Guest lists and check-in for small tour operators
Guest lists and check-in for small tour operators is a SaaS idea for small walking, cycling, food and activity tour operators with 3 to 30 guides, priced to test at $49 a month for up to 10 guides. Guides work from a list sent the night before, so late bookings, cancellations and allergies don’t reach them. With it, guides see today’s guests with dietary and medical notes on their phone, and tick people in at the meeting point.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
Guides work from a list sent the night before, so late bookings, cancellations and allergies don’t reach them. The office hears about no-shows and headcounts only when a guide calls.
Why now: Guests often book on the morning of a tour, from their phones, so last night’s printout is already out of date.
What do they use today?
Operators often give guides a spreadsheet printout or a message with the day’s names, and fix gaps by calling or texting when something changes. Allergy and access notes are copied from booking emails by hand.
How does it work?
In the morning the office imports the latest bookings, and each guide opens today’s departures on their phone, with dietary, medical and access notes flagged at the top. At the meeting point the guide ticks guests in and marks no-shows, and the office sees the headcount live. After the tour the guide notes any incidents, and a short trip report is emailed.
What goes in the first version?
- Bookings imported from the booking system’s export or emails
- Each guide’s departures and guest lists on the phone
- Dietary, medical and access notes flagged at the top
- Tick guests in and mark no-shows, seen live by the office
- A short trip report with incidents, emailed after each tour
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Small walking, cycling, food and activity tour operators with 3 to 30 guides
- Price to test
- $49 a month for up to 10 guides
Tour teams are small and guides come and go, so one flat monthly price for up to ten guides is simpler than a fee for each login. The office pays once for the whole team.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask five tour operators how guides get late bookings and allergy notes on the day.
- 2Join a local tour as a guest and watch how the guide checks people in.
- 3Run one operator’s departures from a shared sheet for a week and count the late changes.
Where to find the first customers
- Tour operator and guide groups on Facebook and LinkedIn
- Regional tourism associations
- App directories of tour booking systems
What are the risks?
- Tour booking systems have guide apps, so the angle is simpler and cheaper for small teams.
- Medical notes are sensitive, so guides should lose access when the tour ends.
How to build it on shipanysaas
5 of the parts it needs are already in the kit, the phone app with the All-in plan. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.
- Already in the kit
- Teams and roles
- Billing
- Emails
- In-app notifications
- Phone app with All-in
- You build
- Booking import from exports and emails
- Guide check-in flow with notes and no-shows
- Trip reports and incident log
See the starting prompt
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase; with the All-in plan, the Expo phone app is in apps/native. Help me build the first version of Guest lists and check-in for small tour operators. Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it. ## The product - What it does: Guides see today’s guests with dietary and medical notes on their phone, and tick people in at the meeting point. - Who pays: Small walking, cycling, food and activity tour operators with 3 to 30 guides - Their problem: Guides work from a list sent the night before, so late bookings, cancellations and allergies don’t reach them. The office hears about no-shows and headcounts only when a guide calls. - Price to test: $49 a month for up to 10 guides (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. Bookings imported from the booking system’s export or emails 2. Each guide’s departures and guest lists on the phone 3. Dietary, medical and access notes flagged at the top 4. Tick guests in and mark no-shows, seen live by the office 5. A short trip report with incidents, emailed after each tour ## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it - Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations - Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments - Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer - In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app - Phone app: an iPhone, iPad and Android app on the same backend (All-in plan) ## New code it needs - Booking import from exports and emails - Guide check-in flow with notes and no-shows - Trip reports and incident log ## How to work 1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK. 2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files. 3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next. ## Rules - Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel. - Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are. - If apps/native is not in your copy (the Starter plan), build the web app only. Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
Guides for the parts it uses
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