“I do for a living what people dream of doing for their two weeks of vacation once a year,” says adventure tourism entrepreneur Trish Sare, founder and director of BikeHike Adventures Inc. “I didn’t follow the same trail that everybody else took. My university was the world.”
At 20, Sare set out to see the world. Heading to Australia via Fiji, the Cook Islands, Tahiti and New Zealand, she spent five years on an odyssey that saw her spend a year in Australia before heading to Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.
En route, Sare decided that a career in tourism would be the only job for her. When she returned home to Toronto, she ingratiated herself with the Thai Tourism Authority, securing a job as personal assistant to the Thai representative there – a position that had not existed previously. To learn more about the tourism industry, she concurrently worked with a schooner company that offered charters of the Great Lakes. It was a “very busy time” she recalls, as she also took the travel and tourism course at Toronto’s Humber College. One of her field placements was being sent to Costa Rica, where she trained to be an adventure guide. “I spent that time bouncing around all of South and Central America,” she says.
Her experiences inspired her to create her own business, starting BikeHike with a $1,000 stake. “It was before the Internet,” she says of the challenges of building a clientele. “It was all micromarketing.” While simultaneously working as a fitness instructor, Sare established a relationship with a club that had a professional clientele. She announced her first tour with posters throughout the gym, then hosted slide shows that drew small but intrigued audiences. Clients started booking a Costa Rican adventure right at the first show. “It was pretty exciting,” she recalls. Within a year, she had set up four more trips, and new tours were added annually. Still, “It was not until four years into BikeHike that I could manage it as a full-time job,” she says.
At 45, Sare operates BikeHike, now in its 17th year, from an office on Granville Island, with a staff of four, plus dozens of contractors around the world. Currently, her days involve developing the business, courting media, soliciting sales and attending to financial matters. “We have eight people going to Guatemala at Christmas, and the clients pay us their money and we have to pay our suppliers in Guatemala, that sort of thing.” Sare scouts all new destinations, thereby ensuring herself several trips a year. She also attends international industry conferences and continues to take courses. “There’s the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs, Small Business BC, and BCIT has training programs for small businesses, so I’m constantly upgrading my skills,” she says.
Sare regards a passion for travel and other cultures as a prerequisite for such a career. “You need international experience on the ground. It’s good to have school, but where I learned the ropes for everything I’m doing was being out there on the ground. You can’t start up a company like this and not be comfortable in other places around the world. Then you’ll have a much stronger possibility of employment. Plus, in any business, you have to be willing to dedicate a lot of hours to it. I certainly had to pay my dues with some really long days.”
The payoff of the globetrotting life is far more than simply earning a living. “Nothing is more interesting to me than other cultures and travel," she says. "I’m doing something all day long that makes people happy. When I’m not in the office, I’m on a raft, on a bicycle, surrounded by people. It’s pretty rewarding.”
