The 5 habits of effective multi-day tour operators

The 5 habits of effective tour operators

Here’s what I’ve noticed after spending years behind the scenes with tour operators: the ones who grow effectively all develop the same operational habits.

If you’re feeling stretched, struggling to keep up, or fighting daily fires, it’s often because the right operational habits aren’t in place. Or the ones you had are starting to slip.

It turns out, others in the industry have spotted the same pattern.

Kelsey Tonner, Founder at Guest Focus, a tour coaching business dedicated to helping operators grow sustainably, has seen the same pattern firsthand. Since 2015, Guest Focus has supported over 2,000 tour businesses across 75+ countries. That’s why we teamed up with them to host an online workshop: The 5 Habits of Effective Multi-Day Tour Operators.

The goal: to shortcut years of trial and error by giving you the five proven habits of effective tour operators.

Just like healthy personal habits, the right operational habits prevent problems before they happen and lead to good operational health. They ensure you have the time and energy to work on the important things, whether that’s growing your business or restoring balance in your work life.

In this article, I’m sharing an overview of the five habits, but you can watch the full workshop recording (link coming soon) and access the presentation here.

Before we jump into the five habits, I want to give a special thanks to the operators who generously shared their time and insights for the workshop.

1. Luke Mitchell – Product & Operations Manager, Unbound Travel Group
2. Steven Andrews – Managing Director, Great Private Tours
3. Andrew Wells – Managing Director, TourismTech.Solutions

Their experience and advice were invaluable in shaping this guide and they’re all great examples of operators who live and breathe these effective habits.

Habit 1: Use Templates and Checklists

The most effective tour operators use templates and checklists for everything from booking confirmations, packing lists, guide briefings, supplier emails, rooming lists, and more.

Why? Because most parts of running a tour are repeatable. And if something is repeatable, it should be standardised and, eventually automated or delegated.

Templates and checklists are the foundation of operational efficiency. They:

• Save mental energy by removing small, repetitive decisions from your day
• Reduce mistakes by ensuring nothing slips through the cracks
• Enable delegation and automation because processes are documented and repeatable

As my co-founder Alex likes to say: If you’ve done it three times, create a checklist. If you’ve used that checklist three times, automate it or delegate it.

Your decision-making battery is limited. Every small decision — from writing that supplier email to remembering where you saved your rooming list template — drains it. Over time, these micro-decisions pile up, leaving you exhausted and without the energy for the work that really matters. Templates and checklists protect that energy by eliminating the small, repetitive choices that slow you down.

Once your templates and checklists are in place, the next step is automation. Tools like Fieldbook can take over repetitive tasks, like generating supplier requests or populating key details, so the work you standardise once keeps saving you time on every tour.

Pro tip: Move from private to public checklists. A shared library of templates and checklists in your company wiki ensures your entire team benefits and your business doesn’t rely on what’s in one person’s head.

Habit 2: Create and Maintain a Company Wiki

Steven Andrew from Great Private Tours put it best: “As an owner, your job is to constantly outsource yourself.” And one area you need to outsource is what’s in your head.

This is a habit I see most tour operators develop too late. But when they do, it’s a game changer. Laurie Pritchard, founder of Small World Journeys, shared in a Fieldstories interview how creating a central knowledge hub completely transformed how her team worked and reduced her daily interruptions.

Here’s the problem: without a company wiki, your team relies on you as the “source of truth” and you become the bottleneck. Every day, small questions come your way:

• “Where’s the latest packing list?”
• “What’s the emergency contact for that lodge?”
• “Do we have a template for that guest email?”

Individually, these are minor. But they interrupt your flow, drain your mental energy, and are constant distractions.

A company wiki solves this. It’s a centralised, self-serve hub where your team can find what they need, when they need it, without tapping you on the shoulder. It:

1. Stops constant interruptions by letting your team answer their own questions.
2. Reduces key-person risk because knowledge stays in the business, even if someone leaves.

