Introducing The Founders, a new finance series by Azzet, showcasing the inspiring journeys of visionary entrepreneurs who turned ideas into thriving businesses. Dive into captivating stories and insightful interviews with founders and CEOs, as they share their challenges, triumphs, and industry insights in this ongoing series. Stay inspired with Azzet.
From humble beginnings helping backpackers on their travels, Airguides has evolved into providing luxury travel experiences. It focuses on sustainability and making the world a better place.
Airguides is a tourism company that allows customers to have unique experiences, like swimming with polar bears and sailing around Antarctica. These experiences are curated by the company alongside adventurers and travellers passionate about sustainability and storytelling.
Co-founder, Paul Rowsthorn said every adventurer they work with strives to work towards sustainability and creates positive that are positive for the local environment and communities they operate in.
This includes their safari in Tanzania they plan to launch soon with Chris Fallows and costs around USD$23,000 (A$35,453).
Rowsthorn and his co-founder Bibi Jellema decided to partner with Fellows as his mission to buy land for endangered animals aligns with their business values.
“Chris Fallows is a new one that we’re about to push out; he dedicates his life to using his photography to earn money to buy conservation land for endangered wildlife in South Africa,” Rowsthorn told Azzet.
“He needs to be very careful of his brand and who he partners with, so he can’t partner with a traditional tourism operator. But with us, we are an extension of what he’s doing.”
How it all started
The seeds of the idea were planted deep in Borneo jungles when Rowsthorn and Jellema met David Attenborough while on an Orangutang photography tour in 2014.
“We went into this big bat cave and David Attenborough was there and he was filming at the time,” he said.
“We just started talking about how people do all this stuff online, but the real stuff is what David Attenborough is doing.”
A couple of years later, Rowsthorn and Jellema quit their jobs and launched Airguides in 2014.
In the early days
Paul said the business started with trial and error. This was because they had to learn the harsh truths about operating a tourism company, especially when competing with pre-existing trusted businesses.
“It’s this real challenge of how do you build the business model when you’re coming into an industry that’s very established, and generally your basic stuff like Google and Facebook ad spend is incredibly expensive,” he said.
“We got a lot of brutal feedback on our journey that led us to think: 'If that’s how the tourism industry has always been, how do we flip it over and come up with something new?'”
After around three years of not earning much money, the tides turned for Airguides when they began partnering with photographers in New Zealand. This gave them a leg up in the industry.
“We designed our business model for this to be a competitive advantage for us,” he said.
“By partnering with adventurers, we were able to flip that around and leverage their audiences and sell directly that way.”
Taking a turn
Just as they were gaining momentum in 2019 and gearing up to launch trips within Australia, COVID struck, flipping their entire business model upside down.
For years during COVID, the couple was forced to turn into a marketing business. They won international awards for their campaigns for Tourism Tasmania.
“We just went well we can either give up or we can keep fighting and we went back to the drawing board and realised we had this network of amazing photographers,” he said.
“We managed to get through COVID through being a marketing company with top-of-the-line photographers.”
Rowsthorn said they were also stuck in limbo during this time as COVID restrictions constantly changed.
“Every time we thought we had control of a trip and we’d sell it out, COVID would happen and the borders would get shut again, this happened three to four times,” he said.
After spending a while focusing on marketing, they eventually returned to creating memorable trips alongside inspiring photographers.
What the future holds
Airguides is partnered with around 35 photographers, with eight to 10 having products with the travel company.
Rowsthorn said in the future he hopes they can expand the number of photographers they work with to create more experiences for travellers.
“Things are going quite well for us now. It's now at a point where I have a goal to get 100 of the world's best adventurers on our platform,” he said.
“We want to be the place to go for the best adventure wildlife holidays of any company.”
As well as goals to expand, Rowsthorn said he hopes the future brings more revenue to back to their photographers.
“We are a for-purpose brand, but we don't shy away from pushing as much revenue as we can to our photographers and empowering them to do more,” he said.
“Every one of these photographers that you speak to is out there working with NGOs and out there helping clean plastic out of the ocean, every photographer we speak to is trying to make the world a better place.
“Our responsibility is to get as many of these photographers on and help them be awesome.”
