“The Travel Bug: Specialty tours find a niche”
The Business Journal (Portland), March 23, 2001

Gerhard Meng was fresh out of college and about to lose a job in radio advertising when his boss suggested he start a business doing what he loved to do: touring on a bicycle.

Meng took his manager’s advice: Less than six months later, he was leading two back-to-back groups on 21-day budget bicycle tours through Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

California-based Backroads, the largest of the cycling and “multisport” tour companies offers well over 100 touring options. Meng chooses to stay small, employing only an office assistant (the company office is in The Galleria) and a support vehicle driver. “Like others in the business,” he explains, “ I do what I do because I enjoy it, not to make a lot of money. I enjoy the balance of being on the road as well as in the office. If I hired other tour leaders, I’d have to spend more time in the office.”

Meng is on the road five or six months of the year, leading an average of ten 20-person tours in Europe and New Zealand plus researching new trips. Although tour participants still pedal about 35 miles a day, other details have changed over the years reflecting his market. Like him, most of his clients are now in their fifties. Tours were shortened from 21 to 14 or fewer days, and accommodations have become increasingly luxurious. “If we’re going on a tour, we want to be taken care of ,” is how his clients think, he says.

To ensure repeat business—some years as high as 75 percent—and meet what he considers ever-increasing customer expectations, Meng continually changes tour offerings. This summer there will be two “Bike, Balloon & Barge” trips in France and Germany that use luxury floating hotel barges as accommodation. Several non-cycling tours are also scheduled, including a 16-day tour of the Baltic countries and Scandinavia with nine nights aboard a 5-star touring ship. And for the 14th year, Meng will lead two week-long trips in December to Christmas markets in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic.

Where Meng jumped into the travel business quickly, without much of a business plan, Portlanders John and Amy Osaki, long-time avid hikers spent years preparing to start their company, Walking Softly Adventures. Amy quit her job as curator of education at the Portland Art Museum to launch the company in 1996. John continued to work for the U.S. Forest Service, taking a leave every summer to join Amy in leading small-group walking and art-focused tours in Europe. He joined her in the business full-time in 1999. This summer they’ll also be joined by their one-year-old, Heidi, and a full-time nanny. Destinations will include Italy’s Dolomites, the Pyrenees, Norway, Switzerland and Ireland.

Walking Softly hiking trips are six to 14 days and are designed for walkers of varied abilities. They have a daily choice of easy, moderate or challenging routes. and they range in age from teens to people in the eighties. “We specialize in 5-star hiking destinations,” says Amy. “Hotels are secondary, but last year, for the first time, we moved up to 4-star luxury hotels on some trips. We’re adapting to what people want.”

In 1997 Walking Softly introduced several art trips to their program; this summer’s art trips will explore Paris for eight days, and Florence and the Tuscan hill towns for nine days. These trips and two of the 2001 hiking trips will be led by guides other than the Osakis, people who were previously Walking Softly tour participants. During the off-season, the Osakis are not only busy with trip planning and promotion—slide shows, Web site and catalog work, and trade shows—they have also begun to do custom tours. In May, Amy will take a group from the Delaware Art Museum to Seattle for a week focused on glassmaking. The group will tour Dale Chihuly’s studio and Pilchuck Glass School, the school he founded, plus art museums in Seattle and Tacoma. In the fall, she will lead a second custom tour for the Northwest Society of Interior Designers to Paris to visit design shops, antique dealers and museums.

The Osakis’ goal is to see about 50 percent of their clients coming back for more travel with them. “We aren’t there yet,” says Amy. Nevertheless, tour sales for 2000 were up 60% over the previous year, and 2001 sales are up 40% over sales at the same time last year.

After years of leading young travelers across the United States for Trek America, the first and still the largest camping and adventure travel company in North America, Gary Ripley and Karen Viehover discovered a niche waiting to be filled: showing travelers that there is more to the Pacific Northwest than a scenic coastline. The husband-and-wife team founded Portland-based Personalized Tours & Travel in 1986, taking small groups to Vancouver, B.C., and back on five-day excursions to the Expo 86 World’s Fair that included bed and breakfast accommodation. The following year, with the help of guides they knew from Trek America, they began offering one- and two-week small-group tours all over the Pacific Northwest.

“We were going after world travelers—affluent, educated people—the kind who might have been on Trek America trips when they were younger,” explains Ripley. They marketed their program through travel agents and airlines. Many scheduled trips had to be cancelled when they didn’t fill, and hard lessons about the costs of starting a business had to be learned, Ripley recalls.

It took 12 years for Personalized Tours & Travel to really take off. Today the company has a staff of 20 full- and part-time employees, a fleet of vans and minicoaches and several business partnerships.

In the last three years, annual revenue has increased 200 to 300 percent. While continuing to sell Northwest tour packages—ranging from whale watching on the Oregon Coast to multisport adventures in the Columbia River Gorge—the company now has a broader geographic focus and a growing focus on customized tours.

New partnerships with Backroads, the large, California-based adventure travel company, and Smithsonian Study Tours are part of the customized tour work.

For Backroads clients arriving in Seattle for Puget Sound cycling tours, Personalized Tours & Travel handles pre- and post-trip arrangements, from hotel reservations to sightseeing (Mount Ranier, Olympic National Park, etc.) In 2002, the company will offer similar services for Backroads’ San Francisco departures.