59 Days Changed Everything

Seven days. That was the plan. Scope out opportunities, close a few deals, fly back to London. The spreadsheets were ready, the meetings were booked, the return date was locked in.

I was trained for exactly this. A Master's in Business Management with Entrepreneurship. Years in operations, systems design and quality assurance. I knew how to assess risk, spot a gap in a market and build something that lasts. I was a strategist: I saw problems and structured solutions.

Day 1 went exactly to plan. A riad booked through an app. A guide booked through a tour operator. A medina ticked off like a checkbox. Everything optimised. Everything tracked.

He wasn't running a tour script. He was showing me something real: his neighbourhood, his people, his family's stories. Not Morocco-as-product. Morocco-as-home. He talked about the market seasons and the café politics, about his daughter studying to leave and how he hoped she'd come back. He shared it not because I'd paid for access, but because he wanted me to understand.

Somewhere between the mint tea and his stories about preserved lemons, something shifted.

Conversations that weren't performed. Connection that wasn't transactional. And right behind it, a second thought: I could build this. Properly. I could see exactly what was broken in tourism (guides reduced to logistics, travellers treated as throughput, authenticity packaged and sold), and I could see how to fix it.

More than that, I didn't want to leave. By Day 3, I'd decided I was moving to Morocco. Except I had no savings, a mortgage and a job. So I did what a strategist does when the data looks too good to trust: I decided to test it first.

I finished my seven days, flew home and lived my old life for 59 days, to see whether the conviction held when I wasn't on holiday. It held. Every meeting felt hollow. Every evening in my London flat, I scrolled through photos of Morocco like proof that real life was happening somewhere else.

But I didn't treat it as a holiday hangover. I treated it as data. I analysed the market and studied how destination management companies work: where they fail, and what travellers actually want versus what they're sold. I asked other travellers what had worked for them, and what hadn't.

And I realised I could do this properly. Not as a holiday fantasy, but as a real business serving three kinds of clients at once: individual travellers, travel agencies that need a reliable partner on the ground, and companies that want team experiences that genuinely work.

1. Day 30Not homesick any more. Certain.
2. Day 45A full business plan, drafted.
3. Day 59A one-way ticket to Morocco, booked.

When I landed, Ahmed was there. I told him I was coming back to build something real. Not for Instagram, not for profit alone, but for the same reason he shares his world: because it matters.

That's how Visit Morocco Tours began. The company is new; the people behind it aren't. I work with guides, drivers and suppliers who have spent 15+ years in Moroccan tourism, and who are trained, supported and fairly paid. Together we build every journey from scratch, for the person, the team or the client in front of us.