The answer is: he didn't understand the business. There tens if not hundreds of competitors, and yet the tour operators still taking bookings over the phone. That tells you a lot.
The market is ruthlessly efficient. If something has a low barrier to entry, like his idea, then it's absolutely 100% guaranteed that someone else has tried it. Would-be founders need to do a brutally honest assessment of why they are going to succeed where others have failed.
Not mentioned in the article: the market which this person was trying to enter is saturated with competition. These tour operators are bombarded with pitches for these things every day, and of course every one of them wants a cut of their hard earned revenue. It's a bad deal for a small business owner. They take all the risk, invest all the capital, while some SV firm comes along and kindly offers to scoop all the cream (margin) off the top.
So, this business failed due to a combination of lack of knowledge of the market and were not addressing a truly burning need for customers.
Kidding aside, I used to live one block away from a Trader Joe's and am sort of over them now. It can be a frustrating place to shop when you just want 'regular stuff', rather than paying the markup for fancy varieties of things. It's very nice to have as a supplement to a normal grocery store though.
The market is ruthlessly efficient. If something has a low barrier to entry, like his idea, then it's absolutely 100% guaranteed that someone else has tried it. Would-be founders need to do a brutally honest assessment of why they are going to succeed where others have failed.