Almaty resident Dauren Zholdasbayev earns millions by organizing tours to exotic countries through his travel agency Exotic Tours. He started without any starting capital, with a salary from foreign organizers and one successful camp in the Maldives. Today his agency has a waiting list, a closed community of 200 people, and routes that mass agencies do not consider. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Kursiv Media.
When Kazakhstanis think about travel, destinations like Turkey, Vietnam, or Thailand first come to mind, but Zholdasbayev's agency chooses countries that many may not even know. For example, Tonga (a country in Oceania). The Kazakhstani did not even advertise tours to this exotic country. All spots sold out in two days, and the waiting list grew to more than eight people, forcing him to open a second group. For a market where tour operators pay for clicks for years, this looks almost incredible. Dauren's explanation is simple: people themselves asked him to create this destination.
The founder of Exotic Tours lives in Almaty, teaches freediving, and goes on expeditions for seven to twenty days every month. His clients are entrepreneurs, banking specialists, and executives tired of formulaic resorts. They are willing to pay more than $6,000 (approximately 2,704,200 tenge) for a route with five flights and six days of travel for a few hours next to humpback whales. How such a business is built, what it earns on, and why clients agree to fly to a "secret country" without knowing its name, Dauren told Kursiv in an interview.
The journey began not with a business plan but with a passion. Dauren took up freediving in 2015, and two years later became an instructor. In 2018, his own coach, who lives in Russia, suggested going to the Maldives and holding a camp. The coach worked with the travel agency Team Trip, which conducts expeditions to whales and opposes keeping killer whales in dolphinariums.
The format was called a "family camp." Each group necessarily had a freediving instructor and a biologist. Dauren worked such camps for two seasons in a row, 2018 and 2019, and all this time worked as an employee: Russian organizers paid him a salary. Money was not the main result. In the second year, he was made group leader, and he began to be responsible for everything: for the people who fly and for the team that provides their program.
"I decided that this is a very cool destination. I like doing this, and I am good at it," he recalls. This decision determined the following years.
In 2019, together with a friend, Dauren obtained skipper's rights (a document confirming qualification for independent chartering and management of a sailing or motor yacht). Yachting became the second direction: he taught people to set sails, manage a yacht, and moor. Then hiking along the Lycian Way (a legendary walking route in Turkey) appeared. He combined these two programs into one route: a week of hiking, then immediately a week on a yacht.
Since 2020, he began gathering groups from Almaty. Before that, mostly Russians flew on his trips because everything was built around a Russian agency. Now he offered Kazakhstanis to go with him. Russians, however, did not disappear. Information about tours is open, and people from Russia themselves wrote asking whether they could join if they flew from their city. The answer was always the same: of course. Only the price changed because the flight from Kazakhstan was not included.
Dauren's partner during this period remained a friend, who later left the business and suggested continuing joint work with his wife. Dauren honestly admits that he did not get along with her. The choice was small: leave the business or go his own way. In 2023, he opened his own company. Since then, he has been building a personal brand, that is, Exotic Tours.
When asked about starting capital, Dauren answers unexpectedly: there was none. "What investments? I invested in myself first of all, in my education, in skipper training," he says.
The first author tours worked on a simple formula. Dauren calculated his own fee, tickets, accommodation, and food, divided the sum by participants, and got the price for one person. This is how the cost was formed for groups of five, seven, ten people. The main rule was not to go into the red.
Sometimes he violated this rule deliberately. If three or four people were already ready to buy tickets for a trip, he could say to himself: "we will fly even with a small group, but we will fly." Such a tour might not bring a penny of income, and at best only paid for itself. But it took place, and people returned with the emotions for which the whole project began.
In recent years, everything has changed. Today the company plans routes a year ahead and invests its own money: it makes a prepayment for yacht rental to secure good dates and buys air tickets in advance. Amounts start from $30,000 (about 13 million tenge) per route. Accumulated demand allows such risk: the team knows that spots will be bought.
The most successful period in the company's history came with two tours in a row. Dauren flew out with the first group, met the second on site, conducted it, and returned to Almaty with it. The profit was $30–35 thousand (13-15 million tenge). He separately clarifies that this is profit, not revenue.
The secret of efficiency that travel marketers do not reveal: the best advertising is an announcement in a closed chat. Exotic Tours first shows new routes to a narrow circle of people with whom the company wants to travel and who trust it. If spots remain, social networks learn about the tour, and only then, if necessary, paid advertising is launched.
The Tonga story showed how this works. No advertising was launched at all. People from the inner circle had long awaited this destination, and when the announcement appeared, spots disappeared in two days. Then a waiting list was created. When it grew to more than eight people, a second group was announced, and it also gathered without a single advertising tenge.
"We did not launch this advertising, we simply announced that our group is preparing for Tonga," Dauren explains. Those interested were offered to book participation for the next season.