Build a Seasonal Team That Performs Like a Permanent One
I have worked with many tourism operators over the years, and one of the most common things I hear is some version of this: “We had a great product but our team continues to let us down.” Or “ I can’t find good staff.”
Sometimes it’s a guide who went off-script and gave guests a watered-down experience
When I operated Southern Cross Tours our senior guide was outstanding but we struggled to build a team underneath him. Finding a guide who knows information, has the licences to drive the vehicles, is passionate and wants to engage and connect wasn’t easy. I feel like most hires were essentially just driving the vehicle and pointing at things.
For the guests this meant we had the same tour, completely different guest experience depending on who was behind the wheel. The reviews made that obvious.
The five-star ones mentioned the guide by name.
The three-star ones said the tour “felt rushed” and “a bit flat.”
Sometimes it’s a shift handover that fell apart.
A cruise operator I know had a guest with a serious shellfish allergy noted in the booking. The morning crew knew. The afternoon crew didn’t. Nothing went wrong on the day, but it easily could have, and the operator only found out because the guest mentioned it in passing at the end of the trip.
Sometimes it’s a brand new hire who handled a complaint so badly it ended up in a one-star review. A kayak tour company had a new starter who, when a guest complained the tour was shorter than advertised, argued with them on the water. In front of the group.
Here’s the thing. None of those situations are really about the individual. They are about the system, or the lack of one.
You can have a brilliant product and a stunning location, but if your team isn’t performing consistently, your guests will notice before you do. And in tourism, word travels fast.
Hiring for tourism is not like hiring for anything else
Most operators I talk to are hiring fast under pressure. Peak season is coming, the roster has gaps, and someone who’s available and reasonably presentable gets the nod.
I get it.
But hiring on availability alone is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make in this industry.
In tourism, your team doesn’t just deliver the product. In most cases, your team IS the product. The guide who makes a family feel like they’re on a private tour even though there are twenty people in the group. The host who picks up that a couple is celebrating an anniversary and gives them a quiet moment at the best spot on the trail.
The operator who handles a weather cancellation so well that guests rebook on the spot. That’s not skill. That’s attitude, warmth, and presence. And you can’t train it into someone who doesn’t have it.
I saw this play out with a reef tour operator I worked with. They had two guides with identical qualifications. One of them had guests lining up to tell the crew it was the best day of their holiday. The other had people politely nodding and heading straight for the bar. Same reef. Same boat.
Completely different experience. The difference was entirely about personality and how each of them engaged with people.
So before you look at availability, look at fit. What kind of person thrives in your specific experience? What do they love? How do they respond when something goes wrong? Do they naturally connect with people or do they have to force it?
Build a picture of your ideal team member and recruit to that, not just to the roster gap.
When you’re interviewing, ditch the questions that let people tell you what you want to hear. Don’t ask “are you good with difficult customers?” Ask “tell me about a time a guest was unhappy. What did you do and how did it end?” Listen for ownership and empathy, not just a tidy outcome.
I had a client in the touring space who started asking one simple question at the end of every interview: “What was the best guest interaction you have ever had and why did it stick with you?” The candidates who lit up answering that question were consistently their best hires. The ones who had to think hard about it rarely made it past probation.
And if you can, get a senior team member involved in the process. They’ll pick up things you’ll miss, and it means your core crew has bought in before the new person even starts.
Onboarding is where most operators lose the plot
I’ll be honest.
Most tourism businesses I have seen do a version of onboarding that goes something like: show them around, run through safety basics, shadow someone for a shift, then throw them in the deep end.
And then operators are surprised when the experience feels inconsistent, or when a complaint comes in that the new person handled badly.
Your new team member cannot deliver your experience if they don’t understand what your experience is actually supposed to feel like. That sounds obvious, but I promise you most new starters go into their first solo shift without a clear picture of what success looks like for the guest.
I ran a mystery shop for a Sydney harbour cruise operator a 2 years back. Three different departures, three different hosts. One of them was exceptional. She knew the history, she read the group, she made it feel like an event.
The other two were perfectly pleasant but they were essentially just making announcements and answering questions. When I spoke to the operator, it turned out the exceptional host had come from a background in live events and had asked a lot of questions during her induction. The other two had been handed a laminated card and told to follow the script.
Onboarding Definition & Overview
Onboarding in tourism needs to cover four things properly.
First, your brand and experience promise.
What is the guest supposed to feel? What makes what you offer genuinely different? A zipline operator I know spends the first hour of every new starter’s induction talking about nothing but the guest journey, from the moment they book to the moment they leave the car park.
Not the safety procedures, not the equipment, not the roster. The guest journey. Because everything else only makes sense once you understand what you’re trying to create.
Second, your SOPs.
I know some operators roll their eyes at standard operating procedures. But here’s what SOPs actually are: they’re your consistency insurance. They’re what stops the experience varying depending on who’s on shift. Start with your highest-risk and highest-frequency scenarios.
What happens when a guest doesn’t show? What’s the process when the weather turns and a tour needs to be modified? What do you do if someone has a medical episode on tour? Write it down. Make it accessible. Make it part of induction, not an afterthought.
I have seen operators lose serious money because there was no documented process for weather cancellations. Every staff member handled it differently.
Some offered rebooking, some offered refunds, some offered neither and just apologised. The inconsistency alone was costing them in complaints and chargebacks.
