Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Drywa.
Hi Alex, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
I never thought I would be a tour guide! In 2009 I returned home from living and studying in Australia for 3 years. Friends worldwide began visiting, and showing them around New York would be fun. I thought I knew a lot about the city, but once the questions started pouring in, I realized how little I knew about the area I grew up in. I dove head first into food, history, and architecture to gain more knowledge when friends came into town. Friends started joking that I should become an official tour guide. After studying and passing the sightseeing guide exam in NYC, I contacted tour operators about leading tours part-time on weekends. I was shocked at how different the tours were from showing my friends around. There were either inexpensive walking tours, but you had 20-30 guests in your group, or you had to pay a ridiculous sum to hire a private guide. I knew there had to be a middle ground.
I finally found a small company called Manhattan Walking Tour, and it had a rinky-dink “build your own” website, nothing fancy, but I loved that the description kept talking about small and intimate tour groups. That is when I luckily met my great friend and business partner, Garry Zafrani. I learned that Garry had just started the company in anticipation of his retirement from Marriott, and had barely any customers or scheduled tours. We met the next day, and he told me about his vision of small group walking tours, 8 guests or less guests, to give it the feel of visiting family or friends while in NYC. I began helping build his vision whenever I had free time. After about 4 months, I quit my job and started putting all my time and effort into growing Manhattan Walking Tour.
This was also my first introduction to St. Augustine. Garry told me he had just bought a place there a few years ago and that I should visit when he’s down. My first reaction was, “where the heck is St. Augustine?” I still remember the first time I drove down King Street and fell in love with this beautiful historic city. I couldn’t believe I had never heard of it until then. We knew nothing of St. Augustine’s history and had our hands complete with a new start-up in NYC, so opening a company in Florida was nowhere on our radar.
As we grew in NY and I took on more responsibility, Garry was worried he might lose me. He couldn’t afford to pay me more, so he offered me a small piece of the company to make me a partner. Over the years, we slowly built Manhattan Walking Tour into a popular tour operator. Our small group mentality took off. As we built up NY, I visited St. Augustine at every chance. I explored everything I could! I read everything I could! When I met my future wife Amy, I brought her down only 2 months after we met to show off this incredible place. It took almost 10 years of visiting, studying, and ingraining ourselves into the community before we felt comfortable opening a tour company in America’s oldest city. Throughout those years, we continued to build Manhattan Walking Tour bigger and bigger. Garry made me a full 50/50 partner, and he moved full-time to St. Augustine. Amy and I married in May 2018. Finally, in 2019 we thought it was time to open a new company in St. Augustine. The timing could not have worked out any better.
We originally opened St. Augustine Experiences with just one tour, our Ale Trail Craft Beer & History Experience. Garry was enjoying semi-retirement and just being in charge of phone and email, and I flew back and forth from NY, getting the company set up and paperwork out of the way. We established the company when Amy and I started seriously talking about eventually moving to Florida. In our heads, we were still thinking another 4-5 years away! Opening St. Augustine Experiences in 2019 was a blessing in disguise after Covid hit. We quarantined up in NYC for a few months, but once flights resumed, I started flying down as much as I could to grow the company.
At the beginning of 2021, Amy and I decided to join Garry in Florida and move down full-time. We developed more tours, knocked on every door we could to introduce ourselves, and steadily built our social media following. We got busy faster than we thought, with 2021 being a boom year for Florida, in both tourism and the real estate market. We got Garry out of semi-retirement and back on the tour circuit. The leg work we did paid off. We thought 2021 was great, but 2022 was our Cinderella story. In June 2022, our Perfect Pairing: Wine, Cocktail & Food Experience was ranked #1 in the World on TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice in the “Beer, Wine, & Spirits” category. We beat out tours in Lisbon, Portugal; Santorini, Greece and Queenstown, New Zealand. It was not just great for us but for St. Augustine overall. We could not have done it without our incredible restaurant partners, our amazing team of guides, and the direction of our St. Augustine Visitors and Convention Bureau. We hope this continues to draw more visitors to our beautiful city. We are lucky to host historical and culinary experiences in two amazing cities. We look forward to a busy 2023 in St. Augustine and New York City!
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned? Looking back, it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect.
There are constant challenges in small business tourism, finding the right team to fit our small and intimate group sizes and standing out online with all the other tour companies available to travelers. OTA’s (online travel agencies TripAdvisor/Viator, Get Your Guide, Airbnb) have huge budgets and eat up most of the first page on almost all searches for tour companies in any city. Staying relevant online so you can get more organic bookings. Building and finding your voice on social media and constantly researching to keep your history and stories fresh for returning guests. Continually researching new restaurants and vendors to find unique food & drink offerings and building referral relationships with hotels, inns, and other tour operators. I can fill up a few pages if you give me more time!
Let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
We have always stood out in our industry because of our small group size. Most public walking tours have group sizes of 12-20. With only 8 guests, it is much more comfortable to explore the streets, dip into small museums, and eat & drink at some of our smaller restaurant partners. Since day 1, we have always said we want our walking tours to feel like you are visiting a family member or close friend. You might not even know we were an organized tour if you saw us on the street. It would look like a group of friends having fun together. We have become close friends with people who were our former guests on tour. We have met extended families and friends when guests return for more tours year after year and bring more people with them. We have received emails from guests who became friends on one of our tours and then traveled together in other parts of the world. We have celebrated engagements, honeymoons, bachelorettes, birthdays, and other milestones in people’s lives. Our tours always end with hugs. Don’t worry. We can care for you if you have a group bigger than 8! It’s just our public tours we keep small.
After over a decade of providing memorable experiences for guests worldwide, receiving the #1 ranking on TripAdvisor Travelers’ Choice was an incredibly proud moment for us. The ranking was not chosen by journalists or travel writers but by the guests themselves. We can forever say we were the #1 experience in the world in 2022, thanks all to our amazing guests who became friends.
We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
Always have an emergency savings account! Garry was always adamant about this from day 1. In NYC, we thought it might be another terrorist attack or one of us having a serious illness. We never thought about a multi-year pandemic. That savings account allowed us to pay off all credit card debt and insurance and gave us breathing room during a year of almost no business. We were in a much better position than some other tour operators around the country and were able to start building up our St. Augustine company without the constant worry of having to pay back old debt.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.staugustineexperiences.com
- Instagram: @staugustineexperiences
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/staugustineexperiences
- Other: https://www.staugustine.com/story/lifestyle/travel/2022/07/11/tripadvisor-florida-st-augustine-wine-cocktail-food-tour-voted-best-world/10009287002/
