Pied Pipers: Group Travel Magic?

Gather and Go with Brian Jewell

Host Brian Jewell interviews Allie Raymer, founder of Peace and Pearl Travel Co., about her innovative 'Pied Piper' group travel model. The episod

Key takeaways

• The 'Pield Piper' model focuses on individuals with a niche sphere of influence, such as artists or pastry chefs, rather than high-follower influencers.
• Successful group travel partnerships rely on the partner's existing transaction history and established trust with their community.

Main topics

• Pied Piper group travel model
• Community-based entrepreneurship

Notable quotes

Sometimes we're following people because they're kind of a train wreck.

Conclusion

The episode highlights how travel professionals can scale their busine

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Are you looking for a wild addition to your next Atlanta adventure? I want to take a minute to tell you about Zoo Atlanta. Just minutes from downtown and home to hundreds of incredible animals representing more than 200 species. Get up close to one of the largest groups of gorillas in North America. Then see if you can spot one of the world's tiniest frogs. The colorful Panamanian golden frog inside the scaly, slimy, spectacular amphibian and reptile experience. Spend your day exploring 40 acres of amazing habitats featuring African elephants, Sumatran tigers, red panda, orangutans, southern white rhinos, and more. No day is complete without a spin on the Endangered Species Carousel and a ride aboard the Norfolk Southern Zoo train. Zoo Atlanta offers groups of 15 or more special discounted admission, making it an easy and unforgettable addition to your Atlanta itinerary. Visit zooatlanta.org slash groups to start planning your wild adventure today. Speaker 2 (1:11) Hey there, everybody. Welcome to Gather and Go, the podcast that helps you plan, promote, and lead better trips. I'm Brian Jewell. I am your host. I am feeling energized today and hope you are as well. And of course, as always, my promise to you is that I'm going to do everything I can today to make this investment of your time worth your while. Now, today I have a really cool featured interview with Allie Raymer of Peace and Pearl Travel Company. Allie's going to tell us all about how she has learned to partner with community leaders to build what she calls Pied Piper group trips. And in this conversation, you're going to hear how you can do the same, how you can set expectations with your group leader partners to ensure success. and how you can help them pick the right destinations and experiences to make sure their trips are a home run for them and their customers and for you. It's a really cool conversation. I can't wait for you to hear it. Before we get there, though, let's start with some travel news you may have missed. A new Arctic cruising company is launching a zero emissions ship. An expedition cruising startup called Solar has announced it will sail a new ship called the Captain Arctic starting in February 2027. The ship is equipped with five aluminum sails and will run mostly off of wind, solar and battery power with additional biofuel electric engines for times when weather isn't amenable to renewable power sources. Founder Sophie Galvanian told Travel Weekly that her goal is to run the ship as close to zero emissions as possible, saying, quote, it's going to depend on the weather, but altogether we have 90 percent less emissions than conventional ships. The ship is set to accommodate 36 passengers and is focused on cultivating unexpected experiences. Cruise departures will have no set itineraries, allowing the crew to sail at will to interesting destinations. Gavignon also said activities and dining programs would be tailored to guests' individual interests. Solar will run English-speaking and French-speaking cruises through the Arctic starting with Norway and Greenland in 2027, and said that its inventory for the year is already about 75 % booked. Speaker 2 (3:47) Well, now, before we move on, I want to take just a minute and share a little bit of news from us. We just released one of the most helpful and useful resources we put out on a yearly basis. This is the buyer's guide for the group travel industry, and it really should be required reading for anybody who works in group travel, whether on the trip planning side or the trip promotion side. This is a special section of the September issue of the group travel leader magazine. And in this year's buyer's guide, you're going to find interviews with the leaders of America's top travel associations, where we really dig in deep about some of the opportunities and some of the challenges facing our industry. We also have a great guide to succession planning for your travel business and a roundup. of some really cool behind-the-scenes experiences that could take your