Owners and Managers Guiding Their Customers

I'm thinking about using smaller vehicles -- 10-seater limo/vans for instance. Perhaps a bookstore that's acting as a point of origin for a tour could sell 9 seats to customers. The 10th seat would be the store owner or manager. This bookseller from home would then be accompanying their customers on the tour. Using these smaller vehicles would add a lot more flexibility to scheduling. And it would heighten the identification of customers with the specific store that sold the ticket.

Whereas if I stick to using luxury motorcoaches with 50 seats, I'd inevitably be pulling regular customers from a larger number of different favorite indie stores, and so no given originating store would strongly get the "credit" for the bookstore tour in the customer's mind.

That is: bookstore tours can be strongly felt by customers to be a fine product that's offered by a specific store.

Thus, Eric Carle Museum Store customers are likely to want to buy a ticket with me leading a trip to children's bookstores in New York. I'd lead them on a customized trip. Meanwhile, Books Of Wonder customers are likely to want to buy a ticket from New York City with Peter Glassman leading a trip to visit Eric Carle Museum in Amherst -- I'd work with Peter to design a customized trip for his customers.

I think it can be a great marketing device for a specific store to put their own best customers on tour, and for the owner or manager to go along as a guide, with those customers, to destination bookstores or literary landmarks. I know that Carla Cohen has done this, out of Politics & Prose, in D.C.; and Scott Merritt has done it from his store -- Merritt Bookstore -- in Red Hook, New York.