Why Tourism Businesses Stay Busy but Struggle to Make a Profit – An Interview with Anissa Renae Kunda
Anissa Renae Kunda spent 35 years building Cape York Motorcycle Adventures and learning, often the hard way, what it takes to turn a great tourism experience into a sustainable business. Today, as the founder of Always Rising and the T.O.U.R. Framework, she works with small and medium tourism operators on the business behind the experience.
In this interview, Renae shares what 35 years inside tourism taught her about profitability, ownership, sustainability, resilience and the decisions operators need to make before a busy business becomes an exhausting one. Her perspective is practical: a full booking calendar means very little if the business underneath it is not working.
Anissa Renae Kunda, Tourism Business Strategist
After 35 years in tourism, what led you to start helping other operators build stronger, more sustainable businesses?
I realised I'd spent 35 years learning things that many tourism operators are still trying to figure out alone. Cape York Motorcycle Adventures began because my partner had a passion for motorcycles, adventure and Cape York.
It gave us an incredible life. He was out living his dream in nature with new friends every week, while I had the flexibility to raise our kids at home and never miss a single sporting match. Like a lot of tourism businesses, passion came first and business education came later. We were very good at delivering the experience, but that did not automatically make us good at every part of running the business behind it.
Over the years, I learned about pricing, compliance, cash flow, staffing, marketing, sustainability, customer experience and leadership because I had to. Some lessons were exciting. Others were expensive, confronting or frightening.
In my search for better ways, I started seeing the same patterns in other operators. They were exceptional at what they delivered, but often exhausted, underpaid or unsure what to fix first. That is why I created the T.O.U.R. Framework. I want operators to benefit from lessons that took me decades to earn.
Looking back at Cape York Motorcycle Adventures, what was one business decision that changed the way you operated?
One of the most important changes came from a period when we discovered how dangerous it was to be strong operationally but weak in the knowledge surrounding the operation. There was a time when not understanding a permit return properly contributed to a situation serious enough to put us in court.
It was a wake-up call. I could no longer rely on being busy, experienced or good at running tours. I needed to understand the language of the business: compliance, regulation, documentation and responsibility.
Instead of retreating from it, I went back and learned. That period eventually contributed to us pursuing Eco Certification, and in 2006, Cape York Motorcycle Adventures became the first motorcycle tour company to achieve that certification.
What changed was my mindset. I stopped assuming that being competent at the experience meant I understood the entire business. That was the first pillar: Truth. That distinction now sits at the heart of what I teach: being brilliant at the tour is not the same as owning the business behind it.
Your T.O.U.R. Framework begins with Truth. What do tourism business owners often find hardest to acknowledge about their businesses?
Usually, it is not that something is wrong. Most owners already feel that. The difficult part is identifying exactly what is wrong without explaining it away.
Tourism gives us plenty of legitimate external pressures: weather, seasons, fuel prices, staff shortages, commissions, changing travel patterns and economic conditions. All of those things matter. But if every problem is caused by something outside the business, there is very little left for the owner to change.
Truth asks a different question: what is actually happening here? Are you profitable or simply busy? Are you paying yourself properly? Do you know what each experience genuinely costs to deliver? Are your bookings coming from several channels, or are you dependent on one? Is your business creating the life you intended, or has it quietly become the thing controlling your life?
Those questions can be uncomfortable. But I’ve learned that the numbers, the systems and the customer experience are not judging you. They are giving you information. You cannot fix what you will not face.
Why do some adventure tourism operators struggle financially even when their tours are fully booked?
Because capacity or occupancy and profitability are not the same thing. A tourism operator can be fully booked and still be underpricing every departure.
It happens very easily. Operators look at competitors, choose a price that feels reasonable and then get busy delivering. But the obvious costs are only part of the equation. There are costs for insurance, maintenance, vehicles, equipment, permits, commissions, administration, marketing, preparation time, cancellations, seasonal downtime and, very importantly, the owner's wage.
If those costs are not properly built into the price, volume can actually make the problem worse. You end up doing more tours, working longer hours and creating more wear on equipment without necessarily improving the financial position of the business.
That is why I encourage operators to stop asking, "What will people pay?" as their first pricing question. Start with: "What does this experience genuinely cost us to deliver well, including paying the owner properly?" Once you know that number, pricing becomes a business decision instead of a guess.
