Adventure Collection

A conversation with Bill and Pam Bryan, founders of Off the Beaten Path.

DG:  How did Off the Beaten Path get started?

BB:  We started in a very different way from most of our colleagues. We were not in the travel or high adventure business. We had a passionate commitment around the environment and the Rocky Mountain West, and wanted to share that passion and commitment with friends and family.

When I was in undergraduate school I wanted to go on to graduate school and work on the interface between people and the environment. I was told by my advisor at the University of New Hampshire that whatever I had to do, or whatever I had to sell to do it, I should go to the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources. So I did. I got a Master’s in Environmental Education, and then a Doctorate in Natural Resource Planning, and came out with a real commitment to social change. That was one thread.

Another thread was that in 1965, I actually led my first trip. It was a fly-fishing trip to Central Idaho with teenage boys. I was working for Vagabond Ranch in Granby, Colorado, and they offered these 11-day trips, mainly for Eastern kids; in fact, we caravanned from Connecticut. Anyway, we just had a ball. That trip imprinted on me the notion that I had to figure out some way to make that kind of experience a part of the rest of my life.

After graduate school I got a grant from the Whole Earth Catalog to live in Montana for a year and literally “work with cowboys and Indians on energy issues.”  That was 1972. The year raced by, and by the end I knew I had to stay, and I created a management consulting organization for cause-oriented non-profits in the Northern Rockies, Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. The environmental movement was just starting to hit the West and we essentially set up almost every citizen’s organization dealing with the environment as well as all sorts of other social interests, human rights, women’s rights, new agriculture interests, in the Northern Rockies.

The organization was called the Northern Rockies Action Group. I founded it and led it for ten years. We were very successful at what we did. So we started doing work out of the region, mainly with environmental groups in Colorado. Then we started working with national groups. For example, we helped with the development of the Trust for Public Land, and did a management critique for The Wilderness Society that ended up helping their new president chart a very successful future for the organization after some difficult times.

By the late ‘70s, it was obvious that if I was to really continue in that profession, I needed to leave the Rockies and go to either the East Coast or the West Coast, because my most interesting consulting jobs were there. Well, Pam and I decided at that time to stay in the Rockies. We have a lot of allegiance here, and we thought: We know the Northern Rockies really well, and we’ve been in a position where we’re constantly sharing it with our friends (and in my case with a lot of funders for the Northern Rockies Action Group); maybe we should do something in the for-profit world, and in a sector of the economy that has less of an impact on the environment than more extractive-oriented industries. So we said, let’s do something in the world of travel.

One of the most telling moments was when I was doing some work for a foundation that was wanting to fund boom and bust communities including Butte and Anaconda, Montana. In Butte, the mines had closed, and the smelter had closed in Anaconda. The Anaconda city fathers told me that what they really needed was money to buy the smokestack, which had been the world’s largest smokestack, because they wanted to turn it into a tourist attraction.

And I thought: There’s something deeply wrong with this. Here we are surrounded by all this incredible beauty and yet people think that visitors will be attracted to Montana to see the world’s largest smokestack. That bothered me. Moreover, Pam’s family wanted to have a family reunion at a dude ranch. Pam and I tried to find a ranch that was the right one, but there was not a consumer rating system. We finally found what we thought was right – but it wasn’t. So we said to ourselves, maybe there’s a business where, with the information we know about this region, about vendors, and our own experiences, we could reward our customers with our “insiders’ advice” and reward the suppliers who are providing really good experiences/services with our customers. One day, I was having lunch with a good friend from California named Albert Wells, who was a philanthropist/entrepreneur. I told him about this idea, and he said, “Are you serious about it?”  I said, “Yes, I am.”  He came back to my office and spent the next hour scratching out on a piece of paper what became the beginning plan for Off the Beaten Path.   

DG:  And that was when?

BB:  That was in July of 1985. Albert then said, “I'm going to put in the first money on this. But if I’m going to do this, let’s do it right.” And from there he went back to the Bay Area and found both a market research firm called Tony Wolfe and Associates and an individual who was great at branding, positioning, named Jerry Mander. Jerry and his partner came up with the name Off the Beaten Path, and with our initial marketing strategy. We incorporated in 1986, and had our first clients that year. But they were friends of ours or friends of the market research firm. They were willing to help us work the kinks out of our business. It was in 1987 that the doors were fully opened. And off we went from there.

