Adam Torres and Sibu Szymanowska discuss immersive travel.
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Show Notes:
The Hybrid Tours is a travel company that combines fun and culturally immersive experiences. In this episode, Adam Torres and Sibu Szymanowska, Co-Founder of The Hybrid Tours, explore The Hybrid Tours and traveling.
About The Hybrid Tours
The Hybrid Tours is a travel company that focuses on building connections between locals and travelers. Cultural immersion is at the core of every one of their trips – you’ll travel in a way that you’ve never done before by learning about history from people who have lived it. The best classroom out there is the school of travel.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today’s guest is Sibu Szymanowska, and she is the co founder over at The Hybrid Tours.
Sibu, welcome to the show. Hi, Adam. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here. All right, Sibu, so we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite topics here, travel. I’m normally living vicariously through my guests, but I know you’re doing some interesting things over at the hybrid tour.
And really, I want to get into your concept of redefining travel and what that means. So I guess just to get us kicked off here, I mean, how’d you come up with this concept, the hybrid tours? Like where’d that come from? Sure. So, basically, I’ve gathered around two decades of travel experience, whether it’s on my own, through groups, et cetera.
And as the years go on, I feel like the travel industry is becoming a little bit saturated. It’s difficult to find authentic experiences. I mean, travel has never been. As affordable and as accessible as it is today. However, it feels like everybody’s just flocking to the same destinations. We have people complaining about Europe being overcrowded and the prices being extremely expensive.
And so through. My expertise and my co founders, we wanted to bring something new to the market and we really wanted to redefine travel. So what we’re doing is travel from a culturally immersive experience. But the way that we’re doing that is that I’ve partnered up permanently with a nonprofit that focuses on working with refugees.
And so the way that we do this is that. We go site, if people sign up to our tours, we go sightseeing, we go to all the different typical spots that people want to hit whenever they’re at a destination. But something that we do differently is that we work with refugees and those that have been previously displaced on the ground.
And the way that we do this is we try to do this in a very ethical way as ethically as humanly possible. We work together with them to curate our itineraries to get. The best examples of what there is to see in a country to make sure that we stay off the beaten path, but most importantly, to raise awareness about different issues going on in different parts of the world.
And this is how the whole concept of the hybrid tours came to be. So, for those of you who consider yourself to be. Culture or history this is the perfect tour for you. So basically, we’re combining recreation, fun, sightseeing, together with education and humanitarianism to create a hybrid tour.
How did this concept, take me deeper into how the concept came. Was this a buildup of something you saw? Was there like an aha moment? Like, because combining, I mean, I’ve I’ve seen a lot of different travel concepts. This is the first one that I have heard of. That’s quite this way where you’re combining the humanitarian component.
Like when did that happen? So this actually happened back in 2019. My co founder actually was running course independently through her through her nonprofit and the idea we got together and we wanted to continue expanding this through my travel expertise because I work in the travel industry, and unfortunately.
all know, something changed the world in 2020. So we have to pull back for about two years. And we started again in 2022 running towards again. Hmm. What, so what, what are some of the tours, the areas like geographies and otherwise that you’re covering? So as of right now, since we’ve been running for about, Officially we’re running in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Jordan.
We’ll be expanding to Georgia and Armenia soon. And what’s different about us is that we make a conscious effort. It’s not that we’re just booking services online, which is what most travel companies out there do. Like we fly out to the destinations, we get to know everybody on the ground. So we’re basically establishing.
Long term relationships with everybody that we work with to try to make this as sustainable as possible. And so it’s not that easy to be launching towards some different destinations around the world. We have an idea of which destinations we’re aiming for. But at the moment, we’re operating in those 2 that I.
Just mention, what’s your favorite experience? Like I’m a potential traveler. I’m thinking about doing something. I’m listening to this show. like, give me a feel like, well, like, why should I why should I take one of these tours? Like, what? Tell me about one of the experiences that you like.
I feel like nowadays it’s okay, you’re you’re You can book your own travels, right? You can book a hotel. You can book a you can book a tour, your flight, et cetera. But I feel like nowadays, it’s really difficult to be able to truly interact with locals wherever we go. And if we do, it feels a little bit forced, like, okay, you’re exchanging money To get to spend time with someone.
The way that we work is that the people that we work with they’re people who really, truly are out there sharing their stories and their narratives to make sure that they’re raising awareness about different issues on the ground. So. I don’t feel like out of my 20 years of travel, I don’t think there I’ve ever had such immersive experiences as the ones that we’ve actually created.
And that’s something that we’re really, really proud of. So, if you really want to get a a country from deep down, then I would definitely suggest you take 1 of our tours. They’re affordable. Like I said, we engage with locals. We do it in a very, we’re all about responsible travel.
