When should you start planning for peak season?
Earlier than feels necessary. The moment to start is when the first tour operator programmes land in your inbox, not when the first busy week appears on the rota. By then, the guides you wanted have committed their best dates to other agencies.
Planning peak season is three jobs done in order: work out how much guiding you will need, find out how much your team can actually give you, and close the gap before the season starts. Then, once it starts, a weekly routine keeps that plan true. Each step below can be done on a spreadsheet; the point is that it gets done.
How do you forecast how many guides you need?
Operator programmes arrive in every possible format: a series of departures, a list of groups with dates, a seasonal allocation. Turn all of them into the same unit: guide-days per language per date. A full-day excursion with two coaches of German speakers is two German guide-days. A morning walking tour in English is half a day, but it still blocks one guide that morning.
Three rules make the forecast useful:
- Peak days, not averages. A week that averages eight English guides a day may need fourteen on the Wednesday a cruise ship is in. Plan for the Wednesday.
- Confirmed and probable apart. Series departures with a history are probable; a quote you sent last week is not. Keep them in separate columns.
- Languages separately. Ten guides do not cover ten services if only two of them speak Italian.
Lay the result out week by week against what your team has confirmed. The gaps tell you where to recruit, and which languages to worry about first:
| Week (example) | English | German | French | Italian | Gap to close |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 23 | 9 needed / 11 available | 3 / 4 | 2 / 2 | 1 / 1 | None, but no French or Italian backup |
| Week 27 | 14 / 11 | 4 / 4 | 3 / 2 | 2 / 1 | 3 English, 1 French, 1 Italian |
| Week 31 | 12 / 9 | 5 / 3 | 2 / 2 | 1 / 0 | 3 English, 2 German, 1 Italian |
How do you collect guide availability without chasing everyone?
Most availability problems are format problems. One guide replies with a voice note, another sends a photo of a paper diary, a third says “mostly free in July”. Ask once, in one format, with a deadline:
- One form or sheet per guide, with the season’s dates already listed, and three options per date: available, not available, ask me.
- A deadline, and a clear statement that dates offered after it are welcome but not guaranteed work.
- A monthly update, because freelance calendars change. A guide who said yes to August in March may have taken a contract elsewhere by June.
This is the same distinction that prevents double bookings during the season. We go into the causes in how to avoid double booking tour guides.
How big should your bench of backup guides be?
There is no ratio that works for every agency. Look at your forecast instead: any date where you are using almost all your confirmed guides in a language is a date where one illness leaves a service uncovered. Those dates and languages are where you need backups.
A backup guide is only useful if they can start the same day you call them. That means, before the season:
Paperwork and rate agreed
They have your rate card, your cancellation terms and know how to invoice you.Access set up
They can see their services and accept them from their phone, just like the core team.One or two services already done
A shadowing day or a quiet service in the low season, so their first job with you is not a 45-person group on the busiest day.Product briefing
Meeting points, the operators’ expectations, and the excursions they are most likely to cover.Red flag: a backup list that is only a list of phone numbers.
How do you cover languages you rarely need?
The rare language is where peak season goes wrong most often, because nobody plans for a request that arrives twice a year. Spot them in the programmes early and decide case by case:
A guide from outside the core team
Agree terms in advance with the one or two guides who can cover it, even if you only need them twice.
A guide plus an interpreter
Workable for some programmes, but tell the operator in advance and price both roles.
The tour leader translating
Some groups travel with a tour leader who can do this. Confirm it with the operator in writing; never assume it.
How do you share out work fairly between guides?
In high season, the easy thing is to call the same reliable guides every time. That works until they burn out, and the rest of the team, who were promised work, start accepting offers elsewhere. You lose both groups.
Fair distribution needs two things: rules everyone knows, and numbers everyone can trust.
- The rules: how you weigh language, experience with the operator, availability offered and performance. Write them down and tell the team.
- The numbers: services, days and PAX per guide, per month. Review them every two or three weeks, not at the end of the season.
Fair is not equal. A guide who offered three days a week will do less than one who offered six. What guides need to see is that the rules are applied the same way to everyone.
How do you prevent guide fatigue in high season?
A tired guide is a quality problem before it is a staffing problem: the commentary gets thinner, the patience shorter, and the operator notices. A few rules help:
- A maximum run of consecutive working days, agreed with the team before the season.
- No early start after a late finish. An evening tour followed by a 7:00 airport pickup is a pattern to block when you assign.
- Alternate the demanding work: long coach days, large groups and summer heat with shorter or easier services.
- Watch the guides who never say no. They are the ones most likely to be on their eighth day in a row.
If your guides are employees rather than freelancers, there is also the law. In the UK, for example, workers are entitled to 11 hours’ rest between working days and to either 24 hours’ uninterrupted rest each week or 48 hours each fortnight. Check the rules that apply in your country.
What does a good weekly roster rhythm look like?
Once the season starts, the plan becomes a weekly routine. The exact days do not matter; the fact that they are the same every week does, because guides learn when to expect their schedule and when to reply.
Early in the week: update the forecast
Load new and changed services from the operators. Recheck the gaps for the next two weeks.Midweek: assign next week
Send every service for next week to a guide, with its rate, so there is time for replies and reassignments.End of the week: publish and chase
Next week is visible to every guide. Anything still without a confirmed guide is chased by name, not with a general message to the team.Every afternoon: check tomorrow
Every service for tomorrow has an accepted guide, the right meeting point and the latest PAX. This is the check that catches last-minute problems while there is still time to fix them.Red flag: finding out at eight in the morning that a service has no guide.
A rota that works for this has to show, at a glance, which services are accepted, which are still waiting for an answer and which have no guide at all. We explain what to include and the views that help in our page about tour guide scheduling. In Partners, each guide sees only their own calendar, always current, and gets an email when a service is assigned or changed, so the rota is not a screenshot that goes stale overnight.
What should you review when the season ends?
The best moment to plan next season is the week after this one ends, while the problems are fresh. Compare your forecast with what actually happened: which languages ran short, which dates were underestimated, which backups you actually used, and which guides carried too much. Those notes are next year’s first forecast.
Two related reads for the same planning cycle: how to set the rates you agree with guides before the season, and how to run the busiest single days of the year in shore excursion operations.