EPISODE #E48

How A Shore Excursion Marketplace Put AI To Work On Bookings

05:32 / 39:43

Drew Fortner, founder and CEO of Alaska Shore Tours, wired an AI agent into his reservation system. His dashboard says the return on that spend is around 9,000%. Alaska Shore Tours is a shore excursion marketplace that has planned tours for over 125,000 cruise guests across seven regional booking sites in Alaska. Drew started as a tour guide in Colorado, moved into sales and marketing, and built a platform that now lets AI tools pull availability, pricing and cruise schedules and send a ready-to-book proposal in the middle of a web chat. Five years ago that build would’ve cost six figures and a dev team. Brennan Bliss, founder and CEO of Propellic, talks with Drew about how he measures AI spend against minutes saved, why 80% of his customers book within 24 hours of first finding the site, the one ad message that beat everything else in Google Ads testing, and how a mid-size reseller competes with the cruise ship for the same tour.

Drew Fortner

He is the Founder and CEO of Alaska Shore Tours. His tourism career began as a tour guide in Colorado, a job he still counts among the best he's ever had, before stepping into a Sales & Marketing Director role where working with resellers showed him the potential of diversified revenue streams for tour operators. In 2013 he launched Alaska Shore Tours, which has since planned tours for over 125,000 guests. That experience led him to found Tourbase, a platform built on nearly a decade of technology developed at Alaska Shore Tours, empowering entrepreneurs and tour operators to launch their own regional online travel agencies through a franchise model designed to preserve the deep product knowledge he sees as the difference maker for both customers and tour partners.