The one vertical I run myselfUpdated July 2026
Operations help for tourism, from someone who operates a tour company.
Most consultants who pitch tour and hospitality operators have never run a season, hired a guide, or watched a no-show storm eat a weekend's revenue. I co-founded Freaky Foot Tours in 2015 and still own it: a walking-tour company running in three Arizona cities on documented tours and trained guides, without me in the day-to-day. This page is the operating playbook from that company, offered as a service.
Tourism operations have a specific shape: seasonal cash flow, a front line of part-time staff who ARE the product, review platforms that punish a single bad night, and an owner who started the company because they loved the thing and now spends every evening on scheduling. The fix is the same operating layer every business needs, tuned to that shape.
Operator to operator. No pitch, and an honest no if your bottleneck isn't operational.
By Nick Jones, Founder and Operating Partner of Eat Sleep Launch Repeat. More about Nick
First-party proof
The tour company I still run
five-star reviews across Google, TripAdvisor, Viator, and Airbnb
TripAdvisor's #1 nightlife attraction in Flagstaff, three years running
Flagstaff, Prescott, and Tucson, with the Tucson expansion covered by the Arizona Daily Star
The tourism shape
What breaks in a tour business, specifically
Every tour, activity, and hospitality operator I meet is fighting some version of the same five fires. I know because I fought all of them at my own company before the systems existed.
One boundary worth naming: this page fixes the company. If the problem is the experience itself (rankings flat, reviews trickling, bookings soft at a low price), that is product work, and it lives on tour and experience consulting. On reviews specifically: owning, monitoring, and responding to them is operations work and stays here; getting more of them is engine work and lives there.
- The schedule runs on the owner. Guide assignments, swaps, and no-shows all route through one phone, usually yours, usually at night.
- Quality lives in your best guide. The experience varies by who leads it, and when that person leaves, the product walks out with them.
- Season whiplash. Summer's chaos funds winter's quiet, and neither season gets used to fix the other.
- Reviews are your revenue engine and nobody owns them. Responses are ad hoc, patterns go unread, and a bad month on the platforms shows up in bookings a quarter later.
- Booking-platform sprawl. Direct, OTA, and phone bookings living in different places, reconciled by hand, usually by you.
What gets installed
The tour-operator operating layer
The same six functions as every ESLR engagement, tuned to how a tour and hospitality business actually runs. Every item below is something running today at my own company.
- Tour and service documentation: routes, scripts, safety procedures, and standards, written so a new guide delivers the real product in weeks, not seasons
- Guide and staff systems: hiring, training, scheduling, and standards that hold quality steady across a part-time front line
- A booking and scheduling cadence: one source of truth across platforms, without the owner as the reconciliation engine
- Review operations: monitoring, response rhythms, and reading the patterns that tell you what to fix on the ground
- AI on the repetitive work: confirmations, FAQs, scheduling, and reporting handled by workflows instead of your evenings
- Seasonal planning: using the slow season to build what the busy season needs, on purpose
The difference
Advice from the sidelines vs systems from an operator
A traditional agency profits from your dependence. We profit from your independence. In tourism that difference is sharper than anywhere: your margins can't carry a permanent consultant, and your operation can't wait for one to learn the industry on your invoice. I've already made the mistakes at my own company, on my own dime. Engagements are scoped builds with a defined exit, and the goal is the same one I hold for Freaky Foot Tours: a company that runs at the top of its market without its owner in every loop.
How it works
Assess, install, hand off. In season or out.
Scoped around your seasonality, not against it: assessment can run mid-season while installs land in the shoulder.
- 01
Assess
I map the operation the way an operator reads one: where the schedule breaks, what depends on your best people, where hours leak. You get a prioritized plan ordered by what returns your time fastest.
- 02
Install
Documentation, guide systems, the booking cadence, review operations, and automation, built with your team and tested against your actual season, not a template.
- 03
Hand off
Your leads run the systems, your season runs on the calendar instead of your willpower, and my involvement steps down on a defined timeline.
Questions
Tour and hospitality operators ask
Do you actually understand tour operations, or is this generic consulting?
Is Freaky Foot Tours a client case study?
We're seasonal. When should an engagement run?
Can you fix our reviews?
What does it cost for a tourism business?
Do you work outside Arizona?
Operator to operator
Tell me where the season leaks.
A free fit call, operator to operator: where the schedule breaks, what depends on your best guide, and what would return your evenings first. Honest no if the bottleneck isn't operational. Based in Flagstaff, Arizona; working with operators nationwide, remotely.