Follow one tour day at a walking tour company on EquipDash, from the first online booking to the numbers at close.
OTA DISTRIBUTION
List your tours on GetYourGuide and Viator. Bookings flow straight back into EquipDash, and availability and pricing stay in sync — so you never oversell across channels.
0% EquipDash fee on OTA bookings — you only pay the OTA’s own commission Our platform fee applies to direct online bookings only. See pricing →
They book on your own booking page, branded as your tour company, sitting on your website.
Dash answers on your booking page from your own tour write-ups, checks the departure and puts the booking in their basket.
Viator and GetYourGuide bookings sit next to your direct ones, and seats are counted across all of them, so a departure never oversells.
When you pick a guide, EquipDash flags anyone missing a qualification the tour needs, or already out on another walk.
The run sheet builds itself from the bookings, and the count moves as each guest arrives.
The booking page offers a place on the waitlist, and when a seat comes back, the next person in line gets it.
Set the tour to request to book. They pick a date and time, their card goes on file, and nothing is charged until you say yes.
Each one pulls the guest's details from the booking, so nobody copies and pastes at 11pm.
Set the wind, rain and lightning you won't walk in, and a bot watches the forecast at your meeting point.
Open the reports, or ask Dash and read the answer in plain words.
Describe a job in a sentence and a bot does it every day, asking you first when it should.
Free resources
Free checklists for tour operators. Use them as they are, or import them into EquipDash.
Ready-made bots for tour operators. Turn one on in Dash in a few seconds.
Tour operator terms, explained.
Tour operator software is a platform that manages every part of a guided-tour operation — online direct bookings, OTA distribution, spots-per-departure capacity, guide rostering, waivers, manifests, payments, post-tour reviews and guest communication — in one place. Modern systems like EquipDash replace the spreadsheet-and-OTA-dashboard sprawl most operators grew up on and add AI bots that handle the repetitive admin (pre-tour reminders, waiver chasers, review requests, manifest building) automatically.
Spots-per-departure capacity is the cap you set on each individual tour time slot — 12 guests on the 9am food tour, 8 on the 8pm ghost walk, 4 on the 5pm carriage. EquipDash enforces the cap across every booking channel (direct widget, Viator, GetYourGuide) in real time, so the same departure never gets oversold by an OTA selling the last seat while a direct guest is checking out. Capacity flows through to your manifest and your guide app.
A tour manifest is the per-departure list of guests showing names, ages, party size, emergency contacts, waiver status, dietary or mobility flags and custom-form answers. Guides use it to check guests in at the meeting point, confirm waivers, and brief the group before the tour starts. EquipDash builds manifests automatically from booking data and delivers each to the assigned guide phone the evening before — no end-of-day reconciliation, no spreadsheet exports.
OTA channel distribution is listing your tours on Online Travel Agencies (Viator, GetYourGuide) so guests can discover and book your departures from the same platforms they use to plan trips. EquipDash syncs your availability and pricing out to the OTAs and pulls bookings back into your unified calendar in real time, with spots-per-departure capacity enforced across every channel. EquipDash supports Viator and GetYourGuide today.
Guide rostering is matching the right guide to each departure based on availability, languages, first-aid certifications and tour-specific qualifications. EquipDash tracks every guide profile and shows you who is free AND qualified when you schedule a tour — not just who is free. Certification expiries are flagged before they lapse and unqualified guides are blocked from running incompatible tours.
A pre-tour reminder is the SMS or email sent to each guest 12–24 hours before their departure with the meeting-point address, departure time, what to bring, and a one-tap link to sign any outstanding waiver. Pre-tour reminders cut no-shows by 30–50% and dramatically reduce check-in friction at the meeting point. EquipDash ships these as pre-built Dash Bots — no scripts to write, no SMS provider to wire up.
Best practice is to require every guest to sign a digital participant waiver before the tour starts — covering activity risk, release of liability, emergency contact, and (for minors) guardian consent. EquipDash sends the waiver link automatically with each booking confirmation, chases unsigned waivers 24 hours out via the Tour Waiver Chaser Bot, and stores the signed copy on the booking. Pull a signed waiver in seconds if you ever need it for a claim.
Meeting-point check-in is the workflow guides use to confirm each guest has arrived at the tour starting location. With EquipDash, the guide opens the manifest on their phone, ticks each guest off as they arrive (or scans a booking QR code from the confirmation email), and a late guest gets a polite "we left at 9:05" auto-text. Head count happens automatically. A walk-up joining at the meeting point can be added on the spot via tap-to-pay.
Branded gift vouchers and experience gift cards are sold from your booking widget — recipients buy a voucher for a fixed dollar amount or a specific tour and the system generates a unique redemption code. The recipient redeems at checkout like any other payment method. EquipDash includes a Gift Voucher Tracker Bot that pings recipients 30 days before expiry so vouchers do not quietly lapse on the customer.
Repeat guests are guests who book more than one tour over a season or year — they have a 3–5× higher lifetime value than first-timers and they leave more reviews. EquipDash tracks every guest profile across bookings (direct + OTA where the OTA shares guest data), surfaces repeat-rate by tour type, and ships a Repeat Guest Reactivation Bot that texts dormant guests at the start of the season referencing the tour they did last time.
A tour no-show is a confirmed guest who paid for a departure and never showed up at the meeting point. No-show rates run 3–8% across most operators; over 10% indicates a deeper communication or expectation-setting problem. EquipDash ships a Tour No-Show Follow-Up Bot that fires 45 minutes after a no-show, sends a warm rebook link with a courtesy credit, and logs the outcome — turning a missed booking into a recovered one.
Most tour operators ship four SMS touchpoints: pre-tour reminder (the evening before with meeting point + what to bring), waiver chase (12 hours before if unsigned), departure-day check-in nudge (2 hours before), and review request (24 hours after the tour ends). Stacked together they cut no-shows by 30–50%, lift waiver completion to ~98%, and meaningfully raise Google review counts. EquipDash ships these as pre-built Dash Bots.
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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Real questions from tour operators evaluating EquipDash. If yours isn't here, get in touch.
Contact UsPlans start at $29/month, or $23/month billed annually. 21-day free trial, no card. There is a 1–2% platform fee you can pass to the guest at checkout — so unlike FareHarbor or Peek Pro pulling 1–6% off your top line, your margin stays yours.
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