Ask a room full of tour operators how they feel about the year ahead and you tend to get the same answer: a shrug, followed by some version of “who knows.” Global instability, inflation, safety questions, shifting trade policy, airline disruptions, political uncertainty, overtourism backlash, booking behavior that swings month to month. The forces shaping demand right now sit mostly outside any single operator’s control.
That uncertainty pushes a lot of owners into a familiar trap. They freeze, waiting to see what happens. Or they build a detailed 12-month forecast in January, watch reality diverge from it by March, and then quietly stop looking at it.
The operators who hold up best in conditions like these are not the ones with the most accurate predictions. They are the ones who stopped trying to predict and started building for flexibility instead. That shift, from forecasting the future to staying ready for several versions of it, is the difference between a business that bends and one that breaks.
Editor’s note: this article is a preview of an upcoming Arival Insider Pro Meetup online event led by Kelsey Tonner. The session is open to Arival Free members also, sign up here for a free membership.
Why certainty is the wrong goal
A traditional annual plan assumes the year will roughly resemble the assumptions you made about it. In a stable market, that holds well enough. In an unpredictable one, it sets you up to be wrong and to feel behind for most of the year.
We have watched operators grow through good years, bad years, and the pandemic, and a pattern shows up every time things get shaky. The businesses that keep moving treat their plan as a living document, not a prediction. They work in shorter horizons, usually around 90 days, and they revisit the plan as conditions change rather than locking themselves into numbers they set before they had real information.
The goal is not a perfect plan. It is a resilient business: one with enough structure underneath it to absorb a surprise without falling over.
Cash is what buys you options
Most operators track projected revenue closely and pay far less attention to cash. When the market gets shaky, that order is backwards. Revenue is a forecast. Cash is what actually pays your team, covers your fixed costs, and gives you room to make a decision instead of being forced into one.
Four numbers tell you where you stand, and they are worth knowing cold before any slow stretch:
- Your burn rate is how much cash leaves the business every month across everything, not just payroll and marketing. Software subscriptions, insurance, rent, vehicles, the small recurring charges that are easy to forget. Add them all up.
- Your runway is how many months you can operate at that burn rate before you run into trouble. The useful version of this number is not a single figure but a range. What happens to your runway if bookings drop by half? What if you only hit minimum group sizes for a full month? Thinking in scenarios rather than a single forecast lets you make adjustments before you hit a wall instead of after.
- Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to a tour page who actually book. If a thousand people visited a page last month and twenty-five booked, that is a 2.5 percent conversion rate, which is fairly typical. Well-optimized pages with a strong product-market fit often reach 6 to 8 percent. If you cannot track this per page yet, start with total website traffic against total bookings to get a baseline, then refine once you know which tours matter most.
- Your customer acquisition cost (CAC) is what it costs to win one new paying customer. Add up everything you spent on marketing last month, ads, design, email tools, and divide it by the number of new direct bookings those efforts produced. Six hundred dollars and twenty bookings works out to thirty dollars per customer. The number itself matters less than the comparison: Is what you spend to get a booking lower than what that booking is worth to you over time?
If those four numbers are fuzzy right now, getting clear on them is the highest-value work you can do this week. Everything downstream gets easier to manage once you know where you actually stand.
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Extend your runway without gutting the business
Once you know your burn rate and runway, you have levers to pull. The trick is pulling the right ones.
Start with a subscription audit. Block thirty minutes and look at every recurring charge: booking software add-ons, schedulers, email platforms, the tools you signed up for and forgot. For each one, ask whether it actively helps you win or serve guests. Cancel, pause, or downgrade the rest. Trimming a couple hundred dollars a month adds real time to your runway.
Next, revisit fixed costs. Phone and internet plans, vehicle leases, insurance policies. A phone call asking for a better rate or a seasonal payment structure costs you nothing and sometimes buys meaningful flexibility. This is not penny-pinching; it’s buying yourself time.
Then consider delaying or outsourcing non-essential work. A short-term freelancer may make more sense than a heavy monthly retainer. Those 15 extra bikes can probably wait. You can reinvest later, once you have more clarity.
Do not cut your revenue engines
Here’s where careful operators get into trouble. In a push to cut costs, they slash the things that were actually bringing money in: their best-performing ads, their list-building, the marketing campaigns producing real returns. They feel productive and end up worse off.
A simple test helps. If a dollar spent is reliably bringing back three or more, that is not a cost. It is a revenue engine. Be ruthless with waste and protect what is working.
Bring cash in sooner
Beyond cutting, there are honest ways to pull revenue forward. Multi-day operators can offer a small incentive for paying off balances early, or use buy-now-pay-later services to reduce friction on larger bookings. Day tour operators can lean on gift cards, which bring in immediate cash, often attract customers who would not have booked otherwise, and carry a built-in lag of several months between purchase and redemption. A meaningful share of cards go unredeemed entirely, and many guests spend beyond the card’s value when they do use it.
Bundling with nearby partners, such as a walking tour paired with a brewery or a food experience paired with a spa, can lift average spend. So can updating your messaging to speak to local and regional travelers, who tend to book closer to the date and with less hesitation when budgets feel tight.
Talk to your guests before you change anything
When the market shifts, the instinct is to guess at why people are hesitating and adjust offers based on that guess. Resist it. The operators who adapt well do the opposite. They go straight to the source.
One question does most of the work: “What are your biggest challenges or frustrations when it comes to ___?” Fill the blank with your niche, whether that is organizing a group outing, finding outdoor activities near a city, or planning a trip with kids. Ask it of past guests. Call people who have already booked. Post it in your social channels and read the replies.
When you understand what your guests are worried about and hoping forin their own words, you can shape your offers, your sales pages, and your marketing around what they actually need rather than what you assume they need. In an uncertain market, that clarity is worth more than any forecast.
Market smarter, not harder
Tight budgets are not the moment to chase shiny new channels. They are the moment to lean on the ones with the best returns. Email remains one of the highest-ROI channels available to tour operators, as long as you send something useful rather than a stream of promotions. Address the new concerns your guests are raising. Share seasonal updates and behind-the-scenes moments. One genuinely helpful email a week builds trust and drives bookings without a big budget.
A small private community, a Facebook or WhatsApp group for past guests and locals, keeps you top of mind and gives you a direct line to people who already value what you do. Webinars and workshops that solve a real problem for your guests position you as a credible authority and tend to convert well, especially for premium and multi-day experiences.
Plan for flexibility, act this week
None of this requires predicting what the next twelve months hold. It requires building a business that can adjust to whatever shows up. Get clear on your burn rate and runway. Track your conversion rate and your cost to acquire a customer. Extend your runway by cutting waste while protecting what works. Talk to your guests and let their answers shape your offers. Deliver real value through low-cost, high-return marketing.
The aim is to get out of worry and analysis paralysis and into steady, proactive motion. Pick one of these this week and start. Flexibility isn’t something you find when the storm hits. It’s something you build before it arrives.
Learn more in the upcoming Arival Insider Pro Meetup session with Kelsey Tonner. The session is open to Arival Free members also, sign up here for a free membership.
About the Author
Kelsey Tonner is the founder of Guest Focus, a tour business coaching company whose highly successful coaches have worked with more than 2,000 tour operators in over 75 countries since 2015. He has spent 20+ years in the tour industry as a coach, tour designer, and tour leader trainer.
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Header image: Pexels / Andrew Neel
