For tour & activity operators
Five booking channels, one spreadsheet, and a Sunday night reconciling commissions.
The trips run beautifully. It's the paperwork wrapped around them that's eating your season.
Your season, drawn as a pipeline
Five stages, same as any business — except yours takes bookings from four or five places at once, which is where most of the mess comes from.
- 01
Be findable
Bookable on some channels, not on yours
- 02
The booking
One spreadsheet holds it all together
- 03
The itinerary
Waivers and pickups chased guest by guest
- 04
Run it, get paid
A Sunday night reconciling commissions
- 05
Review & rebook
The best day of their year, then silence
What’s actually leaking
01Be findable
The resellers can take a booking in three taps. Your own site takes an email and a phone call.
Full commission on business that could have been direct.
02The booking
Direct bookings, resellers, agents and walk-ups arriving into different places, reconciled by a person.
Double bookings, and empty seats you thought were sold.
03The itinerary
Dietary requirements, waivers, pickup points and weather calls, all handled by individual emails the night before.
An evening a week, every week of the season.
04Run it, get paid
Manifests rebuilt each morning, and reseller statements checked against your own bookings by hand at month end.
A full day a month, and commission errors you never catch.
05Review & rebook
No review request while the experience is fresh, and no offer to the guest who'd happily come back with friends.
The cheapest bookings you'll ever take, unmade.
The systems you’re already running
Most operators here are on Rezdy, Checkfront or ResPax for bookings and channel management — and if you build multi-day itineraries, likely Tourwriter, which was built in New Zealand for exactly that. Distribution through Bookme, Viator, GetYourGuide and your agent contracts. Stripe taking the money and Xero counting it.
We’re not here to replace any of that, and we won’t try to be your channel manager. Rezdy is good at that and you’re already paying for it. The gap is everything that happens around it — the guest communication, the manifest, the reconciliation, the follow-up.
Count it by the season, not the month
Say you take 1,800 bookings a season, and eight minutes of each one is admin a system should be handling — the waiver, the pickup detail, the dietary note, the confirmation. That’s 240 hours a season.
Then add a full day every month checking commission statements across four channels, in a period when you are least able to spare a day.
The commission reconciliation is the one operators are most surprised by, because it feels like it’s only an hour or two. It never is, and the errors you don’t catch cost more than the hours.
What we’d automate
- Bookings from every channel pulled into one operational view, without a spreadsheet in the middle
- Pre-arrival sequence triggered by departure date: waiver, pickup point, what to bring, weather call
- Tomorrow's manifest assembled and sent to guides and drivers automatically
- Reseller statements reconciled against your own bookings, so month-end is a review rather than a rebuild
- Review request while the trip is still fresh, and a rebooking offer that actually goes out
Where AI earns its keep here
Reseller statements arrive in four different formats and none of them match your booking records. They get read, matched against what you actually sold, and the discrepancies get flagged — so month-end becomes a review of exceptions rather than a rebuild from scratch.
Pre-arrival messages get drafted per booking too, with the pickup point and the weather call in them — for you to glance at and send. Nothing goes to a guest until one of your people has seen it.
What we’d avoid is a chat bot answering guest questions unsupervised. Your guests are about to get in a boat or a van with you; a wrong answer about pickup times is a genuinely bad morning.
And the timing, honestly
Nobody should be rewiring their booking flow in January. We’d scope this for your shoulder season, build it while you’ve got the head space, and have it running before the next one starts.
Which also means: if you ring us mid-season and we say “let’s talk in April”, that’s us being useful rather than uninterested.
Where to start
Start with a conversation
No charge and no pitch. If we’re not the right people for the problem, we’ll tell you and point you somewhere better.
Free · no pitch
You tell us what’s slow or manual. We ask the questions we’d ask any new client. By the end you’ll know whether we can help, roughly what it would involve, and what it would cost.
We work evenings and weekends, so there are a limited number of slots each week. Trades tend to ring rather than book — info@nullnil.net works just as well.