My first season of Drink•Eat•Walk DC food tours ended with the 2025 calendar. That means I can finally synthesize & quantify some answers to the question I’m always asking myself (and my friends are always asking me):
“How’s the tour business going?”
I had four objectives for this first season:
- Cycles (eg. # of tours)
- Feedback & Reviews (as posted on Tripadvisor, Viator, Google, GetYourGuide)
- Iterations (eg. ingest the learnings from 1 & 2 and make changes as necessary)
- Don’t Lose Money
I then had specific goals for each. One of the best things I did early on was creating a spreadsheet that tracked every tour for guests, revenue, costs at each stop, and total tip amount. This helped me always know how I was doing in terms of each tour’s budget vs. actuals, etc.
It was also perfect to help me answer that big question — How’d I do?
1. Cycles → 130% of goal
I had more tours than I expected! That said, I had no idea how many tours to expect in my first season, so I just chose a nice, low, unscary, round number. I’m happy I exceeded my goal, but knowing what I know now, I probably should have been more courageous and set a higher goal 😬
2. Reviews → 88% of goal
I also had no idea how many reviews to expect, but soon figured out it was going to be based upon the # of tour guests (duh). So I set specific goal for that, and I ended up hitting 92% of it. Knowing what I now know about the tour industry, and standard guest behavior, getting almost one review per guest is pretty good. I worked hard it, though, as reviews are the single-most important way to boost your listing & attract folks on the OTAs (Tripadvisor , Viator, & GetYourGuide) and appearing high in Google search, especially for newbie tours like mine. I’ll do a later blog post of the specific things I did to get reviews, as I think I ignorantly stumbled into using some good, novel tactics 🤪
3. Iterations → 👍
There’s no real good way to track this. However, I constantly made changes, and no two tours were the same. Some of the changes I made were big ones, including: tour meetup spot; restaurant stops; food & drink ordered; stories told; tour ending spot. I’m proud of this, especially since I’m confident the experience I created in the tours by the end of the season were much better than at the start (and not just because I became a less clueless tour guide 😂)
4. I Didn’t Lose Money!
In fact, I made more money this year than I have in the any of the past few years. You’ll see in the pic that I crossed out this goal on my whiteboard — I realized early on that I did indeed want to make some money in this first season. It has proven itself to be both a big motivator and very helpful in deciding on some of the iterations. I don’t expect to make oodles of money with D•E•W, but I also don’t want it to be the bad kind of non-profit — being able to cover my living costs is crucial.
So that’s it in terms of the objectives I committed to at the start of the 2025 tour season. I’ve thought a lot about how I wanted to summarize this year, and this is just my first shot at it — more 2025 recap & thoughts to come (as well as posts about my 2026 objectives & goals).
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