PB:  Both of us came at this business from a non-traditional background, with no background in the travel industry or in the “for-profit” sector. But Bill and I were imprinted in the same ways in terms of caring passionately about the American West. I grew up in the Midwest, but my family owned a dude ranch in Wyoming on the Continental Divide with several other partners. In the ‘50s I had the good fortune of spending my summers there, at 9,000 feet, riding and fishing and spending time in that wild country surrounding Yellowstone. When we would go home again to Illinois, we all were just like – “Yuck! It’s hot and smelly…” So as a child I decided then and there why live somewhere you don’t want to go home to? 

That experience of being in Wyoming definitely affected my life choices. The Western world and its mountains were always a draw for me whether exploring in the summer or skiing in the winter. I also studied Environmental Studies in college and was also interested in the interface between people and the environment. I got drawn in the late ‘60s to Alaska, where the future of the last frontier was being debated as the Alaska pipeline and Native land claim settlement were being settled. I thought those were fascinating public policy issues, so I went up to Alaska, lived there for three years, worked on public policy issues affecting land --

BB:  -- and built her own log cabin --

PB:  -- and my last summer there I happened to work at a place called Camp Denali, which was kind of the first eco-lodge, out in the far end of Denali National Park. I shared the park with the guests, took them on day hikes, did natural history interpretation, and I worked in the office. In terms of the travel business, it was a great experience for me, though I didn’t know it at the time. I met a woman who was there as a guest with her mother. She was the regional rep for the Sierra Club, working in the Northern Plains, based out of the same town, ironically, where our family’s dude ranch was located in Wyoming. She offered me a job as her assistant, and in January ’74 I moved down to Wyoming.

I was working with various people around the region who were building their lives on the land; they were farmers or ranchers, or fishing lodge operators or dude ranch owners or horse packers or river outfitters. They all shared a love of the country, and they knew that their businesses depended on the health of the landscape around them. I worked a bit in politics as well, went back to D.C. for a couple of years to work on the big Alaska parks and wildlife refuge bill, but came back to Wyoming. Bill and I were married in 1982.

One has to be creative to stay in Montana (especially in the mid ‘80s). We created Off the Beaten Path because we believed it could become a vehicle to drive healthy economic growth in the region and challenge us professionally.

We started with the Northern Rockies as our core because that’s where we had all the contacts. We built this business initially with a mailing list that we developed from our family and friends each giving us names of 25 people they thought would be interested. Since both of us grew up in other parts of the country, we had a good list of 2,500 to 3,000 names. The business started through friends of friends and friends of family. We also did a three-quarter page black and white ad in the New Yorker and other advertising. But the very personal approach of the business built on that foundation of “being the friend you wished you had here who will steer you to the right places,” carries on today in the highly personal service Off the Beaten Path offers.

DG:  In that first year, 1987, how many trips did you run, and where did they go?

BB:  There must have been a couple of hundred trips – all “custom” trips.

PB:  That’s right. We did not offer group trips in the beginning. We were in the business of providing reliable information to independent travelers for a fee. We would put a trip together for you, let you avoid a travel and error vacation, and we would charge a fee. In ’87, no one was charging a fee for travel information.

Mind you, this was a very low fee compared to what it is now; it wasn’t a fee on which you could make a business. But it was a fee. Our whole service was designing trips from scratch. We really pioneered, I believe, the true notion of what custom travel is all about. It’s not taking over a group trip itinerary for yourself. It was “Now, what do you want to do out here, and where do you want to go, and what kind of hotels do you like?  OK. We’ll weave that together into a trip. And if there’s only two of you, no problem.”

BB:  When we started, we were very clear: We were a custom travel service. We were not a group travel business. So initially we attracted to our mailing list people who even had an aversion to any kind of group travel. They came to us and said, “Here’s who we are, we are not group travelers!” Conde Nast Traveler subsequently called us “the travel shrinks of the West.”

We really wanted to get into the other person’s head about what they wanted to do when they were out here. To this day that is still, I believe, an attribute of this company. Even though 40-45 percent of our business is group travel, 55-60 percent is still custom travel. It’s still somebody calling us up and saying, “We have a family of three kids. Their ages are 10, 12 and 15. It may be the last time as a family that we can travel together because our 15-year-old is going to have a job next summer. The five of us want to come West; this is who we are and this is what we want to do.”  We ask them to fill out a questionnaire to help us get to know them. We want the 10-year-old to be involved in filling out that questionnaire too, not just the father or the mother. That’s what we really became known for, and to this day, close to 50 percent of our business is still families using our custom travel service.

