TORONTO — All it took was for one backpacking trip in Asia to inspire Bruce Poon Tip to change the face of travel.

Following that fateful trip over 30 years ago, the then 22-year-old Poon Tip started G Adventures in 1990 with just two maxed-out credit cards and a clear vision to bridge the divide between backpacking and mainstream travel.

Fast forward 33 years and G Adventures is now the world’s largest small-group adventure travel company, hosting 200,000 travellers in 2019, offering more than 750 tours, and travelling to 100 countries across all seven continents.

Though decades have passed since the company’s early days, Poon Tip’s passion for community outreach and socio-economic change through travel has never waned. In 2003, he founded G Adventures’ non-profit partner, the Planeterra Foundation, to ensure travellers’ dollars benefit underserved communities around the world.

He’s also worked with organizations like the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) to help develop more than 100 community development projects, authored the New York Times bestseller ‘Looptail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinventing Business’ in 2013 and the ‘instabook’ ‘Unlearn: The Year the Earth Stood Still’ at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and most recently executive produced the documentary film, ‘The Last Tourist,’ which empowers audiences to change the way they travel for the better.

Having accomplished and seen so much in his 30-plus years in travel, we reached out to Poon Tip as part of Travelweek’s 50th anniversary celebrations to get his thoughts on how the industry has changed – either for the better or not – since the early 90s, and whether he thinks that backpacking stint through Asia over three decades ago has paid off in the long run.

Travelweek: Which decade would you say was the most successful for the travel industry? 

Poon Tip: “For me, between 2005 and 2015 were the glory days of travel. It was after SARS and also after 9/11. A lot of businesses didn’t make it during those times, and it seemed like we’d gotten over the dot-com bubble, which was also something that really affected the industry. We hit our stride as an industry in a new era and fuel was cheap, as were flights. So there was a great expansion of airlift during that time. It’s during this period that travel agents truly became travel professionals.”

Travelweek: What are some events/innovations that you think changed the course of the travel industry, either in a positive or negative way?

 Poon Tip: “You’d have to say social media, starting around 2007, followed by Google, which launched a bit earlier, around 2005. Social and search really changed how people search and how they connect with brands. It created the greatest opportunities for brands and companies, as no matter how small or large they were they had the same free tools to create intimate relationships with customers.”

Travelweek: What would you say is the single most important tool/innovation in the last 50 years for the travel agent community? 

Poon Tip: “The Internet was probably the most important innovation to shift the dial in travel, besides the invention of the plane. The Internet wasn’t necessarily a positive change in the beginning, but ultimately it increased the speed of communication, which was revolutionary in a global industry like travel. I can’t think of anything that was quite as revolutionary for the travel industry, because it changed everything when it came to the ease and speed of business.”

Travelweek: If you could go back in time, knowing what you know now about travel, what would you say to your younger self just starting out in the travel industry?

Poon Tip: “I would say, ‘stop the person who started the ‘last minute’ club’. That’s what I would do. Because that changed the patterns of how people booked trips. Before that time, people thought to book trips further in advance for a cheaper price. The last-minute club [concept] changed the thinking to ‘wait until the last minute and your trip gets cheaper.’ It changed the booking patterns and, consequently, the course of the travel industry forever after that.”

Travelweek: After first envisioning and launching G Adventures way back in 1990, do you think the company is exactly where you had hoped it would be today, in 2023?

 Poon Tip: “When we first started out in 1990 and I started out as a young entrepreneur, I just couldn’t even envisage becoming a multinational company and a global brand. They didn’t teach me that in business school or anywhere that I studied. So it has far exceeded my expectations of what I originally thought we could be in 1990, absolutely.”

For all the latest product news from G Adventures see gadventures.com. In the weeks and months to come watch for more interviews and memories marking Travelweek’s 50th anniversary. Plus, try your luck with our contest, ‘It Happened This Week’, featuring a new headline (and a new chance to win!) every week from Travelweek’s 50 years of travel industry news coverage.