 |
Tourpreneur Tour Business PodcastAuthor: Tourpreneur
Tourpreneur is a community of passionate tour business owners eager to improve their skills and increase their profits. Our community is passionate about helping each other. As small tour business owners, we understand its a lonely job, a daily grind, and easy to become a busy fool working harder but not smarter. The Tourpreneur community helps you get advice from your peers as well as experts in the areas you need to grow your business and make it more profitable. Whether you explore our hundreds of free articles, podcasts and other resources, or join our Tourpreneur community, were here to help! Language: en Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Places & Travel, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
Listen Now...
The VAWAA Story: Building a Niche Tour Business on Human-Centered Design
Episode 322
Monday, 27 April, 2026
There is no itinerary. No promised outcome. And a 98 percent five-star review rate.Geetika Agrawal is the founder and CEO of Vacation With An Artist (VAWAA), a platform connecting travelers with master artists in 42 countries for multi-day, one-on-one apprenticeships. The business does not sell tours. It sells access to process: five to six days in an artist's studio, working directly alongside practitioners of pottery, calligraphy, natural dyeing, quilting, shoemaking, and dozens of other craft traditions rooted in place and culture. There is no itinerary. No guaranteed finished product. No group of strangers to manage around. Just immersive making alongside people who have spent decades mastering their practice.Geetika brings 20 years as a human-centered designer, including work at Disney Imagineering, L'Oreal, and Lincoln Center, to an operation run by a team of four with artists across 42 countries. Mitch and Geetika talk through how she vets artists (the internal bar: is this worth flying that far?), how she designed onboarding systems and feedback loops to maintain quality at scale, and why VAWAA has grown 25 to 30 percent organically for two consecutive years, hitting 50 percent growth this year, without a dollar in paid advertising. She also walks through the decision at the center of everything: sell the process, not the outcome. That decision, she argues, is directly why 98 percent of reviews are five stars.Resources:VAWAA: vacationwithanartist.com or vawaa.comGeetika Agrawal on LinkedIn
