The Pre-Memorial Day Check for Tour Operators

Many of the support tickets we handle in the first few weeks of peak season could have been avoided by small fixes in the lead up to Memorial Day.

Maybe an old blackout date is still blocking what should be a sellable Saturday, a confirmation email is pointing guests to last season’s meeting spot, or an add-on has quietly stopped showing up on mobile.

None of these on their own are dramatic, but all can cost real bookings, increase operational friction, and are entirely preventable for operators.

Here’s a quick run through our team would recommend for any operator approaching a peak period like Memorial Day.

The 6 pre Memorial Day checks

1. Availability, capacity, and blackout dates

Open your calendar and confirm schedules extend through your full peak window. Then scan blackout dates and remove anything left over from last season.

The check most operators skip is the blackout calendar. Public holidays from last year, weather closures from a March storm, a guide’s PTO entered as an all-day block. They all silently kill availability on days you actually want to sell. Capacity is the second trap: if you hired new guides over the off-season but haven’t added them as resources, the system thinks you still have last year’s team.

In Rezdy, your blackout calendar and resource-based availability sit in a single convenient view, so this check takes only a few minutes.

2. Run a live test booking on desktop and mobile

Complete a full booking end to end on both your phone and a desktop browser. Use a real card if you can, then refund yourself. This is the one check operators most frequently tell themselves they’ll do but then don’t.

A common issue is when an add-on or upsell that shows on desktop is disappearing on mobile because a theme update pushed it down. Most bookings happen on mobile, and a mobile-only bug cannot be caught in a desktop preview.

And test how long it takes to complete this process. If more than 90 seconds, from product page to confirmation, that friction in your checkout is friction in your conversion rate.

3. Product content and imagery

Open every product you expect to sell in peak season. Review the title, description, inclusions, exclusions, and the visual presentation.

Ensure you update anything seasonal: gear lists, inclusions that changed when a supplier did, pricing notes that still reference last year’s promo, and look through all the photos you’ve taken or gathered since last updating your listing for a chance to optimize.

4. Pricing, deposits, and promo codes

Confirm peak rates are active on every product, not just your primary product, verify deposit percentages reflect peak-season risk, and find every active promo code and ensure you know when it expires.

Two specific pitfalls we see: peak rates set on only the headline tour but not for any others and promo codes from last season with no end date. A 10% off code left running into August because no one got around to disabling it in January is a silent margin hit.

While you’re in there, check that the deposit and cancellation language guests see at checkout matches what your ops team will actually enforce. The two drifting apart over time is how chargebacks start.

5. Customer communications

Walk through every automated message a guest receives: booking confirmation, pre-arrival reminder, day-of message, post-trip follow-up. Read each one as if you’ve never been to your business before.

Check meeting point and address, parking, what to bring, weather and cancellation policy, the after-hours contact number. One outdated meeting point in a confirmation email costs you a morning of angry guests and a week of refund requests. If you operate multiple products or locations, repeat the check for each one.

6. Top-performing products from last season

Pull last year’s data and identify your top three products by revenue and by margin. Then make sure those products are visible everywhere a guest could land: homepage, category pages, paid traffic, email signatures.

Site reorganizations during the off-season can quietly bury your best converters. A high-margin private charter that was front and center last year can end up on page three of your tour list because six new products were added in February. If your top performers aren’t visible in your highest-traffic spots, that’s a quick conversion win you can find today.

Get the printable version

Want the one-pager to pin to your office wall and tick off in real time? Grab the printable checklist here.