What Do You Stand For? Why Taking a Position Is Good Business

Most tour operators know they should stand out. Very few are willing to say something specific enough to actually do it.

Yulia Denisyuk is a journalist, storyteller, and independent trip operator who has spent years watching the travel industry default to the same itineraries, the same highlights, and the same cheerful marketing, while the travelers who might actually connect with something real keep looking for it elsewhere. She and Mitch don't spend much time on tactics. They spend most of this conversation on the harder question: what does it actually mean to build a travel business around something you believe, and what does that require you to give up?

The conversation covers the rise of creator-led trips and why personal trust has effectively replaced brand trust for a growing share of travelers. Yulia makes a practical case for why a narrow, specific position, one that tells potential travelers what you won't do as clearly as what you will, is a more durable business strategy than chasing broader appeal. She also shares a framework for pitching your business to media that has nothing to do with your destination and everything to do with the larger conversation your trips are part of. By the end, the episode lands somewhere most travel business podcasts don't: the question of whether the goal is a five-star review from a self-actualized traveler, or something that actually changes the relationship between the people on your trip and the communities they're visiting.

Top Takeaways

• Your trips should reflect your personal lens on a destination, not the consensus itinerary. 6:23 – 8:32 Yulia doesn't bring her Jordan groups to Jerash — one of the most recognized ancient Roman sites in the region — because she personally didn't connect with it, and the trip is built around what she can honestly advocate for. This creates a natural filter: you're not trying to reach everyone, you're reaching people who share your specific way of seeing a place. Operators who copy the standard itinerary end up competing on price and social media polish, and that's a fight most small operators lose.
• Slow, longer trips are a competitive position — not an apology. 5:44 – 6:22 Yulia's Jordan trips run longer than the industry standard for that destination, by design, because real connection with local people takes time. Most group tours to Jordan are built for efficiency; hers is built for depth, which draws a traveler who isn't cross-shopping on price. If your trip length is determined by what the market seems to expect rather than what the experience actually requires, that's worth revisiting.
• The creator-led trip works because personal trust has replaced brand trust. 8:32 – 9:57 Younger travelers have largely stopped trusting institutional brands and marketing, and they're redirecting that trust toward people whose worldview they already follow. An operator who has built any kind of content presence around a clear point of view can convert that trust directly into bookings, without the credibility-building work that larger brands spend years establishing. The itinerary becomes secondary. People are buying the person and the lens.
• Cutting standard highlights from your itinerary can be more compelling than adding them. 9:30 – 9:57 Yulia tells prospective travelers that her groups experience Petra differently than 98% of group tours — rejecting the Indiana Jones angle that most operators default to because pop culture and Instagram demand it. Telling someone what you won't do, and why, signals that you've thought harder about the experience than operators who simply include everything on the standard list. That editorial curation communicates expertise faster than any feature list.
• Distrust in mainstream media is spilling directly into how people choose travel operators. 11:06 – 12:09 The same collapse of credibility that has sidelined legacy publications is operating in the tour space: people want to travel with someone who stands for something, not a company whose primary message is "great experiences await." Yulia draws a direct line between the rise of independent journalists and the rise of creator-led trips, framing both as responses to the same cultural shift. Operators who communicate a consistent worldview — even a narrow or unfashionable one — are building the kind of trust that no ad spend can manufacture.
• "Authenticity" is a dead word. A specific point of view is not. 13:00 – 13:22 Yulia's argument is that the word authenticity has been so thoroughly absorbed by marketing copy that it now means nothing, and that what people actually want is someone willing to say what they believe. For a tour operator, that means your website and social content should state a specific stance on travel — not just that you care about local culture, but what you think is broken about how most people experience it and what you're doing instead. A declared position creates a community. A vague claim of authenticity disappears into the noise.
• Ignoring what's happening in the world right now reads as tone-deaf to a growing share of travelers. 13:44 – 15:24 Yulia describes a tour operator who opened a conference presentation with the words "the room is on fire" as one of the most powerful moments she'd witnessed at an industry event in years — because almost nobody else does it. Travelers who are paying attention to what's happening in Gaza, in immigration enforcement, in the communities they're visiting are looking for operators who are paying attention too. Operators who maintain cheerful, context-free marketing are losing those travelers, and those travelers tend to book multi-day, high-investment trips.
• Most travel experiences are designed for the visitor, not the community — and that gap is an opening. 17:00 – 17:57 Yulia's conversation with Jordanian operator Muna Haddad surfaces a blunt question: who gets to tell the story of a place, and whose voice is actually centered in the experience? The honest answer is that most itineraries are curated around what the visiting traveler wants to see, not what local communities want to share or how they want to be represented. Operators who build trips around local agency — where the community is the narrator, not the scenery — are genuinely differentiated, and they tend to generate the kind of word-of-mouth that no marketing budget replaces.
