Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, August 15, 2024, and now here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
30.07.2024 - 13:14 / skift.com / Jesse ChaseLubitz
In 2019, ToursByLocals received $33 million from a private equity firm and had plans for a full rebranding of its website. Then came the pandemic.
ToursByLocals connects travelers with, you guessed it, local guides. During the pandemic, the company used some of the funding to focus on keeping their guides above water. Now, five years later, the company finally followed through on its promise to rebrand.
In an interview with Skift, ToursByLocals’ CEO Lisa Chen explained the rebrand and also said that the company is working on integrating AI while keeping the customer experience human.
Chen, who took over last year, gave an inside look at what we can expect next from the company, including more partnerships and new tools for travel agents.
Skift: ToursByLocals underwent a significant branding overhaul in the past two months. Why?
Lisa Chen: It goes back a few years — before my time. Tritium Partners, which is a private equity company based in Austin, Texas, invested money in 2019. It was an incredibly inopportune time, being two months before the pandemic.
The original intent of funding was to completely overhaul the technology platform, the website itself, as well as the brand. We are now knee-deep, and I would say, sort of starting to be on the other side of that path. We completely re-platformed our technology stacks. We went to the cloud. We’ve overhauled our UI on the site to be much more modern. We’re using much more modern technology tooling, we brought in additional leaders that we sorely needed as head of product and head of engineering, and we rebranded all of it. It was a very ambitious project.
The reason we wanted to rebrand is to signal to our travelers, who are largely luxury travelers, that we are growing. We had fantastic growth last year and we’re doubling down on growth, on providing really excellent experiences and connecting and focusing on authentic, local experiences. And we wanted the brand to signal that much more clearly and distinctly than the old brand.
Skift: How are you incorporating artificial intelligence (AI)?
Lisa Chen: I’m dating myself, but I was around when the internet kind of came to be. I started my career in 1994 and my first job was in PR. I kind of feel deja vu again when I hear people say, how are you using AI? It’s like we used to say, you know, how are you using the internet?
It is going to be pervasive. We are using tooling that makes use of AI capabilities and machine learning capabilities, so it is threaded throughout our business. But our purpose is to keep travel human.
Right now, it’s more on helping us do our business more efficiently. We are threading it throughout our business. We have 165 people spread out throughout 10 different countries,
Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, August 15, 2024, and now here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
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