Overview

Learn Tourism is on a mission to transform how education is delivered across the global tourism industry. Founded by industry veterans and learning experts, the organization partners with destination marketing organizations, attractions, associations, and hospitality leaders to design and deliver education that’s engaging, accessible, and impactful at scale.

To support this mission, Learn Tourism needed a learning platform that could handle diverse audiences, complex partner requirements, and high expectations for learner outcomes. They found that foundation in Thinkific Plus.

The challenge

Delivering meaningful education at scale in a complex, distributed industry.

Tourism is a people-powered industry. Learners range from overnight hotel staff and restaurant teams to destination leaders, travel planners, and community partners. Traditional in-person training and static online content were failing to meet the needs of this diverse audience.

As Learn Tourism’s programs expanded, several challenges became clear:

• Training needed to be available on demand, across time zones and shift schedules
• Programs had to support multiple use cases, including certification, partner enablement, workforce development, and revenue-generating education
• Partner organizations required branded, independent learning environments
• Internal teams needed a platform that was efficient to manage without heavy technical overhead

Initially, Learn Tourism evaluated 10 to 15 different learning platforms and even launched on one early solution. It quickly became clear that approach wasn’t sustainable.

“It was the cheap choice in more ways than one. It required too much effort and too much bandwidth to manage. We knew it wasn’t going to scale.”

— Stephen Ekstrom, Co-Founder of Learn Tourism

The solution

A scalable, multi-instance learning platform built for real-world complexity.

After extensive research and competitive evaluation, Learn Tourism selected Thinkific based on one core differentiator: usability at scale.

“What made Thinkific the obvious choice was the user experience for our team. Course creation, management, payments, analytics. It was all dramatically easier to manage compared to anything else we tested.”

— Stephen Ekstrom, Co-Founder of Learn Tourism

As Learn Tourism grew, they upgraded to Thinkific Plus to support more advanced needs:

• White-labeled learning experiences for partner organizations
• Multi-instance environments with independent administration
• Centralized analytics and reporting across programs
• Flexible monetization and automated learner communications

Today, Learn Tourism operates nearly 60 separate learning instances across client organizations, trade associations, and learning centers — with more than 65 total programs running on Thinkific Plus.

The approach

Designing education around transformation, engagement, and accessibility.

Learn Tourism’s learning philosophy is grounded in three principles they call the “TEA” framework:

• Transformations: Learners must be able to do something new or better after completing a program
• Engagement: Learning must be active, interactive, and participatory
• Accessibility: Education must accommodate different learning styles, schedules, and environments

Thinkific Plus enables this approach by supporting short, modular content, interactive quizzes, certifications, analytics, and on-demand access.

“We rarely create lessons longer than four minutes. The data shows how people actually learn today. Short attention spans, high interaction, real engagement. Thinkific makes that possible.”

— Stephen Ekstrom, Co-Founder of Learn Tourism

The impact

Exceptional outcomes across engagement, scale, and retention.

By standardizing on Thinkific Plus, Learn Tourism has achieved results that far exceed industry benchmarks:

• ~60,000 total enrollments across programs
• 80–85% average completion rates for established programs, significantly higher than typical online learning averages
• 10x increase in participation by moving programs online and on demand
• 20% higher satisfaction with online training compared to in-person delivery
• 17–19% average increase in learner confidence
• 100% partner retention last year, with continued retention in the high 90s

Operationally, Thinkific has also reduced friction for Learn Tourism’s internal team.

“We look at team bandwidth, frustration levels, and responsiveness. Thinkific consistently delivers. The support is solutions-based. It’s not ‘here’s an article,’ it’s ‘let’s solve this together.’”

— Stephen Ekstrom, Co-Founder of Learn Tourism

A true partnership

Supporting innovation, not just software.

Learn Tourism views Thinkific as more than a platform — it’s a strategic partner in advancing modern learning.

“Thinkific is a learning organization that produces learning experience platforms and the support you need to build and deliver training programs that are more effective and efficient.”

— Stephen Ekstrom, Co-Founder of Learn Tourism

From direct access to customer success teams and engineers to ongoing platform innovation, the partnership supports Learn Tourism’s long-term vision.

Looking ahead

Scaling ethical, sustainable education globally

In the near term, Learn Tourism aims to support more than 100 partner organizations and surpass 100,000 total enrollments. Long term, their goal is to demonstrate what ethical, sustainable, and effective education looks like across an entire industry.

“Everyone says they want to make a difference. We want to show how to do it the right way, for the right reasons, and at scale.”

— Stephen Ekstrom, Co-Founder of Learn Tourism

With Thinkific Plus as its foundation, Learn Tourism is doing exactly that.