Communicating With Guests Before, During and After the Tour
These messages are the only version of you a guest experiences until the morning they arrive.
Between paying and meeting you, a guest's entire experience of your business is a handful of messages. They set expectations, they decide how many questions land in your inbox, and they largely determine whether somebody arrives on time in the right place with the right shoes.
Most operators assemble these one at a time as problems arise. Designing the sequence deliberately takes an afternoon and removes most of the recurring admin for a season.
The sequence, mapped
Every message should have one job. If you cannot say what a message is for, it is noise — and noise is expensive, because it teaches guests to stop reading the ones that matter.
| When | Its one job |
|---|---|
| Immediately on booking | Confirm it is real, and answer everything |
| If a balance is due | Collect it without anyone chasing |
| A few days before (longer trips) | Preparation — kit, fitness, documents |
| The day before | Planning — time, place, weather, what to bring |
| On the morning | Navigation — where exactly, and how to reach you |
| During, only if something changes | Keep the group informed |
| Same evening or next day | Thank them, and ask for the review |
A day tour needs three or four of those. A multi-day trip legitimately needs more, because there is more to prepare. Beyond that you are adding messages to feel attentive, which produces the opposite result — the morning reminder gets muted along with everything else.
The confirmation does the most work
It arrives at the moment of highest anxiety — money has just left an account for something happening weeks away, bought from a business the guest has never used. Its first job is to prove this was real, which means arriving instantly and looking like it came from a company rather than a script.
Its second job is to answer every question the guest would otherwise email you. That makes completeness more valuable than brevity here, which is unusual:
- What was booked — product, option, date, time, party size, price paid
- Exactly where to meet, with a map link and a photograph if the spot is ambiguous
- What to bring and what to wear
- What happens in bad weather
- The cancellation terms, restated rather than linked
- How to reach a person, and how quickly you reply
- Anything they still owe, and when it is due
Every item there is a message you do not have to write by hand later. Operators who treat the confirmation as a receipt end up answering the same five questions all season.
Before the day
The pre-tour messages do two jobs that are easy to conflate. The day-before message is for planning — the guest is deciding what to wear and how the day fits around everything else. The morning message is for navigation, and needs to be short enough to read while walking. Reducing no-shows covers the timing and channel choices in more detail.
Two things worth building in that operators frequently miss:
Make the messages replyable. A pre-tour message somebody can answer converts a silent problem into a solvable one — a guest who realises they cannot come tells you rather than disappearing, and one who is running late says so.
Set expectations honestly, especially about difficulty. A message that says plainly this involves four hours of walking on uneven ground loses you the occasional booking and prevents the review that begins "nobody told us". That trade is almost always worth taking.
During the tour
The least considered part, and the one where the channel matters most.
Your guests are abroad. Many have no local number, are avoiding roaming charges, and will not answer an unknown call — so SMS and phone calls are unreliable at exactly the moment you need them. In practice a messaging app works far better, because it runs on wifi and the guest is already using it.
- Establish the channel before the day. Put the number in the confirmation and the morning reminder, so a guest who is lost already knows how to reach you.
- Make sure the guide has the numbers — on the manifest, before they leave. A guide who cannot call a missing guest is waiting blind.
- Use it for changes, not commentary. A delayed start, a moved pickup, a route altered by weather. Not photographs of the group, which nobody asked for mid-tour.
- On multi-day trips, consider a group thread for the duration — genuinely useful for logistics, and worth closing when the trip ends.
One judgement call: a group chat makes coordination easy and gives every guest a public channel for complaints. Most operators find that acceptable on multi-day trips where coordination genuinely matters, and unnecessary on a three-hour walking tour.
Afterwards
The post-tour message is where most operators either do nothing or overreach. One message, sent the same evening or the next day, doing three things: thank them, ask for a review, and leave the door open.
On reviews, timing and place matter. The strongest ask happens in person at the end of the tour while the experience is immediate — the written follow-up supports it rather than replacing it. And check where you are sending them: marketplaces solicit reviews automatically for bookings made through them, so for those guests your message is the second one about the same thing. Getting more platform reviews goes into that properly.
This is also the moment where a guest who booked through a platform becomes reachable directly for the first time. Once somebody has actually travelled with you, a relationship exists that is yours rather than the marketplace's — which is where repeat direct bookings come from.
But be careful with the boundary. Someone giving you an email address to receive a confirmation has not signed up for a newsletter. Ask separately, make declining easy, and check what applies where you and they are.
Automating without sounding automated
All of this should send itself. Nobody should be writing confirmations by hand, and a reminder that depends on somebody remembering is a reminder that eventually does not go.
The risk is that automated messages read as machinery, which undoes some of the trust they were sent to build:
- Write them as a person would. Plain sentences beat corporate formatting, and heavily templated design signals advertising.
- Use their name and their actual booking — the specific product, the specific time.
- Sign from a person with a real reply address, not a no-reply mailbox. A no-reply address on a message about tomorrow morning is a small act of hostility.
- Send in the guest's language where you can, particularly for the morning message.
- Read them once a season, as a guest would. Details drift — meeting points move, phone numbers change, and templates outlive the facts in them.
One structural check: make sure automated messages stop when they should. A reminder that goes to a guest who cancelled, or a review request after a tour that was called off, is worse than no message at all.
How Travelity helps
Travelity sends confirmations and reminders automatically against the actual booking, so the message carries the right product, option and time without anyone assembling it — and stops when a booking is cancelled or moved. Balance reminders for deposit bookings run on the same mechanism.
Guest contact details sit on the day's manifest where the guide can reach them, and guest records from every channel stay in one place, which is what makes the post-tour follow-up practical rather than theoretical.
Frequently asked questions
What should a tour booking confirmation include?
Everything needed to stop the guest emailing you — what was booked and when, exactly where to meet with a map link, what to bring and wear, what happens in bad weather, the cancellation terms, and how to reach a person. It arrives at the moment of highest anxiety, just after money has left an account, so completeness matters more than brevity.
How many messages should I send a guest before a tour?
For a day tour, usually three: the confirmation, a reminder the day before and a short one on the morning. Multi-day trips need more because there is genuinely more to prepare for. The test is whether each message removes a question you would otherwise answer individually — anything that does not is training the guest to ignore you.
How should I contact guests during a tour?
Through a channel that works on foreign phones without local credit, which in practice usually means a messaging app rather than SMS or a call. Establish it before the day, make sure the guide has the numbers on the manifest, and use it for genuine changes rather than commentary.
When should I ask for a review after a tour?
The most effective ask is in person at the end of the tour, while the experience is immediate. A written follow-up within a day or two supports it, but note that marketplaces solicit reviews automatically for bookings made through them, so adding your own for those guests makes you the second message about the same thing.
Can I add tour guests to my mailing list?
Not automatically. Someone giving you an email address to receive a booking confirmation has not agreed to marketing, and treating those as the same thing is the fastest route to complaints. Ask separately, make it easy to decline, and check what applies in your jurisdiction and theirs.
Bottom line
Give every message one job and drop the ones that do not have one. Make the confirmation complete enough to answer the questions you are tired of answering. Split the pre-tour messages into planning and navigation. Establish a messaging channel that works on a foreign phone before you need it.
Then automate all of it, write it like a person, and read the whole sequence once a season as a guest would. Most of what operators call customer service is really this — done in advance, once, for everybody.
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