You've told us you know AI is coming to your tour business. Here's what it actually does on an ordinary day in the middle of your season.
What does your day start with?
It's Tuesday in the middle of your season. You've got departures going out this week, a supplier who hasn't been confirmed, a late season custom trip to build, and an inbox that filled up overnight with enquiries and customer questions.
The old way starts by opening five things. A spreadsheet for departures, the booking system for balances, your email, a folder for the word doc itinerary you built for the last ‘custom’ tour, and a text to the depot to find out who's driving. By the time you know where you stand, it's ten o'clock.
In Odyssey 2.0 you open one screen. The Control Centre shows what needs you right now: a supplier still unconfirmed close to departure, or a balance that's overdue. Next to it sits everything that's been prepared for you and is waiting for your go ahead. Below that, you can see the finances for upcoming departures and on enquiries that are due for a follow up. Your guides view their departures on their phone, and are already getting the rostered vehicle and resources ready.
If you prefer, a board view shows the work to do across your service areas: unconfirmed suppliers, missing customer details, operational resource conflicts like staffing a tour, and finance updates.
What happens when a guest emails?
Most of what lands in your inbox follows a pattern. Someone asks about availability, a supplier confirms, and a balance is due. You know how to reply to these before you've finished reading, but then you spend ten minutes writing it. And for many of you this means rewriting the same email response over and over.
In 2.0, the system can read the email, work out what it's about, and draft the reply using your knowledge base, so it provides information that actually exists. The draft waits for you to read it, change it if you have a question, want to add more information or a personal message, and approve it. Your version is the one that goes out to the customer or supplier.
Nothing is sent without your say-so unless you decide it can be. How and when AI is used is 100% your call.
How long does one trip take to build four ways?
More than two-thirds of multi-day operators now run tours for groups of 10 or fewer, according to Arival's research. That's more individual trips, each with its own details to pull together.
Building a trip in 2.0 can be done a few different ways. Build from a master product template (the trip everyone loves). Or build from scratch or give AI an idea and work with it to build a custom version. You can modify any of these through simple drag and drop. You pull in your suppliers and bundles of activities, and the same itinerary becomes a proposal, an agent brief, an operational sheet or a web page. You build it once, instead of typing it out four times. You can translate the language of these outputs.
If your guest speaks another language, you set it once on their record. Their emails go out in it, and the itinerary builder handles it too.
Why does it all work together?
None of this is a chatbot sitting on top of your software, or a bolt on AI widget. It works because Odyssey already understands how a multi-day operation fits together: guests, suppliers, guides, vehicles, bikes and luggage. That's more than twenty years of working alongside operators, built into the foundation.
When your information sits in one connected system, AI has a clear picture to work from. When it's scattered across spreadsheets and separate tools, it has to guess, and if it’s looking at outdated data you have some real risks. Bringing in your current knowledge layer enables the AI to understand your processes to help you in your day to day work.
Want to see what this looks like?
You don't know what you don't know… that means if you haven’t taken the opportunity and are proactively curious about something then you will have no knowledge of it. We encourage you to be curious with technology because if you aren’t, your competitors will be. So we invite you to jump on a zoom call with us if you're interested in improving your business systems and processes.
Next week: We’ll look at the admin that consumes your time during your week, and what it looks like when it stops.
About the Author
Al Check is Co-Founder of Odyssey, the operating system for multi-day tour operators. He leads sales, marketing, business development, AI strategy, and channel partnerships, helping tourism businesses simplify operational complexity and build scalable, AI-ready systems.
With more than two decades of experience in adventure tourism, Al has worked across guiding, customer service, reservations, operations, and senior leadership. His hands-on experience includes helping establish a new depot operation for Cycle Journeys and contributing to the leadership of one of New Zealand’s largest self-guided cycling businesses.
Al regularly writes and speaks on tourism operations, business improvement and the role of AI in helping operators turn trusted data into practical business intelligence. He does this through industry communities, including the Adventure Travel Trade Association, Tourpreneur, and Cycle Summit.