Cape York Motorcycle Adventures began its ecotourism certification journey in 2006. How has that commitment over many years influenced your understanding of business sustainability?
It taught me that sustainability is much broader than environmental practice. Our environmental commitment mattered enormously, and maintaining certification over many years required us to continually examine how we operated. But the longer I stayed in business, the more I understood that a tourism business must be sustainable on several levels.
The environment has to be protected. The community relationship has to be respected. The experience has to remain valuable to the guest. The finances have to work. The people running the business have to be able to keep doing it.
If the owner is physically exhausted, financially underrewarded and unable to step away, I do not consider that a truly sustainable business, no matter how strong the environmental credentials are. That became one of the biggest lessons of my career.
Sustainability is not a project you finish or a badge you collect. It is a way of making decisions. The real question is: can this business continue creating value without consuming the very people, places and resources that make it possible?
What should a small tourism operator examine first when bookings are strong but profits remain disappointing?
Start with the numbers behind one booking. Not the annual turnover. Not the amount sitting in the bank today. Take one core product and work out what it actually costs to deliver.
Include the costs that are easy to forget: booking commissions, preparation time, cleaning, fuel, maintenance, insurance allocation, equipment replacement, administration, marketing and the owner's time. Then look at what is left. That calculation can be confronting because many operators discover they have been subsidising the experience with their own unpaid labour.
After that, I would examine three things: pricing, channel mix and capacity. If 25% or 30% of a booking disappears through a distribution channel, understand exactly what that channel is costing you. If increasing volume requires more staff, equipment or owner hours, calculate that too.
Turnover is a vanity number if very little reaches the owner. The question I want an operator to answer is simple: after everyone else has been paid, is this business paying you properly for the risk, time and responsibility you carry?
How can tourism businesses run by their owners become less dependent on their founders without losing the personal touch customers value?
The first step is recognising that the personal touch and the owner doing everything are not the same thing. Customers may love your personality, your story or the way you welcome them. That does not mean you personally need to answer every email, process every booking, clean every vehicle or remember every operational detail.
I would start by separating what genuinely requires the owner from what has simply always been done by the owner. Write things down. Build simple procedures. Document the guest journey. Decide what "good" looks like at each point and teach other people how to deliver it.
Then protect the moments where the founder adds the greatest value. Maybe that is welcoming guests. Maybe it is storytelling. Maybe it is designing experiences, building partnerships or personally checking in after a significant trip.
The goal is not to remove the owner from the business. It is to stop making the owner the operating system. A business becomes stronger when its standards can be repeated without requiring one person to remember everything.
In Always Rising, you explore the realities of building a business through setbacks. What has that journey taught you about resilience?
I used to think resilience meant being able to keep going. After 35 years in business, I think that definition is incomplete. Sometimes resilience is continuing. Sometimes it is changing direction. Sometimes it is admitting that something you have done for years no longer works.
Business will test you. We had setbacks, regulatory challenges, difficult seasons, financial pressure, and decisions that looked very different in hindsight. There were times when the easier response would have been to blame circumstances or simply work harder.
But working harder is not always resilient. Sometimes it is avoidance. The most useful question became: what is this situation trying to teach me that I do not yet know? That changes a setback from something that simply happened to you into information you can use.
That is what Always Rising means to me now. It is not relentless positivity. It is the willingness to look at what happened, take responsibility for the part that belongs to you, learn from it and rise with more wisdom than you had before.
What is one change you believe every small tourism business owner should make to build a more profitable and sustainable future?
Create protected time to work on the business rather than only in it. Tourism operators are very good at filling their days. There is always another booking, maintenance job, message, roster problem or guest request waiting. The danger is that an owner can spend an entire year operating the business without ever properly examining it.
Put regular time in the calendar when your job is not to deliver the experience. Your job is to look at the business. Review the numbers. Look at where bookings come from. Read your guest feedback. Examine your pricing. Ask what keeps going wrong. Decide what needs to stop, what could be delegated and what deserves investment.
Even a few protected hours each week can change the quality of the decisions you make. I learned this much later than I should have: busy is not the same as building.
The strongest operators learn to move between both roles. They can deliver a remarkable experience today while still building the business that needs to exist tomorrow. With the right foundation and clear insight, you can transform your hard work into a sustainable, profitable business that truly serves your life. Nothing would make me happier than to help other operators build that. Email me at welcome@anissarenae.com
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