Blog · Dispatches

Tour managing in the digital age

In 1998 I bolted a GPS receiver to a motorcoach so passengers could watch their own little dot crawl across the monitors. Nobody had done it before. The year before that, I blogged a 5,000-mile bicycle-and-skydiving charity tour in real time — also, as far as anyone can tell, a first. I mention this not to brag (well, not only to brag) but because people keep asking me whether technology is changing tour management.

It is. It always has been. And it has never once changed the job.

The job is this: forty strangers step onto a coach trusting that the next seven days will simply work. Hotels will hold rooms. Restaurants will seat groups. The Lincoln Memorial will be reached before sunset, and the one kid who wandered toward the wrong exit will be retrieved before anyone worries. Technology changes how fast I can fix a problem; it has never changed whose problem it is. It’s mine. That’s what the front seat means.

What the digital age has done is raise the floor and lower the excuses. A tour manager who still can’t reroute around a closed interstate in real time, rebook a restaurant from the jump seat, or keep parents updated without stopping the tour is not being traditional — just slow. The tools are table stakes now. The differentiator is the same as it was in 1990: judgment, calm, and knowing the material cold when the microphone goes hot.

So use every gadget. Then remember that when the coach breaks down at 4 p.m. outside Williamsburg, no app steps into the aisle, smiles, and buys the group forty-five minutes of good humor. That part is still done by hand.

More dispatches from the road coming — the stories, the systems, and the occasional disaster averted. Welcome aboard.