Question 6 was repetitive, so I’ll save myself the time writing about it and you, dear reader, the time to read it. Fortunately, question 7 was pretty fun, so let’s look into it.
7. What were your biggest challenges with human resources/labor?
You want to know about human resources challenges in Morocco?
Buckle up. This is where adventure tourism meets reality television meets Shakespearean betrayal.
Here’s the Moroccan maze that haunted me from day one: By law—actual law—guides can’t drive, and drivers can’t guide.
Not “shouldn’t.” Not “it’s complicated.” Can’t.
Morocco decided in its infinite bureaucratic wisdom that these must be separate professions. Different licenses. Different regulations. Different people.
So every single tour requires at least two humans: one to tell the stories, one to navigate the roads. Two salaries. Two personalities. Two people who need to work together like a married couple but might have met that morning.
You’re not just hiring employees. You’re casting a buddy movie that plays out in real-time with paying customers as the audience. And if your lead actors hate each other? Well, that’s a seven-day car ride through the Atlas Mountains that nobody’s getting refunded for.
Success also breeds a particular kind of poison: the “essential employee” delusion.
You find someone good—really good. They know the routes. They know the riads. Clients love them. Reviews mention them by name. They become the face of your operation in Morocco.
And then it happens. Slowly. Quietly. Like rust on a blade you don’t sharpen often enough.
They start showing up late. The storytelling gets lazy—recycled jokes, half-hearted historical facts. They stop going the extra mile because, well, they’ve been going that mile for years and nobody’s complained yet.
They think they’re irreplaceable.
The irony? The thing that made them great—the dedication, the passion, the care—is the first thing to die when they decide they’ve “made it.”
But the worst? The absolute worst was the guide who decided to start his own side business.
Using my business.
He was one of my best. Charismatic. Knowledgeable. Clients adored him. For years, everything ran as smoothly as Moroccan mint tea.
Then I started hearing whispers. Vendors in Fez mentioning “SaharaTrek’s commission.” Shop owners in Marrakech asking when I wanted to “collect my gift.”
My what?
Turns out this enterprising soul had been making the rounds to every carpet seller, spice merchant, and leather goods dealer on our routes. His pitch was beautiful in its audacity:
“SaharaTrek requires a baksheesh for any purchases our clients make. You give me 20%, and I’ll bring the tours to your shop.”
He was literally extorting vendors using my company’s name, pocketing commissions I didn’t know existed, for an arrangement I never made.
The beautiful, stupid mistake he made?
He didn’t know I talked directly with the vendors.
Not through translators. Not through intermediaries. I’d spent years building relationships with these shop owners. Learning enough Arabic to have real conversations. Drinking tea in their back rooms. Meeting their families. They were my network, my friends, my partners. And they love us because SaharaTrek never, EVER gets a commission on anything our clients buy while in Morocco. There’s no pressure on the shop owners to keep prices high enough to give SaharaTrek a kickback, so when you’re haggling prices, you’re going to get the best deal. It’s a dirty secret that other tour operators don’t want to get out: they can charge less on the front end because the tour operators themselves make money from their “commissions” on what you buy.
When one of them casually mentioned “the new commission structure,” I knew exactly what had happened.
Confronting him was like pulling back a curtain on a whole second operation I didn’t know existed. Not just the vendor shakedown—that was just what I’d discovered. Who knows what else was happening in the shadows?
The guide who thought he was essential, who believed he was SaharaTrek in Morocco, suddenly realized he’d made a catastrophic miscalculation.
He wasn’t essential.
He was fired.
Here’s what nobody tells you about the human resources “adventure”: In tourism, your employees aren’t just employees. They’re your brand walking around without you. They’re your reputation speaking a language you might not fully understand, in places you can’t always be, making decisions that can build you up or burn you down.
And in Morocco? You need twice as many of them because the law says so. Double the people, double the problems, double the chance that someone thinks they’ve figured out how to game the system.
The guides who think they’re irreplaceable? They forget that trust is harder to build than skill, and easier to destroy than either.
The ones who get complacent? They forget that excellence isn’t a destination—it’s a daily choice.
And the ones who try to run their own hustle using your name? They forget that in a country built on relationships and word-of-mouth, nothing stays secret for long.
You want to know the biggest HR challenge?
It’s not finding good people.
It’s keeping them good after they realize they’re good.
That’s the real adventure. And unlike the Sahara, there’s no map for it.