group trips to the next level. There's also a great article about how you and your groups can experience international flair without leaving the United States. Now, all of this and more is available in the Buyer's Guide, and it is absolutely free. That's right, you can get it right now. at grouptravelleader.com slash buyers guide. I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well to make it easy for you to click on. Just go to that site. The articles are all right there. We don't even ask you to give us your email address. It is super helpful information. And I think if you check it out, you will be glad you did. So don't miss this year's buyer's guide for the group travel industry at grouptravelleader.com slash. buyer's guide. Well, now it is just about time for us to move into our featured conversation with Allie Raymer. As we do that, let me remind you that you can find a wrap up of some of the most important things Allie had to say in the show notes for this episode. And in fact, you can find show notes for the 110 or so episodes we have done all on our site at grouptravelleader.com slash podcast. And after we finish the interview with Allie, I'm also going to come back and. do a wrap-up of some of the most interesting and insightful things she had to say to make sure you don't miss them. And I hope you will stick with me through the end of that wrap-up because once we're done there, we're going to take a minute and answer the question, what are you really selling when you sell travel? That's going to be the topic of today's Hot Minute. You won't want to miss that. We'll be right back with Allie Raymer. Speaker 2 (6:44) All right, everybody. My guest today is a former high school English teacher who found her passion for travel after taking her students on trips throughout Europe and Central America. Today, she's the founder and lead travel advisor at Peace and Pearl Travel Company, where she builds personalized trips for Pied Piper travel groups. Allie Raymer, welcome to the podcast. Thank Speaker 1 (7:06) you so much for having me. I'm super excited to chat with you today. Speaker 2 (7:10) I'm so excited to have you here. I always love... talking to people who have discovered group travel and discovered what a beautiful experience it is, what an enriching experience it is, because so many people honestly don't know about it. Or maybe they think of like the student, you know, group element, which you did for a long time. Speaker 1 (7:26) I did, yeah. Speaker 2 (7:27) So, you know, the fact that you kind of found it and have made it a huge part of your practice and travel. That is really exciting to me. And I want to dig into a lot of that. First, give us the super quick version of how you went from teacher to travel advisor. Speaker 1 (7:42) Yeah, for sure. So I was a high school English teacher, as you said, and I was working at a Title I school down in Southern Kentucky. And we're doing lots of fundraising and selling lots of trips, though. And it was so much fun. And my husband's aunt, she actually owned her own travel agency, Picture This Travel. And she said, you know, Allie, you're selling travel to people with no money. You know, you're having to fundraise every bit of it. And she said, but you could sell travel to people with money. And I was like, oh, duh. Like, that's what you do. And it just so happened that she her specialty was group travel. And she kind of saw what I was doing with high school students and brought me along. And yeah, I joined her agency. And then nine years later. Here I am through all the ups and downs of COVID craziness, having two babies, all the things. And now I have my own agency, Peace and Pearl, as you said. And yeah, that's kind of the short of it. There's lots of drama in the middle, which I'm sure we might get into some of that. But yeah, it's been a fun ride. So that Speaker 2 (8:45) is a wonderful ride. Now you. specialize in part in what you describe as Pied Piper trips. It's a fascinating concept. It's a concept I don't think enough of our listeners are either aware of or really engaged in. So when you say Pied Piper trip, unpack that for us. Tell us what it means and how it's different than just, you know, putting a trip together, putting a bunch of people on it and operating it yourself. Speaker 1 (9:11) Yeah, absolutely. So For us, you know, I started the Pied Piper trips with Sherry as my mentor, and she was doing it through different avenues, one of which was pastors, local pastors, and going on, you know, trips to Greece or Israel, you know, the Holy Land, things like that. And I saw what she was doing, and she was mentoring me in that way. And I thought, okay, what other avenues can we go down with this? You know, we have this person of influence, someone that has a group and that you know, maybe they don't preach to them every day