But we also get other custom requests. For example, we got a 68-year-old money manager in New York who said, “I’ve done everything that needs to be done in the world, but I want to create my own trip before I get too old.” We asked, “What’s that?”  And he said, “A fully guided horse trip across the state of Montana.”  It took us a year to help him put that together. It took him 61 days and 715 miles on a horse, but he and his outfitter did it.    

In terms of our story, I think it’s very important that in our very first year we had an interesting development happen. Jerry Mander’s philosophy was: “Let’s spend quite a bit of money on advertising in the right magazines, from Smithsonian to the New Yorker and Travel and Leisure. But you also must have a catalog which shows a prospect calling from the ad, that you’re for real and you’re one of them.” So we created a small catalog, elegant and understated. It had the feel of a little book. This way of operating got the attention of a man by the name of Harry Evans. 

Harry had just started a magazine called Conde Nast Traveler. He called us up after he’d gotten the catalog and we reeled him in, or he reeled us in. We became the Rocky Mountain regional correspondents for Conde Nast Traveler!

This was in ’87, the year the magazine began. We were affiliated with Traveler for the next three years. We did not write stories; we helped filter. A lot of stories about the West passed across their desk and they would pass them on to us and ask, “Is this legitimate or not?” In 1988, they did an issue that focused on the American West; we put that together with them. And as you can imagine, that was very helpful to us.

With our names on their masthead, it was not exactly helpful to us with Travel and Leisure, or Nancy Newhouse at the New York Times, who thought these people are in direct competition with us; we don’t want to give them any credit whatsoever. But all in all, it was a wonderful way to begin. When Conde Nast Traveler decided they had to make money, the regional correspondents were no longer. That opened the door for us to do a lot more work with other travel magazines. Now we have a great working relationship with Travel and Leisure as well as Conde Nast Traveler.

One of the great things about this start was that it made us a legitimate name in the print travel media in New York. That remains to this day, and it’s been very helpful. We don’t do any advertising and haven’t for years. It’s all referrals, direct mail, and print media.

So that’s how we got started: We were a custom travel service. We produced for each custom trip massive – 30-, 40-, 80-page – guidebooks that are still a signature of ours. People view them as their road map, their bible. It represents something we feel strongly about, that if you’re going to travel in an area, you don’t want to be known as a tourist; you want to be known as an informed traveler. We want our travelers, our guests, to know more about the region where they will be traveling before they come than most people do after they’ve left. That is one reason why you don’t see us working worldwide.

DG:  That leads to a question I was going to ask you at some point, so I’ll ask it now: How would you characterize the travelers who take your trips, and what are the hallmarks of the trips that you offer?   

PB:  Our travelers are typically well traveled people in a global sense, but have spent very little, if any, time traveling in their own back yard. So they’re coming to us to help them explore a part of the world they haven’t been to yet. They’ve been to Europe a lot. They’ve probably been to Asia. They more than likely have been to Africa. But they’ve never been to the Americas – they’ve never explored the western edge of the Western Hemisphere.

So that’s fun. We find that our rate of return, in terms of past travelers taking new trips with us and/or referring new travelers to us, is around 65-70 percent in any year.  

Our travelers are avid travelers. They’re well educated. They appreciate personal service and they appreciate quality, but they don’t necessarily equate quality and luxury. In other words, they’re not amenity travelers. They’re more experiential travelers.

DG:  And what would you say are the hallmarks of your trips?

PB: This really started at the very beginning: Because we were charging a fee for our service, we felt we had to create experiences that people couldn’t get on their own. One of the biggest things that people typically can’t get on their own is a connection with local people. When our clients visit Yellowstone, let’s say a family with three kids, they spend at least one day with their own naturalist guide. And that day often is the most memorable day of their trip, because it gets them away from the crowds, and lets them really experience the essence of Yellowstone, not experience Yellowstone the way all the other 2 million visitors are doing it.

We also will tell them in this guidebook that Bill was describing where to stop for ice cream between Jackson and Thermopolis, Wyoming, or who has the best milkshakes. The guidebook will also help them understand what Yellowstone, for example, is all about, what are the issues that it’s facing, so that our travelers can be here and experience it through informed eyes. And I think that makes a real difference. It’s the kind of little insider advice that helps make a trip really different.

