Travel Experience & Performance Consulting
I've guided the trips, trained the guides, built the products, run the operations, and shot the photos. I read your whole operation at once — and catch what's costing you guests, margin, and repeat bookings before it shows up in your reviews.
Who I Work With
Multi-day trips at any scale — adventure, luxury, expedition, or high-volume.
Camps, lodges, and properties where the stay is the product.
The on-the-ground partners who deliver what others sell.
Brands whose promise is only as strong as the experience behind it.
Photography-led departures — or the ambition to add them.
Backing travel businesses — before the deal and after it.
Who I've worked for & worked with
Start Here
Most operators can feel when something's off — soft feedback, a slipping repeat rate, thinning margin, a launch that never found its feet. The people closest to the product are usually too deep inside it to see why. The diagnostic finds the root cause: first in the data you already collect, then out in the field, experiencing your product as your guests do.
The data deep-dive
Your dashboards catch fires. I read for patterns — the slow leaks that never trip an alarm but quietly erode ratings, repeat bookings, and margin. I analyze the guest feedback you already collect and trace each signal back to the guide standard, the itinerary, or the promise that produced it.
Deliverable A preliminary briefing on what your data is saying — and the hypotheses worth testing in the field.
First-hand
I join a real departure — or a stay at your lodge or property — as an ordinary guest, covert by default. No performance, no polish: the trip exactly as your guests receive it, read through the eyes of someone who has guided the trips, trained the guides, and run the operations.
Deliverable A full findings report and presentation, ranked by impact and ease of fix.
How they fit together
Data deep-dive
Preliminary briefing
Departure audit
Report & presentation
Start with either — most clients begin with the data to shape the questions, then I ride the trip to see how it actually plays out. Do one, or both.
Why the Audit Works
Internal reviews, guide debriefs, even a typical mystery shopper — they all see a polished version of your product, and a standard evaluator can only report feelings. I see the un-curated trip and diagnose the system behind it: the guide standard behind the guide, the itinerary logic behind the pacing, the operational decision behind the moment that went wrong.
After the Diagnosis
The diagnostic hands you data, insight, and a prioritized read. Execution is yours to own — take the findings to your team, or keep me involved wherever it helps:
The findings show whether the lift is with individual guides, a product line or region, or the training program itself — and I help build it.
Tweaks to systems, workflows, and communication that improve efficiency and performance — usually surfaced directly by the diagnostic.
From subtle itinerary shifts to a full rebuild — adjusting the components that hold your guest experience back.
Does what your marketing promises match what the field delivers? I review how your trips are sold — web and print — against what guests actually get.
A review of sales calls and chats: does the trip being sold match the experience being given?
What It's Worth
This isn't a feeling — it's a measured relationship. Durable improvements compound: hopeful repeat bookings become lasting loyalty, and loyal guests become the advocates who sell for you. Decades of research put numbers on that climb.
5–9%
more revenue per +1 star
A one-star rating increase drives 5–9% more revenue for independent operators.Harvard Business School / Yelp study
+25–95%
profit from +5% retention
A 5% lift in customer retention increases profit by 25–95%.Bain & Company / Harvard Business Review
~270%
higher purchase likelihood
Displaying just five reviews can raise purchase likelihood ~270% — the effect is larger on higher-priced trips.Northwestern Spiegel Research Center
Move the slider to your revenue for one trip, stay, or product line. The estimate uses a deliberately conservative rating-driven lift — the kind a diagnostic routinely uncovers.
Estimated annual upside
$30,000
recurring — every year the improvement holds
Illustrative, using conservative published multipliers — directional, not a guarantee. A diagnostic sizes the real opportunity with your numbers. The point: even a modest, durable lift tends to dwarf the cost of finding it.
Product Build
Sometimes the answer isn't fixing a trip — it's building the right one. Research, design, costing, and field-tested logistics: take on the whole scope together, or just the stages where you need a boost.
The Process
Five stages take a trip from idea to launch. I can own the full scope, or slot into the stages where your team needs depth.
What do you want to build, and why? Where does it fit in your portfolio — a new version of an existing trip, or a whole new revenue source?
We dig into the idea: what you've built and run before, what worked and what didn't, what the competition is doing — and we shape the plan.
A detailed itinerary, initial costing models, and the yield forecast needed to hit your revenue and profit goals.
