Q & A with Ray Sargoni, President and Owner of Super Sightseeing Tours
Q & A with Ray Sargoni
President and Owner of Super Sightseeing Tours
By Jose Carlos de Santiago
Pow Wow 2011 – San Francisco, California
Come visit San Francisco and take an exciting trip aboard one of the Hop-on, Hop-off buses and motor coaches provided by Super Sightseeing Tours, one of the leading Tour companies in San Francisco. Their unique blue buses stand out from an array of mostly-red vehicles that move up and down that beautiful Californian city. Caribbean News Digital sat down with Ray Sargoni, president and owner of Super Sightseeing Tours, and listened to what his company does in order to provide –as its slogan reads- “The best way to see San Francisco & Northern California.”
What does your company do?
We’re primarily a Sightseeing Tour and Charter operator serving San Francisco and its surrounding areas. We provide daily sightseeing tours for our passengers/guests from around the world and our Hop-on, Hop-off multi-language city tours of San Francisco in Spanish, German, French and Japanese, in addition to English. We are one of the premier tour operators in the city of San Francisco, and the preferred company of choice for hotel concierges.
What about Russian travelers coming to San Francisco and to other parts of the U.S.?
So far, we haven’t served that many Russian visitors in San Francisco. It is our experience that the larger numbers of visitors tend to flock to New York, Chicago and the East Coast.
How many tourists does your company cater to on a yearly basis?
Last year we provided sightseeing tours for over 150,000 guests to the city of San Francisco and its surroundings, and our charter group provided motor coach transportation service for an additional 100,000 passengers.
What vehicles does your company rely on for these operations?
Our company relies on a number of different sized buses and motor coaches for the vast majority of our tours. In addition, through strategic partnerships we also provide our guests with transportation and tours via boat cruises, helicopters, bicycles, and motorized trolley cars.
How long have you been involved in the travel industry?
I’ve been involved in the industry for over 25 years and I purchased Super Sightseeing Tours in 2001. Super Sightseeing has been operating in San Francisco since 1988.
Who are your most important clientele?
Pretty much everybody. To us, every client is important. We’ve got many visitors from Europe but even more from other parts of the United States. San Francisco is such a unique city that everybody loves to come and visit it, mostly Americans from the East Coast.
In the case of Europe, what’s your top outbound market?
In order of numbers, our guests come from the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain.
What about from Latin & South America?
Lots of South Americans. The largest numbers come from Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. For that reason, we invested this year in foreign languages so that visitors may receive information in their native tongues through headsets.
So you don’t employ guides for your tours, do you?
It depends, most of our tours do in fact have English speaking guides but on some of the newer buses we are installing GPS activated multilingual recorded guides with headsets that contain all the info in English and in eight other languages.
Do you use open-top buses?
Yes. We painted our buses blue because there are many other companies out there that use red buses.
What kind of services do you provide that actually make a difference?
Our company is specialized in personal service in clinching full satisfaction for our passengers. If one of our customers is not happy with the service, we fully refund him all the fare money and we offer him or her more tours for the future. It’s all about personal service.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
That we provide free Wi-Fi service on all of our buses and we’re the only company that does that. And our Hop-on, Hop-off is unique also in terms of the many museums it goes to, more than any other sightseeing bus service in the city.
What major tour operators do you work with?
Worldwide, we have at least 200 different clients and our major tour operators are Globus, Cosmos, American Tourism International and others that use our services within the city of San Francisco.
How large are the vehicles your company uses? Do you have limousines?
We have a fleet of 22 vehicles ranging from 16 to 65 seats.
Can your tours be booked on the Internet?
Yes, we have our website (http://www.SuperSightseeing.com) in which consumers can book and pay for their tours directly online. Alternatively, we also work with a number of affiliate websites who feature our tours. Affiliates can sign up to feature our tours by logging onto our website and registering to become an affiliate. Then we give you a number and you can book online, pay online and do everything online.
What’s your average revenue rate in a year?
About USD $6 million last year, up 20 percent from the previous year, and this year we are glad to report that are again growing at a rate of at least 22 percent over last year.
Do you keep the same tours in both summer and winter?
Yes, compared to our competition, we’re relatively strong in the winter, so we keep almost all of the same tours. Some tours are canceled for part of the wintertime, such as Yosemite, as there is so much snow that the state closes it. So, we have a little frequency to our tours, but we run the same tours.