BB:  I'd also add: We listen. That’s a hallmark. We offer in-depth/drill-down information and advice. We firmly believe that no matter how great the wildlife or how great the fishing is, half the experience has to do with the interactions you’re having with people on your trip, whether it’s the service they’re providing or the guests that are accompanying you. So for us that cross-cultural, authentic experience is paramount. We’re not interested in sending somebody to a little inn that’s run by somebody from San Diego who’s just there for the summer. We’re interested in having them go to an inn that is run by a local person whose family has been there for a generation or two.  

Another hallmark is that we’re an unseen partner, not only in planning one’s trip, but also during their trip. Our client can get a hold of us at any time; we have a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week on-call service. For a lot of people that is very important, particularly if there’s something uncertain happening at home with loved ones, or a situation where they get to a place and it’s not what they’re looking for.

And then there are our guides. When we first started the business, guides you could retain in the West were for hunting, fishing, backcountry horse trips, or whitewater rafting trips. That was it. We felt that there was more to the West and more interactive experiences one could have with guides than just that. So we really pioneered the whole idea that you could come to the West and have your own naturalist guide for a day in Yellowstone or Glacier or the Grand Canyon. Or if you were going through an Indian reservation, you could have a tribal member spend a day or a half a day with you as well. We really pushed that opportunity with our guests. It’s hard to believe that there weren’t those resources available to the traveler twenty years ago. Today they’re readily available, and a lot of other companies are incorporating them into their programs as well. We are very proud of the fact that we helped start that cottage industry.

DG:  That leads to another question I was going to ask: How has the company evolved since those early years, and how have your trip offerings evolved in the past 25 years or so?

PB:  Two big things. One, in about 1991, we started offering some – though very few -- group departures. The World Wildlife Fund came to us and said, “We’d love you to do some trips for our members.”  There were already affinity trips in the market, but this was the first time we had stepped into that world. At the same time, Bill and I offered our first group trip -- the founders leading a hiking group in the Canadian Rockies. This was our first experience with group travel, and we were surprised, when you have a small group of ten to fourteen people, how much fun a group of adults can have, sharing experiences in the outdoors, hiking trails, and exploring new areas together.

In ’91 we started doing group travel, and we also started expanding, first to the Southwest, and then to Alaska. By 1992, we were working the swath following the Rocky Mountain chain, from the Brooks Range all the way down through to the Mexican border. Then, gradually, we kept expanding, but this has always been client-driven: They’ve explored this territory with us, so now they want us to do the same thing for them in the Pacific Northwest or Patagonia. Last year we launched programs in several other South and Central American countries.  

Our goal has always been to have a depth of regional knowledge and a focus. We believe our regional focus gives us a cutting edge. It just takes time to develop the knowledge we want to have before we expand into a new country, but we are fulfilling our goal of representing the Americas in depth.

BB:  We’re evolving into being the experts of the western half of the Western Hemisphere.

PB:  And we think it’s the adventurous half of the Western Hemisphere.   BB:  We’ve evolved geographically, and we’ve evolved into the group business as well. As we said earlier, we didn’t do group travel; today we would like our business to be half and half and are close to achieving that business goal.   

PB:  Yes, when you look at our 2007 catalog, guided group journeys appear to dominate. That’s been an evolution in marketing, feeling like we really needed to promote these guided journeys. In our 2008 catalogue, private custom journeys are taking, again, a higher profile. We find that it’s a hard balancing act. Most of the referrals that come to us are asking for custom travel, while new clients are signing up for group trips. Therefore, we have to find the balance in our marketing as well.

DG:  What do you think are the challenges facing your company individually and the larger adventure travel industry these days?

BB:  One is just the business challenge:  What’s the appropriate gross revenue level for a small business like ours that does not compromise the integrity of the values of who we are and why we started in the first place and how we want to continue in the future?  So how do we get to a revenue level that makes this a really viable business going forward? If we suddenly were three or four times bigger than we are now, would we have compromised some of our values in terms of why customers came to us in the first place?  Can we get to be twice as big as we are now, be comfortably profitable and not compromise our values? Yes, but that’s a challenge. Another challenge is to be successful focusing on one diverse region, rather than operating all over the world.

