Walking tours

A friend of ours was leaving coffee yesterday to go on a walking tour of San Francisco, one of 80 walking tours scheduled that day.

I am very proud to be the father of this wonderful institution, walking tours of San Francisco. The history of local walking tours and my role in starting the process is described in several earlier blogs.

What I did was to create an array of products based on intelligence, narrative and vitality in the world of tourism.  When I think about what I created, I realize that there had been a vast untapped market before I introduced my material. Whether the market would have been developed without me, 1, 5 or 10 years later is unknowable.

There are many tourist destinations where the application of intelligence, narrative and vitality would be insignificant and would not have generated the massive institution that now exists in San Francisco.  Boise, for example.

I am very proud to have started this process here, to have planted the seed in a very fertile field.  

It also hurts me to know that the political class in San Francisco openly and consciously harms the tourist business by encouraging visible homelessness and generating our international reputation for political idiocy.