A good wiki isn’t a giant Word doc or a mess of folders. It’s more like an internal website:

1. Pages are linked and easy to navigate
2. Information is current and searchable
3. It’s so intuitive that your team actually uses it

Many operators assume this is complicated, but the truth is it’s surprisingly simple to start.

Tools like Notion make it simple to set up, and they even provide ready-to-use templates to get you going quickly. They’ve also written about setting up your first company wiki here.

A company wiki is one of the highest-leverage habits you can adopt. It creates a culture of self-service, protects your time, and keeps your business running smoothly, even when you’re offline.

Habit 3: Design Perfect Handovers

Effective operators don’t leave handovers to chance. They design handovers that are clean, clear, and final.

Andrew Wells explained the cost of poor handovers perfectly: “You know a handover was bad if it keeps coming back to you.” Follow-up questions, clarifications, or worse — a missed pickup or guest issue — are all signs that the handover failed.

The goal of a perfect handover:

1. You hand it off once
2. The next person has everything they need to succeed
3. You stop thinking about it

There are three key elements of a strong handover:

1. A standardised handover document – a complete, go-to reference the recipient can use to do the job without chasing you down.
2. A structured handover conversation – even a 10-minute briefing can catch issues an email might miss.
3. A process of continuous improvement – every missed detail or follow-up is a signal to refine the process.

Start with the two most important handovers for tour operators:

1. Sales → Operations: so operations knows exactly what was sold and can plan without guessing.
2. Operations → Guides: so guides can run the tour confidently without chasing details.

Ways to Make Your Handover Even Better

1. Share more, not less – clarity comes from providing all the details the next person might need.
2. Share the source, not copies – link to the live document or system (like your CRM or a digital guide itinerary) instead of sending static files.
3. Use video – a short Loom recording or screen share can often explain what text cannot.

Habit 4: Create Comprehensive Guide Itineraries

The success of a tour should never be left to memory or chance.

Effective operators build detailed guide itineraries that serve as the playbook for delivering a great experience. It removes luck from the equation and ensures every tour succeeds by design, not chance. A guide should be able to pick it up and confidently say, “I can run this tour just from this document.”

Why guide itineraries are essential:

1. Ensure consistency when different guides run the same tour
2. Allow you to delegate guiding without losing quality
3. Help you spot operational gaps when documenting the flow of the trip

Digital guide itineraries take this habit to the next level. Instead of static PDFs or printed sheets, tools like Fieldbook let you share a single, always‑up‑to‑date version with guides. It’s easier to access, keeps everyone aligned, and ensures any updates flow through instantly, so every tour runs seamlessly.

You can explore what a digital guide itinerary that comes out of Fieldbook here.

We’ve also written extensively about best practices for guide itineraries:

1. Best Practices for Guide Itineraries
2. Free Guide Itinerary Template

Habit 5: Review Every Tour

The most effective operators make continuous improvement a habit by reviewing every tour they run.

They proactively collect feedback, debrief, and implement changes so every tour is better than the last.

A structured review process typically includes:

1. Collect Feedback – from guests and guides, both quantitative and qualitative
2. Team Debrief – a conversation with the ground team to add context, celebrate wins, and flag urgent issues
3. Distill Insights – identify patterns and trends to understand what’s really happening
4. Make Changes – update itineraries, processes, and training before the next departure

This habit pays off over time:

1. Immediate fixes prevent repeat mistakes
2. Trends inform smarter, data-driven decisions
3. Your tours compound in quality, season after season

We dive deeper into this in our dedicated post series on post-tour reviews.

Implementing the Habits Today

Taking action on these habits doesn’t have to feel overwhelming.

For each habit, we’ve mapped out a baby step you can take in five minutes, a bigger step to build momentum, and a giant leap to fully embed the habit in your operations.

Start small or go big, either way, each step moves you closer to:

• Reducing daily stress and firefighting
• Saving time and mental energy
• Building a business that grows without chaos
• Spending more time working on the business, not in it

You can watch the full workshop recording (link coming soon) and access the presentation here to dive deeper and start implementing the 5 habits today.