on Sunday, but in some capacity they do. And maybe we can, you know, partner together and I can leverage their audience to create this group opportunity. So I kind of started thinking and brainstorming about people who have a good. following or sphere of influence. And it was actually during the COVID years when we were all spending probably too much time on social media. Speaker 2 (10:08) And Speaker 1 (10:08) I had made some friends with other entrepreneurial moms on there and just started building relationships with them really is where it started. And from there, I just kind of started to get creative and thought, you know, they have audiences that especially post COVID probably would really like to travel with this person and really enjoy this person. Let's just go for it. And that's, that's kind of where it began. Um, I started with Kayla Weber Nord. Uh, she's an artist in Kentucky. I started with a friend of mine, Brie Gallagher. She's a pastry chef in Kentucky. And I thought these are people with niches, you know, with specialties, with audiences and influence. They're really likable women. Um, I enjoyed spending time with them and I thought, you know, I think other people will too. Speaker 2 (10:56) Yeah. So, uh, Give us an idea of some of the different kinds of people that could be a Pied Piper. You mentioned a pastor. In a way, you were a Pied Piper as a teacher. I was, yeah. Speaker 1 (11:08) A Speaker 2 (11:08) lot of people would never have said, oh, pastry chef, that's got potential. So is it just like the entire world is your oyster or are there categories you look for to say, oh, this is the right kind of person? Speaker 1 (11:20) I really think it's important to find someone, one that's... um, very likable and does have that sphere of influence. You know, not everybody has to have thousands and thousands of followers on Instagram per se, but that is kind of helpful. We'll say, um, and it is kind of helpful to, to think about something that's a little bit niche. Like maybe they have something that is their niche thing that they have this audience for, um, and that they can kind of be the expert in. teach. So the trip becomes not just, you know, a trip to Tuscany, but it becomes a trip to Tuscany where I get to paint watercolor and maybe I'm a novice painter or maybe I'm actually really good. And I've always just wanted to sit down with Kayla and, you know, pick her brain. So I think that was a big part of it. Um, right now we actually just this week launched another Pied Piper trip with some whiskey sommeliers. Um, and so whiskey educators. So same kind of idea. Like these people are experts and they have this realm of influence and it just enriches the whole travel experience when you have this expert going on the trip. Speaker 2 (12:25) You know, what strikes me is that, um, I don't hear you saying, I just look for people with big Instagram followings. No, Speaker 1 (12:32) definitely not. You Speaker 2 (12:34) know, I, um, I just find influencers, you know, influencers bring their own tribe. That is a thing in travel. I'm not knocking that people, people do that. But why, why are you focusing more on almost like the community-based entrepreneur versus someone who's got, you know, 10,000 or 50,000 Instagram followers? Speaker 1 (12:53) Okay. I'm going to say this and it might be a little harsh, but sometimes we're following people because they're kind of a train wreck. Speaker 2 (13:01) But Speaker 1 (13:02) I mean, let's just be honest, just because you're following someone doesn't mean that I mean, you might use their link to order something on Amazon, but that doesn't mean that you genuinely want to spend time with that person. Because when you're traveling with someone, I mean, that's very intimate experience. Let's be honest, you're sitting across the table with them. You're, you know, if you're in the middle of summer sweating on a, you know, river cruise ship or something, I don't know, you're doing so. these very monumental experiences with these people. So just because someone has a huge following doesn't mean that people necessarily want to genuinely spend intimate time with them. And I think that the Pied Pipers, yeah, I really look for people that are not influencers, but more, um, they are, they have a sphere of influence. I think that's very different. Um, I think, you know, when I'm looking for these people, I had talked to you about Weta, Michael. You know, on social media, like if you were to look her up, she doesn't have like hundreds of thousands of followers. And I kind of think that she would and she doesn't. But she has a huge sphere of influence in Kentucky, beyond Kentucky. I mean, it kind of blows me away how many people she has a sphere of influence over. And people have already committed funds, right? Like they've already signed up for a cooking class.