Between Two Worlds: A Conversation with Bruce Poon Tip

Bruce Poon Tip is the founder and CEO of G Adventures, a global small group adventure travel specialist based in Toronto, Canada. He is also a bestselling author with his book Looptail: How One Country Changed the World by Reinventing Business, which debuted a number four on the New York Times Bestsellers List a week after its launch last fall. Poon Tip also lectures widely and writes articles for periodical publications. TravelPulse spoke to Poon Tip on April 1, upon his return from India.

TravelPulse: So you had a good time in India?

Bruce Poon Tip: Yeah! I launched Looptail in India. And at the same time I was launching a new partnership with Cox & Kings over there, so that was very busy, but very good for us.

TP: What is the status of India for G Adventures now?

BTP: We’ve been running tours in India for decades but we launched a new program. Do you know Cox & Kings? They are the oldest travel company in the world, actually, 154 years old.

They launched a whole adventure division to South Indian passengers and they are representing our product there to sell outbound to Indians.

TP: So you’ll be selling to Cox and Kings' Indian customers your destinations around the world?

BTP: Yeah. We’re running a huge viral campaign in India now to find the first 50 adventurers. Grab Your Dreams. You should look up the website. It’s called GrabYourDream.com.

To launch our product there with Cox and Kings we’re running this viral campaign to find the first adventurers who are going to go all over the world on one of our trips, and with Cox & Kings in partnership. And they’re going to report back with blogging and video and tell the younger generation Indians about different things. Because right now, they’re a real emerging market, so adventure travel is new for them. It’s a new kind of concept, so this program is to find those 50 first adventurers to go out and report back to India what’s out there in the world of adventure travel.

TP: The idea of a viral campaign in India with a population of a billion people is mind-boggling.

BTP: Yeah. I was really surprised actually on this … because I go to India all the time. I go to Delhi, I haven’t been in Mumbai for a long time.. Cox & Kings has grown so much. They are so huge now. I don’t know if you know the story behind India, but you know Indians couldn’t travel outside of the country until 1998.

TP: Really?

BTP: Yeah, they had a limit in which you could travel. You could only take out of the country $500. Up until 1998. So no one ever traveled except business travelers. And then in 1998 they lifted that to I think a thousand or two thousand. But then they lifted it after that significantly where you can take five or ten thousand. They were limiting people from even traveling. So there were basically no vacation travelers, leisure travelers out of India until after 1998. And now it’s just booming.

TP: Do you know what destinations Indians are preferring?

BTP: Well right now, as in every emerging market, like Russia, China, the first travelers over the last 10 years have been the ones who go on those junket coach tours. As soon as a market opens it’s cheap tours to big iconic destinations, like the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids, Australia, the Rockies, all of these things. We’ve been at the forefront of all those kinds of markets, South Africa being one of them.

When the market opens there’s a ten-year period of discovering the world on these junket coach tours. The next generation of travelers are the ones that look for something like our programs.

TP: You mentioned Egypt, and you are one of the few tour operators operating in Egypt now, right? It’s very rare right now that anyone is going. How is that doing now? Are you getting a good response to them?

BTP: We were. Egypt is unfortunately so up and down right now. When we started we were getting a good response. The numbers certainly weren’t as strong as they were before. But we’re still running groups now. They’re much fewer and farther between. But recently it slowed down a bit. But we’re still going.

TP: I just had such a great time over there.

BTP: Yeah. What we did is we had our global marketing meeting with our global marketing people and we held it in Cairo. And everybody, like you, they had such a great time. When they came back they were all so committed to the cause. They met a lot of not only our people but the tourist boards and things. And they had such an amazing time they came back really committed to promoting Egypt and getting Egypt back.

And our numbers are growing. They are much smaller than they were in the past but we’re still getting calls. It’s a great time to go, to be honest, as you probably saw. It’s so easy to get into everything now, to see everything. …

The business is growing back. We were down to almost nothing. Actually we stopped completely. And our numbers are probably back to about 25 percent of what we were doing before.

TP: That’s good. The people of Egypt are so in need now and they’re so appreciative. They were so welcoming. I’ve never seen people so welcoming of tourists.

BTP: That’s the thing about Egypt. In the heyday everyone takes it for granted because Egypt is such an iconic destination. It’s one of the most resilient destinations that always comes bouncing back so quickly because the Pyramids of Egypt are on the forefront of everyone’s imagination.

If any other country had the issues Egypt had it would kill tourism for 10 years. But people are dying to get back to Egypt and when it calms down it’s going to boom.

TP: I hope it does by the fall, after theIr elections.

BTP: Yeah, that’s the big concern. It depends how those go. You know in the news we heard about the 500 people sentenced to death, you know that wasn’t really good for tourism.

TP: No, that was really bad. What I was hearing from people over there is that that is never going to really happen. It would be an atrocity if it were to happen, but I’m hearing reasons to believe that it won’t.

BTP: And unfortunately the media still makes it a big story, because I have heard that too, that it’s not really going to happen.

TP: I was really shocked when I heard it. It’s so awful on so many levels. Just in itself it’s awful, the sentencing of 500 people to death. But besides that, for tourism, and even for international diplomacy, it’s awful. But it’s just the odd mechanics of the Egyptian judicial system right now. Egyptians tell me it’s not going to happen.

BTP: It’s funny you should mention international diplomacy. Egypt is so affected by news, right? The global news. And for a while there it was such a focus of global news and it was sad. The whole infrastructure of tourism is such a big part of their future, of their economy.

TP: It really is. It was sad to see people like this guy who offers camel rides at the pyramids. He said to me, “It’s been three years. It’s too much. If my camels don’t eat, they die. And I have my children, my mother, my sister to take care of…”

BTP: I know. It’s horrific. But as you saw with all those problems, as we know in the tourism industry, even though sometimes these countries make government panic and offer travel advisories, these problems are often quite centralized and removed from where tourists actually visit and where they are are. And quite often tourism can still go on in these places. I’ve been in so many countries where there are travel advisories and there is no sense of any kind of danger as far as I can tell.

TP: Yeah, exactly.

BTP: I’m advising everyone I know, if you ever want to go to Egypt, now is the time. As it is, it’s so manageable. When Egypt is booming, it’s like Disneyland, like an amusement park. The lines to things -- you can wait a full day to get into the Pyramids. And now you can just go in and out. I was actually blown away.

TP: What else is getting your interest right now?

BTP: I’m launching “Looptail” next week in England. We sold out the Royal Geographic Society for my launch. We sold 25 percent more than our capacity, which I’m super excited about. Especially at the Royal Geographic Society, a historical place where some of the great explorers and Charles Darwin lectured and spoken there. England is like that, where you go to places and Charles Darwin was on the stage. And he reported what he saw in Galapagos.

Looptail debuted at number four on the New York Times Bestsellers list. Then it went number one here in Canada. And since then it’s been launched in India and Australia and Mexico and the UK. I think it’s the highest debut of any book that I can tell on travel or the travel industry on the New York Times Bestsellers list. No one has been able to tell me there has ever been another that debuted that high.

So that’s been amazing. And now it’s also being translated into Japanese, Russian and Polish and released in Russia Poland and Japan. And I’m doing my first translated version. So that’s been great, but it’s also keeping me very busy. These book tours are not easy.

TP: Yeah, you’ve got a company to run too.

BTP: Yeah. So it was good to be able to combine that with India, with our Grab Your Dreams Adventure campaign.