Soon I’m going to tell the story of the biggest mistake I made in the tourism business. But first, I need to explain why I created TourProducer in the first place.

I created it because I realized I was explaining the exact same things over and over again.

Every new tour operator joining my platform, DGtalguide, asked the same questions, made the same mistakes, and eventually went through the same shift in mindset about their business. After having the same conversations countless times, I decided to create this project instead. Here, I want to share everything I’ve been telling my clients for years, along with a few thoughts about how the tourism industry is changing right in front of us, often without realizing it.

Now, as promised, let me tell you about my biggest mistake.

I invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into DGtalguide because I was exhausted.

From 2016 to 2020, I worked as a tour guide in my own company, Motoragazzi, which later became the largest scooter rental and motorcycle tour operator in Italy. By the fourth year, I had reached a point where the idea of riding around Lake Garda one more time explaining the same stories to another group of tourists felt less like tourism and more like reliving the same workday forever, the kind of repetitive routine people usually associate with corporate office life rather than travel.

Every day followed the exact same pattern: the same roads, the same jokes polished through repetition, the same questions, the same timing, the same carefully rehearsed conversations at scenic viewpoints. I realized that I was deeply introverted, and constant interaction with tourists was draining me completely. Guiding tours felt emotionally exhausting.

At the same time, I realized something else: I hated repetitive operational work. And tourism operations are astonishingly repetitive.

You spend your days calling the same restaurants, wineries, hotels, museums, and cheese producers to coordinate bookings that differ only in tiny details. After a few years, tourism management began to feel less like building experiences and more like working on an assembly line, except instead of car parts you move around reservation schedules, lunch timings, ferry crossings, and hotel confirmations.

At the same time, I still loved discovering Italy. I still loved building relationships with local communities, gradually getting deeper access to the real life of villages and small towns, and through those connections discovering places and experiences that rarely appear in guidebooks or standard tourist itineraries.

I simply no longer wanted to spend my life physically guiding tours myself.

So I created DGtalguide — a platform that could perform the operational work of a guide and a booking manager at the same time. It could navigate customers through routes, tell stories in multiple languages, manage timing, and unlock access to all kinds of experiences without requiring me to personally repeat the same performance every single day.

And it worked.

Motoragazzi sold thousands of app-guided tours. Customers left enthusiastic reviews. For the first time in years, I was able to work from home behind a computer instead of spending entire days riding a scooter around Lake Garda under the summer sun and revealing to tourists the “terrible secret” that the name Limone sul Garda, despite the endless lemon plantations surrounding the town, actually has nothing to do with lemons at all.

Everything seemed perfect.

And that’s exactly where I made my biggest mistake.

I assumed that tour guides around the world would enthusiastically adopt DGtalguide for the exact same reason I created it: to escape routine and scale their business beyond their physical presence.

So I started reaching out to guides across Italy, offering to help them publish their tours on the platform quickly, easily, and essentially for free.

The reaction was surprisingly cold.

Some were confused by the concept, others distrusted it immediately, and many came up with different reasons not to try it at all — from “it’s too expensive” despite the €2.50 fee per sold tour, to “we simply prefer working with tourists in person.”

For months, I kept pushing forward: hundreds of contacts, thousands of emails and phone calls, countless demos and presentations.

The result was zero.

And then one day, I suddenly understood what I was doing wrong.

I was trying to take away the part of the job they genuinely loved!

They loved talking to tourists. They loved repeating the same stories every day. They didn’t mind driving or walking the same routes over and over again. Everything that exhausted me gave meaning to their work and made them feel valuable.

That’s when I understood that many guided tours, while technically part of tourism, are not purely tourism products in the traditional sense. Very often they resemble live performance more than operational tourism work. The best guides are not simply transferring information about landmarks and history. They are storytellers, entertainers, improvisers, and, in many ways, stand-up comedians who have mastered timing, pauses, audience engagement, and the strange art of making the same story feel spontaneous for the thousandth time.

Yes, they talk about history and landmarks. But halfway through the tour they can suddenly switch topics and start discussing politics, football, local scandals, or cultural stereotypes, and people will still listen attentively, laugh, react emotionally, and stay engaged.

The moment I understood this, I completely changed my sales strategy. I stopped trying to sell DGtalguide to guides.

Instead, I focused on tour operators — companies whose growth was increasingly limited not only by the rising cost and limited availability of high-quality guides, but also by the growing operational burden of coordinating restaurants, wineries, museums, transfers, hotels, tastings, schedules, reservations, and dozens of other moving parts that modern experiential tourism now requires.

That was the moment things finally started going a lot better. Or, as The Dude would probably say, far f***ing out.

Next time, we’ll talk about why I roll my eyes every time someone starts talking about the “AI revolution” in tourism.

Stay tuned.