My official title is General Manager; the company I work for is a Tour Operator and Destination Management Company (DMC).

When someone asks what you do for work, there’s often an easy answer. Some jobs require a little more explanation, but overall, most people have a basic understanding of what most job titles mean. You would probably be able to make an educated guess about what a “Tour Operator” does. The vaguer title of General Manager might require a little more explanation or at least knowledge of what the business itself does in order to understand what General Manager generally manages. But as many readers may know, when working for a small business, you often wear many hats.

I work for a very small company with a disproportionately large volume of travelers. We have three full-time employees and between 8 and 10 contractors, depending on the time of year. Because we specialize in group travel, in an average year, we touch some part of over 10,000 traveler experiences, often planning them from start to finish. But because we are a small business, our job duties include so much more than just planning a trip. We have accounting, websites, booking applications, databases, swag orders, hosting, customer service, excursion procurement, and even painting the office (which needs to get done by whichever employee sort of has time that week).

So, when someone asks what I do, my response simplifies my title and an extensive list of job duties down to: I’m a Tour Operator, which means I plan a group travel and then travel on those trips to make sure everything goes smoothly.

But, in reality, I do so, so much more.

The generic definition of a tour operator often refers to a company rather than an individual and means that they procure the various elements of a vacation or conference, package them together into a single, inclusive price, and then sell those packages to travel agents, businesses, or individuals.

If we have a new quote request, I’ll spend a couple of hours contacting the necessary pieces for the package and building a quote to send to the client. I start by submitting a Request For Proposal (RFP) to hotels, asking for a certain number of rooms over specific dates in the requested location. I’ll call several transportation companies to get quotes on the various movements the trip requires. I’ll email an excursion representative to get group pricing on the requested tour. I’ll often price tickets and compare the proposed group pricing to retail pricing to ensure my package has savings, and I’ll put all this information into a spreadsheet to calculate an inclusive price with all the taxes and fees wrapped into a neat bundle.

The quoting process often involves several iterations and revisions until the client is happy with the price and inclusions; but once the client is happy, the quote goes to contracting. For a while, I wrote contracts as well, but we’ve been fortunate enough to hire an excellent part-time employee who now writes our contracts. It has made the process much more consistent.

Because we are a Tour Operator, often selling our packages to other travel businesses, a big part of my job is creating white-label web-based booking applications for clients, inputting trips into a client’s booking system, or simply adding the package to our own website for sale to the client’s guests. It’s rare that we sell directly to the end user, but it happens, and we do have the capability to take those bookings.

One of the things I was tasked with early on was creating an e-commerce store for the business that eventually needed to become a Web-based application for direct access by customers. I could write several (incredibly boring for most people) blog posts on all the problems with various commercially available software tools for creating such applications, but I’ll spare you that rant. The short version is that there are countless options for software tools of this type, none of which are perfect, most of them are awful, and all have a learning curve. If you’re curious, in order to have the most robust system with the ability to add features as needed, we chose WordPress® and WooCommerce®, which probably have the steepest learning curve of the options out there, shy of writing custom code.

Creating, maintaining, and building products into this system takes a huge amount of my time, and being able to collect and manage all the traveler information collected from this system, as well as clients’ systems, is a huge undertaking. With the help of my dad, an Excel and Visual Basic wizard, we’ve created software that utilizes Excel’s existing functionality to manage, manipulate, and organize all these data. At least 30% of my average day is spent working with these data to make sure we have accurate traveler information (because, for some reason, people frequently misspell their own names!), cleaning up flight information submissions (because they’re always wrong), creating rooming lists for hotels, creating flight manifests for transportation vendors, running reports for the accounting department, etc.

So, as glamorous as my job may sound, always bear in mind as you reach this blog that I am more often neck-deep in spreadsheets than in a crystal blue lagoon.

Another large chunk of my day is spent in customer service. In the office, this looks like answering travelers’ questions with information easily found on one website or another, answering phone calls to tell travelers where they should fly for their trip that starts next week (this actually happened once), and researching the few questions I don’t have an immediate answer to.

If I’m hosting a group at a resort, the customer service role starts at 8 or 9 AM in the lobby of the hotel where we’re staying. I’ll be there at least through the morning and often well into the afternoon. On arrival day, I’m often meeting with the hotel and making last-minute adjustments for a few hours in the morning, greeting guests for 7 hours, then hosting a welcome reception for another 2 hours. Arrival days are an exhausting marathon of smiles and pretending to care about the minor, mundane problems that travelers have with their room, the resort, me, etc. And that is what I will do for the next several days: accompany the group on excursions, solve any issues, and generally smile far more than my mouth was designed to. Honestly, I get it: if this is your one vacation for the year, you want it to be perfect, and after a long travel day, if something isn’t quite right, it can really throw you off. My job is to make it right, and I’ll be there with a smile to do so. The part of this I really enjoy is the problem-solving. Small things like “I don’t like my view” aren’t much fun, but larger problems like the hotel not scheduling the rooms correctly or an excursion being canceled at the last minute are much more interesting challenges to solve.

Hosting, web work, and spreadsheets make up the majority of my job, but there are a number of smaller tasks that need to be done throughout the day. Reviewing and signing contracts, scheduling hosts, booking flights, writing blog posts for the company website, meeting with clients, ordering swag, negotiating pricing, ordering tickets, writing proposals, creating presentations for clients, etc.

Overall, despite the amount of time I spend in Excel, my job is a ton of fun. My parents are both engineers, so I share an interest in neat, tidy data. I love getting to travel, and the fact that I don’t choose the destination because it adds to the adventure. As a rule, I don’t love working with people, but I do wind up having interesting interactions, and I have lots of stories about the crazy things people do on vacation. They make for great conversation starters. I didn’t expect to love web work as much as I do, but in reality, it’s one of my favorite parts of my job. I’m proud of the problems I’ve been able to solve and the booking application I’ve been able to create with such limited prior knowledge.

It’s often an overwhelming amount of work. I regularly work more than 40 hours a week, and I’ll always be living the #FiveFigureLifestyle, but I love being a Tour Operator, regardless of whether my job description matches my actual job duties. There’s always a new challenge, always a new problem to solve, and always a unique experience to enjoy.

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