Third, safety culture, and I mean culture, not just compliance.
In tourism you’re regularly operating in environments where things can actually go wrong. A white water rafting operator, a horse riding experience, a sailing tour, even a busy walking tour in a coastal town.
Your team needs to understand the why behind your safety procedures, not just tick the box. And they need to see you treating it seriously, because if leadership doesn’t model it, no one else will either.
Fourth, shift handovers.
This one gets overlooked constantly and it causes more guest experience problems than most operators realise. Think about a busy island resort with morning and afternoon activity crews.
If the morning team doesn’t pass on that the snorkelling group has a nervous swimmer who needed extra support, the afternoon team is starting blind.
Five minutes of structured communication between shifts can save you a one-star review and potentially a lot worse. Build the habit and make it non-negotiable.
Yes, you should invest in your casual / seasonal team.
“Why would I spend time developing someone who’s only here for three months?”
I hear this a lot.
And I understand the logic, but it’s short-sighted.
A well-trained seasonal team member delivers a better guest experience, generates better reviews, creates fewer problems on shift, and is significantly more likely to come back next season.
Your returning seasonals are gold. They carry your culture, they mentor new starters, and they hit the ground running.
I worked with a small adventure tourism operator who had one guide who’d been coming back every summer for four years. She wasn’t a permanent employee, but she was worth more to that business than almost anyone on the payroll.
New starters watched how she operated. She set the standard without being asked to. When she returned each season she needed half a day to get back up to speed and then she was fully productive.
Compare that to the cost and disruption of training someone from scratch every single time.
Your returning seasonals are only that loyal if you’ve invested in them. Check in with them at the end of each season.
Tell them what you valued. Ask if they’re coming back. Make it easy for them to say yes.
You don’t need formal development programs or big training budgets. A five-minute conversation each week tells you what someone is struggling with before it shows up in a complaint.
Create feedback loops after tours and after peak periods.
Your frontline team sees things you don’t.
One activity operator I know does a ten-minute debrief with staff at the end of every Saturday. Nothing formal. Just: what worked, what didn’t, anything weird happen?
In three months that habit surfaced a pricing confusion that was causing awkward conversations with guests at checkout, a piece of equipment that staff had been quietly managing around instead of flagging, and an upselling opportunity no one had thought to formalise. All from ten minutes on a Saturday afternoon.
And where it makes sense, cross-train. If your guide can also handle a basic booking query, or your host can run a pre-tour briefing, you build flexibility into your roster. In tourism, when someone calls in sick the morning of a full tour, that flexibility is everything.
How to Create a Feedback Loop: Step-By-Step Guide With Best Practices
Culture doesn’t maintain itself when your team turns over every season
This is the hard part.
And the operators who manage it well have a few things in common.
They protect their core. One or two permanent or returning team members who carry the culture, set the standard, and mentor new starters. I know a whale watching operator who has one permanent skipper and one permanent host. Everything else is seasonal.
But those two people are so clear on what the experience is supposed to be that new starters get calibrated within the first couple of shifts just by watching them. If you have these people, invest in them heavily. They are your culture insurance policy.
They make values visible through behaviour, not just signage.
What gets praised in your business? What gets addressed quickly? What’s tolerated when it shouldn’t be? I visited one operation where the manager loudly celebrated a team member in the morning briefing for going back to check on a guest who’d seemed unwell after a tour the previous day. That one moment told every person in that room more about what this business valued than any policy document could.
And they deal with problems fast. In a seasonal business, you don’t have the luxury of hoping something improves. If a team member is dragging down morale or delivering a substandard experience, your guests and your other staff feel it immediately. I’ve seen one negative, disengaged team member quietly poison an entire seasonal crew over six weeks.
By the time the operator acted, two of their best people had mentally checked out. Address problems quickly and directly. That’s not harsh, it’s respectful of everyone involved.
Before your next intake, work through this
Have a look at your job ads. Do they describe the kind of person who would genuinely thrive in your experience, or are they generic listings that attract generic applicants? “Bubbly and reliable” will get you a hundred applicants. Being specific about your product, your guests, and the kind of person who excels in your environment will get you fewer but far better ones.
Walk through your onboarding process as if you were a brand new starter with no prior context. Could you navigate it without someone explaining it to you? If not, it needs work.
Write down your shift handover process. What needs to be communicated, how, and to whom? If your answer is currently “we just have a chat,” that’s worth documenting properly.
Check that you have SOPs for your highest-risk scenarios. Not just safety ones but operational ones too. Weather contingencies, no-shows, complaints, medical situations, equipment failures. If they don’t exist in writing, that’s your priority this week.
Sit down with your most senior person and ask them what they’re seeing. What’s working and what’s getting in the way of a great guest experience? They’ll know. They’re usually just waiting for someone to ask.
The bottom line
A seasonal team doesn’t have to mean an inconsistent product.
The operators who get this right understand that every new starter is an investment in their reputation. They build systems that carry the culture even when the faces change. And they never forget that in tourism, the experience your guest walks away with is almost entirely shaped by the humans they interacted with.
Get your team right, and your reviews, your rebooking rates, and your bottom line will follow.
If you want to get a clearer picture of where your team and operations might be costing you money or guests, a Tourism Business Health Check is a good place to start.
👉Book a free 15-minute strategy call with Sarah Colgate
