How to sell tickets for a guided tour

Every Saturday at 2 pm your guide sets off from the town hall, and with more than twenty people nobody at the back can hear a word. Until now, bookings came in by email and by phone, into a list nobody fully trusted. To sell tickets for a guided tour you really need just two things: a fixed start time and a hard limit on the number of places. This article shows you how to set that up, online and at the desk.

A guided tour is a time with a maximum

At a museum with day tickets, people walk in whenever they like. A guided tour is different: there is a start time, a guide, and a group that can't grow beyond what that guide can handle. That is exactly what a time slot is: one moment with a maximum number of places. The 2 pm tour can be full while the 4 pm tour is still empty.

That's why there is a separate product type, Guided tour: an accompanied visit at a fixed start time. A guided tour is always sold on a time slot, so your visitor never buys a ticket without a time.

How to set it up

1. Go to Sales → Products and click New product.
2. Under Type, choose Guided tour and give it a name your visitors understand, for example "Guided town walk".
3. Enter 90 under Duration in minutes. The time slot generator will pick up that number on its own.
4. Add an online price, for example 12 euros. If you charge a different price at the desk, add a second price for the Desk channel.
5. Go to Sales → Time slots and click Create time slots.

An example for the Saturdays and Sundays of November: First start 10:00, Last start 16:00, Every how many minutes? 120 and Seats per time slot 20. That gives you four tours a day, at 10 am, noon, 2 pm and 4 pm. If Stay within the opening hours of the venue is on, the generator only creates tours that fall entirely within your opening hours. Every field is explained in the guide under Time slots.

Capacity per group: which number do you enter?

Under Seats per time slot, don't enter how many people physically fit, but how many you want to sell online. Want to keep five places for people who turn up at the meeting point on the day? Then enter fifteen instead of twenty.

Capacity is set on each time slot separately. If you have two guides on Sunday at 2 pm, you raise only that one slot to forty with Change capacity. You can't go below what has already been sold, so you never sell a place that no longer exists. The idea behind it is explained under capacity management.

Other languages and other prices

A tour in French at 11 am is a product of its own, with its own time slots: that way the language is clearly on the ticket, and the right guide knows how many people to expect.

The same goes for prices. A time slot belongs to one product, with one counter. If you sell adult and child tickets for the same time, each price has its own time slots and you split the group: for example sixteen places for adults and four for children. How to build products and prices is covered in Products and prices.

A private group: the guide for one party

A school class, a family celebration or a staff outing doesn't want twenty separate places, it wants the guide to itself. For that, create a second product of the Group type: one line for a whole party. Set Maximum per order to 1, give it a price per group and create the time slots with 1 seat per slot. One booking then takes the whole hour, and nobody else can join that group.

At the desk and at the meeting point

Your ticket shop, your counter point of sale and any resellers all sell from the same time slots. A place that's gone online is refused at the till too. On busy days, places are held for ten minutes during checkout, so two visitors can never both buy the last place.

Online, a time slot closes at its start time. Anyone who still wants to join at 2:05 pm comes to the desk, and there you decide. At the meeting point the guide scans tickets with the scanning app, even without a network. How that works is explained in scanning tickets at the door.

Rain, or a guide who's ill

If you want to stop selling but the tour is still going ahead, use Close: people who already booked simply come along. If it really isn't happening, choose Cancel. You see right away how many people you need to contact, their tickets stay in place until you've sorted it out, and you refund them afterwards from the order.

What it costs

There is never a charge per ticket. On the free plan, a guided tour counts as one event, with 100 paid tickets. If you run tours every weekend, Start (€9.00 a month) is a better fit: up to 3,000 paid tickets a year, with the counter point of sale included. To also sell through GetYourGuide, Tiqets or Viator, you need Growth. Read becoming a supplier on travel platforms, compare the plans on the pricing page, or see how it looks for guided tours.