How ’New Scientist’ Turned a Media Brand’s Readership Into a Multi-Day Tour Audience

New Scientist Discovery Tours runs 100 tours with a team of four, works with six operator partners worldwide, and has guests putting deposits down on a solar eclipse in Australia in 2028. The entire operation is built around one idea: go to the same places as everyone else, but tell a story nobody else is telling.

Kevin Currie, Director of New Scientist Discovery Tours, joined the company in 2019 to build what three journalists had started off the side of their desks. The pitch was simple: curate an itinerary around a science story, not a destination, and put an expert on the tour who can actually tell it. Kevin spent months in due diligence before signing on, looking at guest feedback, partner relationships, and industry data. Experiential travel was growing at 19% annually, roughly double the rate of standard travel. He built a business case, launched 20 tours, sold most of them out, and then lost everything to the pandemic. New Scientist kept him. He's been building since 2022 with a team of four.

The episode covers how New Scientist structures tour development from the inside of a media company, what Kevin looks for when he chooses scientists to accompany tours, and how the team manages a supply chain of partner operators, DMCs, and tour leaders without becoming a tour operator themselves. Kevin explains why they work with only six partners and why the pre-departure briefing between the expert and the tour leader is one of the most important things they do. He describes the 4.6-kilometer walk in the Brecon Beacons where every hundred meters represents 100 million years of Earth's history, and the moment a guest looks up and realizes the last 20 centimeters represent all of human existence. The episode is also a case study in how a niche operator competes not by being cheaper, but by doing the thing competitors literally cannot copy: getting the science right.