Out from behind the desk to verify the logistics: dry runs, trip flow, optimized timings, supplier and DMC meetings — adjusting the build until the details deliver.
Final launch specs, contracting and costings locked, and the differentiators your sales and marketing teams need to sell it well.
The Edge
Guide, trainer, product & operations director, owner. Most leaders in this industry have held several of those seats — my edge is having held all of them, and pairing that whole-system view with an obsessive eye for detail and fast pattern recognition. It lets me trace one soft feedback score through the guide, the itinerary, and the promise that sold it — and tell you whether you're looking at a one-off or a system.
In the field
13 years leading trips for Contiki — a multi-time top-performing guide by client feedback, 300+ days a year in the field across the US & Canada. 7+ years as an owner-operator photo guide on multiple continents.
Raising the standard
Lead Trainer at The Travel Corporation's Tour Manager Training School — guides I trained 15+ years ago are still top performers there today. Guide and program training initiatives at Nat Hab; photo-guide training at my own companies.
Behind the scenes
Director of Product & Operations at Natural Habitat Adventures — voted a top tour operator by Travel + Leisure (2025) and top-10 by USA Today (2026). Supervised operations teams at The Travel Corporation / Contiki, and helped build the foundation of Nat Hab's photography-trip revenue arm.
Owning the outcome
Founder of Photo Nomads and David Gaiz Photography — designing, costing, selling, and personally operating bespoke photo-adventure trips across multiple continents, including trips built for Sony and Phase One.
The Equation Behind the Results
For Investors
I help private equity and investors see what a travel business is really made of — then help build the value the thesis depends on.
Before you invest
An operator's read of the things a data room won't show: product quality and demand resilience, the real delivery model, supplier and key-person concentration, scalability, and the risks hiding in how the trips actually run.
Deliverable An investment-grade report with a clear risk rating.
After you invest
The same hands-on help I give any operator — fixing delivery, standardizing guides, re-contracting suppliers, rebuilding products — aimed squarely at turning the diligence findings into EBITDA.
Deliverable A prioritized value-creation plan, then the execution.
The Photography Niche
The travel side is only half the toolkit. I'm a working wildlife, landscape, and travel photographer — published by Reuters, The Washington Post, BBC, and Sony — and I've built photography travel at every scale: my own company, Photo Nomads; the foundation of the photography program at Natural Habitat Adventures; and bespoke trips for Phase One and Sony.
The Opportunity
Photo trips split between two camps: tour operators who add photography departures but lack the photography depth, and photographers who run trips but lack the operational depth. I've spent my career on both sides. If you run adventure, luxury, or small-group travel, you already have the teams, systems, and supplier relationships a photography line needs — what's missing is the photography depth: the product design, the guides, the training, and the sales enablement. That's what I bring.
Your existing teams, operations, structures, and supplier relationships — no second company required.
Wherever you lack the photography expertise, guides, sales knowledge, or training — I come in to teach, build, and enable.
A photo-centric stream that draws high-value guests and feeds repeat bookings, advocacy, and margin.
Fair Questions
The questions sharp operators actually ask — and how I think about them.
Major issues aren't a prerequisite for growth, and oftentimes guests who had a good time won't air minor grievances. "Fine" is where excellence, margin, and greatness can quietly leak.
Not at all. The same diagnostic applies to safari camps, boutique lodges, and hotels just as it does to multi-day trips. Anywhere guests have an experience worth protecting, the method holds — the language shifts from "departure" to "stay," but the lens is the same.
I'm not a replacement — I'm a neutral outside vantage. Your team is excellent and consumed by running today's trips. "It's in the job description" isn't the same as "it's getting done." They do forty things; I do one, with fresh, every-seat eyes.
It protects the sample — it doesn't surveil a person. The findings are written at the system level (standards, process, design), never as blame. It's standard practice in hospitality, an overt version is always available, and you control entirely how it's framed to your team.
I deliberately operate only a couple of photography trips a year — enough to stay sharp as a guide, operator, and product builder, and never more. Growing that business isn't my goal; helping yours grow is.
There's no guarantee on revenue — execution is yours to own. What I guarantee is clarity: a specific, prioritized read of where the gains are, from an experienced outside set of eyes.
Tell me a bit about what you're running. I'll reach out within 24 hours — or, if I'm in the field without service, as soon as I'm back in range.
