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Chris Koerner noticed cruise lines like Carnival and Royal Caribbean charge five times what local tour guides do for the same excursions. He wants to build a marketplace connecting travelers directly to guides, cutting out the middleman markup.
Chris Koerner noticed cruise lines like Carnival and Royal Caribbean charge five times what local tour guides do for the same excursions. He wants to build a marketplace connecting travelers directly to guides, cutting out the middleman markup.
Tell me this isn't a brilliant idea. So I went on my first cruise, like 15 years ago, and I'm too cheap to buy shore excursions. It costs like 200 bucks to go snorkeling Belize. I'm not paying that. So I used to get off the boat and I'd go find the tour guides that Carnival or Royal Caribbean is contracting and say, hey, how much? 180 bucks. Nope. 30. What? No, no. 30 bucks. I'll pay 30 bucks. That's crazy. No. Okay, bye. Then you do the old walk away. And then they say, okay, okay, okay, friend, come on. 30 bucks. Why did they do that? Because they already paying for the bus. They already paying for the gas. All the people from Carnival that are right next to you paid $180 to Carnival. Carnival kept the vast majority of that and paid pennies to the tour guide. So they're happy to make something because they're already driving to the snorkeling site anyway. Someone needs to build the Expedia for shore excursions. We already have the Expedia for cruises, Expedia for everything. It's already there. This is a way for cruise travelers to skip the middleman, AKA Carnival, Royal Caribbean, stop paying those crazy markups and go directly to the vetted and trusted tour guides that Royal Caribbean and Carnival have already vetted. They've already done the hard work for you. This is a billion dollar business idea doing it. There is no trusted way to buy shore excursions directly from the tour guides. Full business plan right here.
