Simple tech tools can help solve some of your biggest group travel headaches.
Leading group trips can be wonderful and rewarding, but it can also come with its share of hassles. Managing logistics, finding lost people, sharing information and keeping travelers entertained takes a lot of work and consumes time that could be better spent building relationships with your customers.
Fortunately, today’s technology makes many of these tasks much faster — and much easier. There’s a good chance you already have apps and tools at your fingertips that could solve some of these problems.
Leverage some of these simple tech features to simplify your life as a travel leader.
Location Sharing
If you give your travelers free time on tours, there will be moments when people get temporarily lost. This can cause a lot of problems for travel leaders, but you can minimize that risk and hassle. All smartphones offer location-sharing services that allow you to tell a lost traveler exactly where you are — or find where they are. You can share your location in a group message or even turn on real-time location tracking so your travelers can see where you are at any given time. Another helpful use of location services is to create map pins for important sites, such as your hotel, restaurant or gathering point, and then share those with the group as well.
Rideshare Vouchers
Though most transportation during your group trip will take place on a motorcoach, there will be times when it may be more convenient to use rideshares. If you have a handful of customers that want to make an airport transfer, side trip, supply run or optional excursion, using Uber or Lyft is often the most convenient way to go. You can use your favorite rideshare company’s voucher program to create coupons for those customers. Just set up the vouchers in your app then send them to your travelers. They book and manage the rides from their own phones, and when they’re done, those rides get charged to your credit card.
Jam Sessions
Long stretches of highway don’t have to mean boring moments on group trips. You can leverage the motorcoach’s sound system and Bluetooth connection to create some excitement. Build a road-trip playlist with songs related to the places you’re visiting or favorite tunes from the past that will take travelers down memory lane. You can also use your favorite audio streaming service to create your own version of “carpool karaoke,” play fun games like “name that tune” or pass your phone around and let different people take turns playing deejay. Pro tip: To offer a shared listening session without bothering passengers who would prefer silence, some streaming apps allow you to set up group jams across devices for a “silent disco” experience.
Live Itineraries
There’s a good chance that whoever put your group trip together spent hours crafting a thoughtful and inspiring itinerary. But let’s face it — very few travelers want to carry a multipage document around during the trip to keep track of where they should be next. The simple solution to this problem is to share your itinerary as a PDF that people can reference on their phones. An even better option would be to have some version of a live itinerary that updates in real time. This can be as simple as a shared Google doc where you list the important times and places for the day or as sophisticated as a dedicated app provided by your tour company or other third party.
Group Messaging
In an age of instant communications, you can solve all kinds of problems before they start by getting messages to your travelers in real time. You may already do this with a group text thread for smaller trips, but the native texting app on your phone probably caps out somewhere around 10–12 members. To get around this, standalone messaging apps like WhatsApp, GroupMe or Signal allow you to share messages, photos and more with larger groups of people. These group threads can turn into lively sources of conversation and entertainment during the trip. A number of travel software companies also offer apps that let group leaders message the group publicly and allow travelers to respond and ask questions to the group leader privately.