We believe that travel can really have a positive impact on the communities that we work in as well as on our guests. And so it’s a win win situation for everybody, basically. And most importantly, of course, we have fun while we’re doing it. So it’s not like an educational tour or a university guided tour where you’re just being, you Bombarded with information.
No, we happen to combine this. We have fun. Like I said, we go sightseeing. We hit all the different spots and the evenings. People are always free in the evening. That’s what, like, we don’t want to treat you as school children. We want to make sure that you go out there. You have fun and you have free time in the evening.
So we can go like in Boston. For example, we go to different bars in the evening to engage with locals. Coffee shops for our Jordan trip, for example, will be one of the activities that we have planned. It’s actually going, we’ll be doing ceramic and pottery with an organization that’s comprised of Iraqi women.
Iraqi refugees, and we also get to camp in the desert with Bedouin tribes under the stars. So we have a lot of, like, different activities in place to make sure that even though our tours are short, they’re one week. We want to make the most of that one week together. Yeah. Well, what kind of feedback have you heard from this?
Like, like, little bit about, you know, what clients are saying. They’re loving it so far. Like I said, we’re a pretty young company, but people are really engaged. And the ones that have been on our tours previously, the first thing they do, whenever we launch a new destination, the first thing they do is sign up because they’ve seen that even if they don’t have that much experience in the travel sphere, they feel like they can get a lot from what we have to offer.
And like I said, all of our tours are One week long, we do them what we’re thinking about people who work a 9 to 5, right? Like, we have those in mind because we used to have 9 to 5 as well. And so all of our tours run from weekend to weekend to make sure that people only have to take those 5 days off.
And we squeeze in as much as possible, making sure that we hit all the best spots in the country. We go off the beaten path as well, show you different places and sites that other companies are not offering. And so this way, and all of this again, together with locals, locals are the ones that help us curate these itineraries.
So we’re basically creating tours. And paths that no other company out there is doing. And I can tell you for a fact that in these two countries that we’re operating in, there are no other companies out there that have itinerary, or even the different places that we visit are completely unique to us.
That’s amazing. I like it. it’s like curated tour experience, something that you’re going to get and an immersive experience that you’re not going to get if you’re just online booking, I get it. Like, as you’re like, as a thought that went into it, the people like on the ground that live there and otherwise, and then the connection you’re making to the local community just gives you that whole.
Feel of authenticity that you’re not going to get from just like clicking on something online and just buying something randomly and heading out. Not to mention you go to a place, you don’t know much about the culture maybe, and you want to learn more, but how do you do it right? Where do you start? And this sounds to me like a great way, right?
Yes, yes, thank you so much. We are super proud of the services that we’re offering so far. And like I said, none of this would be possible if it weren’t for the permanent partnership that we have with the specific nonprofit. Right? And that way we can make sure that. If you’re traveling, you’re having every single dollar that you spend is having a positive impact on the local communities that you’re visiting.
So people are actually eager to welcome you instead of, I don’t know, Croatia, Barcelona, where there’s over tourism right now, and people are completely, completely fed up. With tourists. All we need is some more tourists. I get it. That makes sense. Well, Sibu, this has been great. If somebody’s listening to this, you got me wanting to travel.
If somebody’s listening to this and they and they want to follow up and they want to learn more about the tours, how do they do that? Yeah, so if anybody wants to follow along, all you have to do is look us up. We’re the hybrid tours on all social media platforms. We’ve got tours coming up this year.
Like I said, we’ve got Bosnia in late June. Jordan and fall and then boss me again during the fall and we’ll be launching Georgia and Armenia this fall as well. Another thing that we do, and that’s really important is that we try to travel during shoulder season to make sure that we’re hitting the best spots and there are no crowds as well.
So we take everything into consideration to make sure that the experience is as. Best as humanly possible. We don’t want to be throwing people out somewhere in the middle of June, you know Yeah, I get that That’s amazing. Well for everybody listening and and again, that’s the hybrid tours. com, right?
I’m, look i’m checking out the website looks amazing and you can see I see bosnia coming up. I see jordan Bosnia, so yeah, I see all kinds of different things that you have coming up. So I definitely highly recommend going to check out the website, thehybridtours. com and speaking to the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters, and this is the first time listening to an episode, we’re all about bringing on entrepreneurs, business owners, executives, telling us about their concepts, what they’re up to, you know, what we can learn from that so that we all grow together.
So if that sounds interesting to you and you haven’t done it yet, Hit that subscribe button because we have many more interesting entrepreneurs coming up the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing. This is a daily show. So hit that subscribe button so you can get the notifications. And Sibu again, thank you so much for coming on the show.
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. And I hope to see some of you in one of our tours.