PB:  And still compete.

BB:  And still compete. 

That’s something we’re constantly wrestling with. I’m probably the most conservative person in this area, because I go back to the whole value of really knowing an area and really getting to know your client or your guest, so that you can marry the two and create something that goes beyond anyone’s expectations. The biggest challenge is to maintain what I believe is the integrity of why we started and to ensure that our operating practices embrace the principles of responsible travel.

Here’s another challenge we’re facing: I view tourism as basically an extractive industry. It takes more than it gives back to the environment and to the people of the community in which it interacts. And the reason for that is that tourism generally has been based primarily on volume with relatively low margins. So how does that all get changed going forward?  How does the adventure travel industry become less extractive?  I cringe when I see some colleagues say that they are going to be carbon neutral by such and such a date, or they’re going to be fully sustainable by such and such a date. I presume they are very serious and committed to do that, but technically, I’m not sure that’s possible -- which could then open one to be questioned, even though what is stated is well intended.

The important point is that we’re working as aggressively as possible to try to minimize our carbon footprint and to try to be as sustainable as possible. But claiming that we’re going to be carbon neutral is almost a “greenwashing” comment. I don’t think one can be carbon neutral. I want everyone in the travel business to try to get there, and I want it to be a priority. I want tourism to be far more sustainable than it is. But a huge challenge before us today is, can that really happen? Can we stay in business and be sustainable and at the same time be affordable?    

This brings me to one of our big challenges, which is the true cost of travel. I was raised thinking that vacations and travel were supposed to be done on as tight a budget as possible. When I backpacked, I bought my food hundreds of miles away at a chain grocery store, not at the mercantile in Stanley, Idaho. I certainly didn’t patronize the local motel or fee-based private campground before or after my backcountry experience. And I didn’t contribute to a voluntary trail maintenance program. I traveled “on the cheap”! I was “an extractor” not thinking about the true costs of my travel footprint. If you’re going to try to make tourism and adventure travel less extractive, we all have to understand what are the true costs involved. That is a huge challenge for all of us. People want to travel as cheaply as possible and get as much value in the process. And at the end of the day, who gets exploited the most? 

The environment, the local communities in which we’re traveling, and the local economies which we often are either giving lip service to, or totally ignoring. Factoring in the true costs make adventure travel and travel in general more expensive. Are our travelers willing to pay what the true costs are?

PB: I have a little more to add: I think that an underlying mission of Off the Beaten Path is to create travel experiences that are life-changing. And I think that that gets harder and harder to do as the world becomes more homogenized. It’s harder to step out of your everyday life if, when you come to Montana, it’s beginning to look more and more like – or less appealing than -- Vermont, for example. Around here the open spaces are disappearing as subdivisions pop up everywhere. The West of our youth is really changing. It’s less exotic, less remote. And I think this can be said for world cultures and wild places all over the globe. I believe this homogenization of culture and landscape, or communities almost, is a threat to the travel industry just as it’s a threat to other things we hold dear, all of us. And it’s hard for us to know how to manage this; it goes back a little bit to Bill’s point: To some extent we’re part of the problem, but it’s also hard to know how we change that.

Another challenge in this age of the Internet is selling travelers on the value of using our service, whether for group or custom travel, rather than doing it for oneself on the internet. I think all of our fellow members in the Adventure Collection face this issue.   

DG: I have just one more question. Looking back on what you and your company have done, what gives you the greatest satisfaction or what are you most proud of? 

PB:  Great question!  Whether through our custom service or our group trips, I believe we have facilitated experiences that have lifelong effects on people’s lives. We believe that vacations aren’t a luxury, but are a real tonic for health – that your time is very precious. So you want to make the best of that time.  

Off the Beaten Path may not have made a lot of money over the years, but we have created these incredible experiences for people. In many cases these are clearly life-changing experiences, and sometimes the ways are more subtle. But either way, we hear this time and again.  

I also think we’ve enabled some small, independent operators in our regions to survive and even thrive. We’ve brought them guests that they would never otherwise have found on their own, and that’s enriched their lives and made their businesses more successful – and enriched our travelers’ lives as well. When you look at it this way, this is a very, very rewarding business – and we’re lucky to have made our living at it over the past 22 years. 

*****

For more information on Off the Beaten Path, click here. for more information on other members of the Adventure Collection, visit adventurecollection.com.