Between a Rock & a Pike Place

Emptying the vault, so to speak. Wrote this in late summer or early fall — can’t remember which. Portrait of some determined small businesspeople trying to make it, against a virus’ odds.

Former New York hotel concierge Colin Perceful moved back to his native Seattle and eventually purchased a tour-operating business called Totally Seattle Tours in 2019. Business was booming until — you guessed it — COVID hit, with the Seattle area bearing the brunt of virus-related restrictions earlier than other parts of the country.

Perceful has two kids in elementary school and a wife who works at a popular marijuana dispensary in West Seattle. So for the past several months, he’s considered himself to be a part-time homeschool teacher with his kids relegated to online learning. But he’s hardly given up on his business. To this end, Peaceful outfitted his Toyota minivan with a glass partition between himself and his passengers — five maximum, but his groups mostly range from two to four — and started getting creative.

With so many standard tourist attractions either closed or limiting capacity, Perceful, who grew up on nearby Bainbridge Island, now conducts tours that are more reliant on his street-level knowledge of neighborhoods — the rich history of the Panama Hotel in Japantown, the touching quirkiness of Capitol Hill’s Wishing Tree, the underrated viewpoint at Jose Rizal Park on the northern tip of Beacon Hill, the inner-city forest of Interlaken and the serpentine road that surrounds it — to give his clients a more intimate understanding of the city.

Although this was pre-pandemic, here’s a good example of Perceful’s personal touch: He was showing a family from New York — two parents, three energetic young kids — around town before they were set to embark on a cruise. A few hours before the ship was set to leave, the mother asked Perceful where they might be able to score some marijuana edibles to make for smoother sailing. Had Perceful been near his wife’s shop, he would have taken them there. Instead, he took the mom pot-shopping at a dispensary in the Fremont neighborhood while dad stayed behind with the kids in the van.

Since Perceful operates at the higher end of the fee spectrum, he occasionally attracts clients for whom money is no object — something that’s been a lifeline during the pandemic. In July, he hosted a father-daughter duo that had Perceful take them from downtown Seattle to Snoqualmie Falls to the Olympic Peninsula, where they spent the night. (They paid for Perceful’s room.) They then got up and had Perceful schlep them all the way to Cannon Beach, Oregon, where they had dinner before returning to their suite at the Four Seasons, which they never checked out of. Over the course of four days, he drove them around for 39 hours — and gave a much-needed jolt to his business’ bottom line.

Tour guides around the country have been similarly challenged by the virus. Lynn Griffith operates an international walking tour business called Welcome Walks that usually sells digital-download, app-based, audio walking tours, where clients use their smartphones to take digitally hosted tours of various cities and landmark areas. Despite the fact that these tours are typically taken individually or among small groups of acquaintances, she says, “Walking tours really all but disappeared for awhile, and I think it will be a few months until people return to that option of exploring.”

So her company has, for the time being, pivoted to virtual walking tours, or what she calls “armchair journeys.” These are pre-recorded tours of different places that people can take entirely online, at their leisure. (There’s also a live option available on a Zoom-like platform.) So far, Griffith says she’s recruited 41 tour guides throughout the world and that the product is “just taking off, since it has taken awhile to develop.”

“The internet makes all things possible,” she says. “Travel will never go away. I think you just have to find the way to do it safely.”

But some folks have braved walking tours during the pandemic. To wit, Perceful’s clients have the option of letting him guide them on a 30–45 minus walk through Pike Place Market. Restaurants have reopened with outdoor seating and Eat Seattle Tours & Classes, after initially shifting to a COVID model of offering online cooking courses, has started doing chef-guided Pike Place Market tasting tours again.

Whereas they used to host groups of 10, they now typically host groups of four to six (the maximum allowed is eight).

“We would not be able to operate like this if it was truly as busy as a normal summer,” concedes Eat Seattle executive Liz Philpot. “Masks are required for everyone, including the guide. It’s up to our vendors to make sure they’re delivering food in a safer way, and they’re doing that. A lot of that has to do with pre-packaging. Fran’s Chocolates just puts everything in a little bag and brings it outside. We make sure everyone’s outside, and that’s going to be a little more difficult during the rainy season. But that’s what you sign up for when you go to the Market.”

A similar outfit, Savor Seattle, has thus far declined to restart its food and cultural tours, with CEO Angela Shen explaining, “We have thought a lot about that and are erring on the side of caution. My standpoint is that eating is meant to be an intimate, bonding experience. And I think with how polarized the general public is feeling about health and safety, I think expectations for what’s safe have divided us too far. So it makes me nervous to put people in an environment where social distancing is tough to do, even though financially, it probably would make a lot of sense.”

When COVID hit, Shen had to lay a dozen employees off. But like so many tour-based companies — and businesses in general — they’ve found a way to stay afloat during the pandemic by offering boxes of food from Pike Place Market vendors like Beecher’s Cheese, Joe Chocolate, Chukar Cherries, and Sunny Honey. They sold 48 boxes the first week and by week three, they were selling a couple hundred boxes, with a high of 1,200 over Mother’s Day Weekend. (They now typically sell around 300 boxes per week.)

Since launching their Market Boxes, Savor Seattle has been able to rehire six of its laid-off employees, and the boxes have had a domino effect on their Market partners.

“In the first three months, we heard of at least 20 jobs returning amid the Pike Place community because of our box program,” says Shen. “Direct sales in the last six months, we’ve been able to provide more than $1.2 million in direct revenue back to these businesses.”