, Eventbrite