Starting any business requires a bit of legwork to get up and running — but if you know where to begin and have a clear roadmap, you can keep costs low and establish your business in a matter of weeks. (Most tour operators can get started for less than $2K.)

We’re a Tripadvisor brand that has been working with tour operators for 10+ years to help them sell tours online, drive new bookings via online channels, and streamline their operations.

We put together this guide explaining the core steps to starting a tour business.

We’ve organised the startup tasks into more manageable stages so you can follow our plan step-by-step until you’re ready to launch.

8 Stages for Starting a Tour Guide Business

  1. Cover the legalities
  2. Develop your brand
  3. Determine the types of tours to sell
  4. Determine how to sell tours
  5. Develop a marketing strategy to get your name in front of new customers
  6. Partner with other businesses to expand your reach
  7. Manage bookings, schedules, and staff with tour operator software
  8. Open your calendar for bookings

1. Cover the Legalities

We’ll start with the not-so-fun stuff — the required permits, paperwork, and legal hoops to operate as an official, recognised business.

Now, these will be different from country to country and state to state, so you’ll have to research exactly what your region requires, but typically, you must:

  • Register your business. You need to file for business licences so your government recognises your tour operator business, and you can hire staff, file taxes, etc. Some websites can help with this (like LegalZoom), but again, this varies from country to country.
  • Get a tour operator licence. This is not required in every country or city, but places like Washington D.C. and New York City require tour operators to apply for a licence and pass a test to operate their business. Other cities that require licences are Gettysburg, PA; New Orleans, LA; and Savannah, GA. Certain countries in the EU require licences as well; for example, you need a licence to operate a tour guide company in Spain or Italy, but not Germany. You can Google “tour operator licence in [your area]” to learn if it’s required and how to apply.
  • Secure the proper permits. This not only varies by location but can also vary by activity, so you’ll want to research what your business requires so you have all the necessary licences and permits from the start. (This can avoid legal troubles and fines later down the line.)
  • Set up liability insurance. Your insurance advisor can help point you in the right direction, but we typically see businesses obtain commercial general liability (CGL), property insurance, and accounts receivable insurance.
  • Set up a business bank account. This is a general best practice to prevent you from having personal accounts hooked up to payment systems and other business applications. You can also apply for business credit cards to help you earn extra perks for your spending.

In addition, it doesn’t hurt to build out a business plan. A business plan more or less defines your business and outlines a roadmap for the future — it’s a document with information about your brand, the goals you want to achieve, how you intend to achieve those goals, and timelines.

Then, unless you plan on going at it alone, you should hire staff members. Determine the resources you need and how many people you need to hire so you can plan accordingly.

2. Develop Your Brand

Now, things become fun — this is where you can tell your brand story.

You can answer questions like:

  • What’s your business?
  • What’s your mission?
  • What makes your business unique?
  • What can you offer customers that competitors don’t?

This is also the stage where you:

  • Brainstorm a business name
  • Design a logo
  • Select brand colours and fonts
  • Determine your unique selling points
  • Come up with a business slogan or a catchphrase (this isn’t necessary)

Some business owners also take the time to develop a brand guide. This is a detailed document outlining how to represent your brand across all touchpoints — in-person interactions and online communications. It includes many of the above points (like typography and colour palettes) but also goes into tone and includes “how-to” instructions for interacting with travellers and tasks such as sharing marketing materials.

Outlining a brand guide can be especially useful as you grow; it ensures all staff and partners know how to be the “face of your brand” so you can maintain consistency and develop a strong brand image. You’re not making things up as you go or risking staff going rogue on tours or in social posts.

3. Create a List of the Types of Tours & Experiences You Want to Offer Travellers

This is arguably the most critical step, but remember that you can adjust your product line as you go. You’ll learn more about customer interests and which tours from your line are most popular (and which aren’t). Of course, lifestyle, tourism trends, and seasonality can also impact this. What you put in place now doesn’t have to be set in stone forever.

First, you should consider your passions and interests. What are you good at? What types of tours do you want to offer? What are your value propositions?

