What exactly is a Tour Manager? What do they do? And why does your trip need one? If you’ve ever wondered these things, you’ll definitely want to hear us out. We here at Green Light feel that Tour Managers are awesome and an essential part of the student travel experience. Here’s why:
An Active Facilitator:
At Green Light, we help people plan student trips. Sometimes the planning phase takes months or even years. So when the trip finally begins, we have a huge interest in seeing that things go well.
But we don’t want to sit back and hope that things go well. We want to take an active approach to guaranteeing trip satisfaction. So we send along someone to represent Green Light and be with your group every single step of the way. Hence, your Tour Manager
At the most basic level, your Tour Manager is a travel professional who’s primary function is to ensure that things go right. If in the event things don’t go right, the Tour Manager is there to fix things and make them better. To put it simply: your Tour Manager has got your back.
They are with your group every second of your trip. From the moment you arrive until the moment you depart. In fact, the Tour Manager arrives the day before your tour begins to check out every restaurant, show, museum, and attraction to ensure everything goes smoothly when you’re there with your group. They even stay in the same hotel as the group in case they need to assist with something at night!
The majority of the time your Tour Managers are actively keeping the trip running as smoothly as possible by managing logistics. That means things like keeping the group on schedule, handing out tickets, helping the group navigate between destinations, and communicating with vendors on the group’s behalf, just to name a few. To do this, your Tour Manager is usually thinking several steps ahead of the group to make sure whatever is coming up next will happen as seamlessly as possible.
Occassionally, groups have to improvise while on tour. For instance, a thunderstorm may roll in during a walking tour of Central Park, or a motorcade in Washington D.C. can shut down some streets you need to take. Tour Managers are there to help you be flexible and make adjustments, while prioritizing the interests of the group and ensuring the itinerary isn’t compromised too much. Should other unexpected things occur like cancelled flights or sick travelers, the Tour Manager is there to do what they can to fix it.
A Knowledgable Friend:
Who doesn’t like visiting a new place with a knowledgeable friend? They know all the cool places to eat, they tell interesting stories and share crazy facts. Best of all, they’re just fun to hang out with. We like to think of every Green Light Tour Manager as a knowledgeable friend for your group.
As knowledgeable friends, Tour Mangers are interested in making sure everyone is having the best time possible. That means if anyone is not having a good time or has urgent needs, they want to do something about it. Your Tour Manager won’t hesitate to use their knowledge of the destination to go the extra mile and help your travelers however they can.
They’ll joke, they’ll make recommendations, they’ll laugh, and they’ll provide insight. When interacting as a knowledgable friend, Tour Managers usually end up impacting travelers in more profound ways. Bonds tend to form, the trip becomes more meaningful, and the Tour Manager may very well become the thing your travelers remember most about the whole experience.
So You Don’t Have To:
As you can see, Tour Managers are intended to do a lot to optimize your trip, and one of the biggest reasons is so you don’t have to! As a group leader, you’ve done an awful lot to make the trip a reality to begin with. Just think of how wonderful it could be if you actually got to enjoy it…
If you’re leading a performance group, you can focus on preparing your performers. If you’re an educator, you can focus on leveraging parts of the trip for teaching moments. And if you want to sit back, relax, and make memories, with the help of your Tour Manager, you’re totally at liberty to do so.
Tour Managers Rock:
Hopefully by now you feel the same way about Tour Managers that we do; we think they rock! As Green Light representatives, Tour Managers make sure things go well, they actively facilitate logistics, they help the with flexibility, they are knowledgeable friends making sure everyone is having the best time possible, and they do it all so you don’t have to and can focus on other important things. Though there is a lot of planning necessary to make a trip great, we don’t think there is any amount of planning that can substitute for a Green Light Tour Manager.