Summer multiplies the inquiries, not the staff

A Saturday morning in July. Guðrún, who runs day tours to the glacier in South Iceland, opens her inbox with her coffee in hand. Thirty-two new inquiries since last night. “Is Thursday available?” “Is the hike suitable for an eight-year-old?” “Do you pick up at the campsite?” “Do I need crampons or do you provide them?” In January the inquiries came three a day and she answered each within the hour. Now her coffee has gone cold and the pile keeps growing while she reads the ones at the top.

Most tourism businesses know this well. Over the high season the inquiries multiply, but the people who answer them do not.

Demand is seasonal, staffing is not

The difference between winter and summer is not that the questions get harder. There are more of them, and they are largely the same ones, over and over. That is where both the problem and the opportunity sit. Repetition is precisely what can be answered automatically, as long as the answers exist in the first place.

And they usually do. Availability, price, what to bring, whether the tour suits children, where pickup is. All of it lives in information the business already has. The problem is not that the answer is missing. It is that someone has to sit down and send it, thirty times a day instead of three.

At the same time, growing the team in step with demand is nearly impossible. Experienced people are scarce exactly when everyone is hiring, training takes weeks, and by the time a summer hire has the tours down the busiest stretch is behind you. Worse, those first weeks often go to answering the same questions in the inbox instead of being out with the guests, where a person genuinely matters.

How people try to bridge the gap

The most common approach is simply to have the experienced staff work more. It holds for a while, but it wears people down and pulls the best guides into the office, away from what they are best at.

Hiring more summer staff helps with the volume, but it does not solve the knowledge problem. A newcomer can answer “what time do you leave?” but not “is this hike alright for an eight-year-old who is afraid of heights?” until they have been at it for a good while.

Outsourced answering also eases the load, but someone answering from a distance rarely knows the tours well enough to go beyond the most general reply, and the guest is left none the wiser.

You can also just accept a slower response time. It looks free, but it is the most expensive option of all. A traveler in booking mode does not wait. They have a few tabs open and book with whoever answers first. In high season, when every booking is worth the most, an unanswered inquiry is exactly when it costs the most.

The newest option is an AI that answers from the business's own knowledge. It takes the repetition as it comes, at any hour, and it handles ten inquiries at once as easily as one. It does not cost a winter salary for a summer load, and it pulls no guide in off the trail. But it is only as good as the knowledge it is given, and it has to know how to hand you the baton when a question belongs with a person.

The ten questions that come all summer

For most operators, the bulk of the summer inbox is more or less the same handful of questions. What it costs, what is included, what to bring, how hard it is, whether it suits children, where and when you leave, whether there is pickup, what happens if the weather turns, whether you can cancel. When the same ten questions carry the load, adding more people to the inbox is not the fix. What helps is taking those ten off the table, so your people can get to the rest that is waiting.

Frequently asked questions

Can Anna handle far more conversation volume in summer? Yes. She answers as many at once as come to her, whether that is three inquiries a day or thirty in a single morning. The plans are sized by conversation volume, so you pick the one that fits your season, and the load adds no hours to the team's day.

Do I have to teach her the tours again for every summer? No. Anna answers from your own knowledge, and you teach her once, approve it, and after that she knows it. For tourism she also reads the tours straight from Bókun, real availability and pricing, and sends the guest a link straight to the booking page.

What about questions that genuinely need a person? They go to the team as a handoff, with a summary of who asked and what about, and the guest is told a person is taking over. And if someone is free, they can step into the conversation in real time and answer directly.

This is why Anna answers the way she does

Anna is built to take on the repetition that comes with the high season, so it does not all land on the same people. She answers on your website right away, in Icelandic and English alike and best-effort in other languages, draws her answers from the business's knowledge, and reads the tours straight from Bókun where it applies. When a question calls for judgment or accountability, she passes it on with a summary and alerts the team at once.

That way the summer hire is out with the guests instead of stuck in the inbox, and the guide is on the glacier, not at a desk.

Summer will keep multiplying the inquiries. It does not have to multiply the strain along with it.

See what Anna does for tourism or chat with her right now, no signup needed. And related: when the traveler asks at four in the morning, how Anna answers every visitor in their own language, and how she reads availability and price straight from Bókun.

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