Then, we suggest doing some market research to learn about:

During your brainstorming, you’ll also want to consider pricing. Yes, you want to offer experiences you and your customers love, but these experiences also need to drive a profit, or your business won’t succeed.

Determining pricing can be a process of trial and error. We suggest looking at similar experiences and other tours and activities in your area to get an idea of how to price your tours. You can always update rates as you go, as a majority of tour operator software offers dynamic pricing tools to adjust rates based on different conditions (we’ll discuss these more later).

4. Determine How to Sell Tours

Now, you want to think about sales channels — how will you sell your tours? Obviously, you can take in-person, walk-up business, but in today’s digital age, the great majority of your potential customers plan vacations and shop online, so you want to make sure people can find and book with you there.

There are two primary ways to do this:

  • Create a booking website — travellers who know about your business can visit your website, see your tours and availability, and book with you instantly, 24/7.
  • List your tours on OTAs — these are the travel sites people already know and use to book vacations and things to do. These sites see millions (upon millions) of monthly visitors, so posting your tours here allows you to get in front of new customers across the globe.

Online Travel Agencies GIF

Note: You can also connect with Google Things to do. This allows you to appear in Google’s “Activities and tours” feature when users search for tours and activities in certain destinations. This program is free for tour operators and lets you reach searchers travelling to your area and looking to fill their itineraries.

Google search: Tours in San Francisco

To learn more, we wrote detailed guides on these steps:

5. Develop a Marketing Strategy to Promote Your Brand & Experience

Selling tours on OTAs and Google is an effective way to get in front of new customers, but you also need a marketing strategy to support short-term and long-term growth. There are dozens of approaches here, including free and paid methods.

Your marketing strategy could include:

  • Creating accounts on social media platforms and regularly posting and interacting with customers.
  • Partnering with travel influencers to promote your business.
  • Sending email newsletters with details on new experiences, events in your area, and incentives to book (like discounts).
  • Listing your business on review sites like Tripadvisor and Yelp and asking customers to leave reviews. Businesses with more reviews and higher star ratings are promoted more often on these sites.
  • Investing in paid advertising — you can run search engine ads to your website, boost content on social media, or enrol in ad programs on OTAs.

Tripadvisor Walking & Biking Tours in San Francisco

We could go into a lot of detail here, as marketing a tour guide company is a whole topic in and of itself. So we wrote a complementary guide with more information & tips on these steps: How to market a tour company: 10 (free & paid) strategies.

6. Partner with Other Businesses in Your Local Area & the Tourism Industry

Now, this isn’t a necessary step to get started, but creating partnerships is helpful for new businesses to establish a customer base, expand their reach, and offer more unique experiences.

We recommend partnering with other tour and activity providers, hotel chains or resorts, travel agents, tourism boards, DMOs, and other businesses in the travel industry to promote your business to new customers. You can work with local businesses or even global brands (like a Marriott or Hilton).

We suggest:

  • Finding businesses that will promote and resell your tours. This helps you earn bookings and grow your customer base.
  • Offering to promote others’ services for a commission. This helps you earn “passive income,” as you can increase revenue without adding more to your schedule or product line.
  • Creating tour packages with other businesses. For example, you could partner with a hotel chain to offer travellers lodging with their tours or with another local tour operator to create a combo experience. This lets you offer customers experiences you otherwise couldn’t and expand your product line; it also gives you a competitive advantage as you can offer more standout or convenient experiences.

Read more: How to find the best partners & increase revenue

7. Support Yourself with Tour Operator Software to Manage Bookings & Back-Office Operations

The last major step is to equip yourself with the right business applications to support your operations. Tour guides have unique considerations here — they need tools to create a booking website, manage availability and new bookings, connect to OTAs and resellers, schedule staff for tours, handle customer communications and check-in processes, monitor revenue and which tours are booked most often, and more.

That’s why tour operator software exists. These are essentially online booking systems designed with all the tools tour operators need to manage back-office tasks.

This isn’t to say you absolutely need tour operator software to get started. We often see small businesses use free tools to keep startup costs low (e.g., WordPress to build websites and spreadsheets to manage bookings).

While these tools can save money and sustain you when you’re only selling on one sales channel or managing a few bookings per month, they have several disadvantages. You have to work between multiple software, processes and spreadsheets become disorganised, and it can be extremely time-consuming.

When you calculate the hours and costs to manage these tools, you’re better off investing in tour operator software and using your time for more productive tasks — like networking with partners to establish those relationships.

Our system, Bókun, is a popular tour operator software because we work with teams at all growth stages — including brand-new startups. (Plus, we offer some of the most competitive pricing in the industry.)

Bókun includes tools to support all of the steps above, so you can:

  • Create a booking website customised to your brand (with logos, colours, and fonts).
  • Connect with dozens of OTAs and grow your online presence. We also have preferred partnerships with Viator and GetYourGuide to offer extra perks to those users.
  • Create engaging tour listings for all of your experiences — our product builder walks you through the steps so you know exactly what details to include to create attention-grabbing listings.
  • Connect with Tripadvisor to pull customer reviews onto your website.
  • Partner with other travel businesses via Bókun Marketplace. Our network contains thousands of members (over 25K), including other tour operators, travel agents, hotels and resorts, rental providers, and more, so you have countless opportunities to drive new business.

In addition, Bókun lets you run a well-oiled operation where you can:

  • Create a customisable booking calendar to see all tour bookings in one place — whether they were from your website, OTAs, partners, or offline sources.
  • Manage availability across all sales channels from your Bókun booking calendar. All customers can see real-time availability, which helps avoid blunders like double bookings or overselling.
  • Automate customer communications so you don’t have to spend time manually sending booking confirmations, tickets, reminders, and follow-ups. We provide a template library so you can design those essential emails (and create other promotional or retargeting emails) and schedule them to be sent at set times or after specific actions. You’ll never forget an important email again.
  • Offer customer portals for travellers to view, modify, or cancel tours. All updates automatically reflect in your booking calendar, and our system sends an email to confirm customer changes.
  • Utilise a reporting dashboard to track bookings, revenue, popular tours, most successful sales channels, and more. This data can help guide your growth strategies so you know what’s working and where to double down.

Watch our quick, one-minute explainer video here:

 

Bókun offers affordable, straightforward pricing, so cost isn’t a barrier for small teams. Plus, our comprehensive booking software can actually save tour operators money during startup; for example, Bókun’s website builder saves our users an average of $3K/year because they don’t have to pay monthly subscription costs to host their site, buy a domain, or pay someone to manage or optimise it for SEO.

Here’s a breakdown of Bókun pricing:

  • Our platform’s free trial allows you to try Bókun for 14 days. During this time, you can begin building your website, connect with Viator, explore the Marketplace, and manage online and offline bookings.
  • After the free trial, you can opt-in to a monthly subscription. Every customer has access to Bókun’s core booking tools, so you don’t have to upgrade between packages or hassle with tiered pricing. We offer add-on modules through our app store if you want to customise Bókun with extra functionality; some add-ons are free, while others, like inventory management, are paid.
  • We charge one of the lowest booking fees amongst competitors — for online bookings from your website, OTAs, and partners.
  • We waive Bókun booking fees on Viator reservations and offer users free monthly product checks.
  • You can manage offline bookings in Bókun for free.

You can learn more about tour operator software in our guides below:

8. Launch!

Now that you’ve put in the hard work to get started, all that’s left to do is:

  • Officially open for business and begin accepting tours.
  • Provide the best customer service to earn positive reviews and repeat customers.
  • Track bookings and revenue to monitor and manage growth.
  • Test new sales channels to see how they perform, introduce new products to see if they attract new business, and measure which partnerships are most successful.

To create a successful tour guide business, you need to know what’s working and what isn’t. Being able to report on business performance is essential to the overall growth of your tour guide business.

In addition to our reporting tools, we offer consulting for growing teams as they drive new bookings in Bókun.

For more info, take a look at our guides to help small businesses expand their reach:

To see how Bókun supports these startup steps, start your free 14-day trial.