• Making locals the narrators, not the backdrop, is a structural choice you can make right now. 19:19 – 19:41 Yulia describes her role on her Jordan trips as providing the container through which her Jordanian friends tell their own stories. This is a design decision, not just a philosophy: it shapes the encounters, the pacing, and the framing of the entire trip. Day tour operators can apply this immediately by shifting from "I'll show you this place" to "I'll introduce you to the people who can tell you about it."
• The industry has figured out personal transformation. Collective transformation is still unclaimed territory. 20:16 – 21:15 Yulia names a specific gap: travel reliably delivers personal transformation — the traveler returns changed — but almost never delivers collective transformation, where the relationship between the traveler and the local community actually shifts. Most marketing, including "transformational travel" marketing, focuses entirely on what happens to the individual. Operators who design for mutual exchange rather than one-directional traveler growth are building toward something the industry hasn't yet learned to sell, which means there's real space there.
• Saturated markets don't require you to compete differently. They require you to compete on meaning. 6:23 – 6:35, 37:17 – 39:12 Yulia operates in Jordan, one of the most crowded group travel markets, and the Barcelona-based operator Aborijans runs in one of the world's most overtouristed cities — both have built distinct positions by naming a specific problem (stereotypes about Jordan, fake tapas tours in Barcelona) and presenting their product as the honest alternative. The positioning isn't just ethical; it does the marketing work because it gives travelers a reason to feel good about choosing you over the default. What you're pushing against is as important as what you're offering.
• A specific social mission functions as a self-executing marketing filter. 34:07 – 35:48 Yulia cites Sororal, a tour operator focused entirely on gender violence and women-led travel, as an example of a company whose story closes the sale before any conversation starts: a traveler who cares about that issue lands on the website and already knows this is their trip. The more specific the mission, the less you have to explain yourself — the right traveler self-identifies and converts without a long persuasion process. For multi-day operators in particular, this kind of specificity also makes press outreach dramatically easier, because the story has a hook that editors can actually place.
• When pitching media, your destination is not the story. The larger conversation your tour speaks to is. 41:25 – 43:42 Yulia's framework for a placeable pitch has four components: tie it to a larger trend, bring something genuinely newsworthy, identify a cultural relevance angle (what national or global conversation does your product touch?), and match it to the right publication's actual beat. Her example — a Puerto Rico operator connecting their product to the national conversation about Puerto Rican autonomy — shows what cultural timing can do for a pitch that would otherwise be ignored. Operators who pitch with "we have a great tour to this destination" are skipping the part that makes a story placeable.
• Test the differentiated concept small before it becomes the whole business. 40:41 – 41:06 Yulia's advice to operators afraid the market won't respond to a bolder concept: design a test. One departure. One limited-availability format. One product that runs alongside your existing revenue-generating trips rather than replacing them. A small experiment gives you real market feedback without requiring you to bet the operation on an unproven idea. If it finds an audience, you have evidence. If it doesn't, you've learned something specific — not that the idea was wrong, but that something external didn't line up yet.
• Taking a position isn't a risk to your bookings. Having no position is. 38:44 – 39:40 The travelers Yulia describes as craving a point of view are, practically speaking, the travelers most likely to book a longer, more expensive trip with an independent operator — they're not price shoppers, they're meaning shoppers. The fear most operators have is that a strong position will cost them customers, but the more likely outcome is that neutrality makes them invisible in a market where the options are nearly infinite. What you lose by having a point of view is the travelers who weren't going to convert anyway. What you gain is the ones who become regulars.
• The people most likely to respond to your real voice are already in your audience; they're just waiting for you to stop performing. 30:20 – 31:11 Yulia describes going through the same evolution Mitch did: she used to publish marketing and "how to succeed" content, and her inner world stopped matching what she was putting out. The operators who found their niche by getting more specific and more honest didn't lose their audience — they finally found the part of it worth keeping. If the content you're producing feels like a performance of what a tour operator is supposed to say, that's the signal, not the strategy.
• Doughnut economics is a practical operating model, not just an ideology. 32:30 – 33:26 Yulia discovered this framework through a course called Creating Regenerative Livelihoods, and she applies it directly to how she structures her business: reinvesting in local communities, recirculating benefits rather than extracting them, resisting the "always up" growth logic that she argues is biologically unsustainable. For tour operators specifically, this maps to concrete decisions — who you pay, how you price, whether your margins come at the expense of the guides and hosts who make the experience real. It's also, practically, a story your travelers want to hear you tell.