Get Your Guide On(line)
Shay Bellas, Navitour
Whether you’re an aspiring guide or aspiring adventurer, my guest Shay Bellas has something for you. Shay is a serial entrepreneur, and I’m pretty confident that her most recent start-up, a travel technology company called Navitour, based out of Portland, Maine, will be of interest to many in the Guides Gone Wild community.
I first reached out to Shay for the podcast because I wanted to hear about her long-ago decision to jettison law school and found a professional women’s football team, the Maine Freeze. But when we started talking about her most recent venture, Navitour, I completely lost my initial train of thought, because Shay’s applying her well-honed business development and operational skills to a cause near and dear to my heart - supporting and promoting local guides.
Navitour is developing an app that aims to elevate the experiences of both the adventure participant AND the guide.
From a traveler’s perspective, Navitour will be a go-to resource for all kinds of experiences that will allow an interested participant to get a good overview of the adventure, and get to know the guide or leader before committing to the trip. But the part that’s super exciting to me is the way Shay and her team are building out the guide support.
As it refines and grows beyond its ‘minimal viable’ launch product, Navitour will provide guides with the resources and tools they need to build out a liveable business around their adventure passions. Instead of spending time monkeying around trying to get a website up, or figuring out how to do online payments, or finding a place to get insurance, a guide can spend their time creating and delivering an awesome experience, and let Navitour help them with the rest.
One of my main goals with this website and podcast has been to introduce you to some fabulous guides, so the idea of this multi-faceted tool for building a guide business has me stoked. I’m excited to support Shay and the Navitour team as they ramp up their business and get the app launched this fall!
If you’re a guide or thinking of becoming one, I hope you’ll check out Navitour at MyNavitour.com and see if their model makes sense for you - even if you aren’t looking to guide as your primary profession, it seems like Navitour will provide some great exposure and access to tools, marketing, and clients that will help you maximize the impact of the time you DO want to spend on guiding.
Look for the Navitour app coming very soon in the Apple store, with an Android version right on its tail. And if you’re not a guide, and you don’t play one on TV, you can still reap the benefits of Navitour - sign up to be a tour tester now, who knows, you might find out about something fantastic you never knew about, and you’ll get to vet it and recommend it, so others will get the opportunity to enjoy it too!
Other links from my chat with Shay: