Dan Eshed’s grandfather, Phillip Meyers, founded Immanuel Tours more than 50 years ago. His mother, Susan Eshed, has joined Phillip more than 45 years ago in the tourism industry in Israel.
“All my life, I’ve known the business — the hotels, our guides, our buses,” he recalls. “But I never thought that I would step in.”
Fast forward to 2023 when, post-COVID, Meyers decided to retire at 89. Dan was living in Tel Aviv, working as a lawyer in the largest firm in the country. Though his mother had asked a few times over the years, she once again encouraged her son to join the family business.
“I’ve always thought it’s an amazing duty; what we do is like a mission,” he says. “But I’d been a lawyer. I’d never actually worked for the company.”
Even so, Dan decided to give it a try. He gave his notice at the law firm, and the rest, as they say, is history.
“I fell in love with everything,” he explains. “When you’re a lawyer, you see people anxious, stressed. Here, 99.9 percent of the time — as long as we do our job correctly — the clients are happy.”
While the past two years have been challenging for Israel tourism (to say the least), the Immanuel Tours family has learned to pivot. In doing so, they were able to keep every tour operator employed during the war. Most have been with Immanuel Tours for 15 to 25 years.
“We have been able to preserve all of them, in spite of the fact that we had no tour groups in Israel,” Dan recalls. “We told them, ‘Listen, we want everyone to stay. We know it’s not an easy time, but tourism will come back.’
“And now that it has, we need more workers,” he adds.
These new employees will no doubt spend a lot of their time helping clients orchestrate their trips to the Holy Land, now that demand has rebounded.
“When a church decides to work with Immanuel Tours on a group tour to Israel, they will have all the materials to back them up promotionally,” Dan points out. “They don’t need to create any materials; they just share our materials with their logo.”
In the event that a church tour doesn’t fill up, the company even helps recruit additional travelers. That tour is added to the Immanuel Tours website, and individual travelers from all over the United States can apply to join. All requests go directly to the pastor or trip organizer at the church. “We don’t have anything to do with the money collected,” Dan explains. “It’s the church’s tour; they decide.”
“For me, the best part is seeing people’s reactions when they realize they stand at the actual places which they’ve read about in the Bible their entire lives,” Dan says. “It really warms my heart to see their love of the Bible and of Israel. It’s more than amazing. It excites me every time, and that’s why I’m here.”
