How Walk and Eat keeps every food tour on track with FareHarbor

“We use FareHarbor as our calendar, as our place of truth. What are we doing today? What tours are we operating? Who’s on them? What are their dietary requirements? All of that really fundamental information is clear and easy to see in FareHarbor.”

Amy Bingham, Owner

Keeping complex food tours running smoothly

For Walk and Eat, a food tour is about much more than taking guests from one restaurant to another.

The Madrid-based operator connects travelers with local culture through food and wine. Its tours are designed to fit naturally into the neighborhoods they visit, rather than disrupting the restaurants and businesses that make those neighborhoods special.

This approach creates an operational challenge. Every tour can change based on the day, timing, restaurant availability, guest dietary requirements, and guide capacity.

As Walk and Eat has grown, the team needed a reliable way to keep all those details organized. FareHarbor became that central source of information. It’s what the team calls its “place of truth.”

Building a business around local relationships

Walk and Eat wanted travelers to connect with Madrid while supporting the local businesses and communities that make the city unique. That means its groups need to fit into the existing atmosphere of the restaurants they visit.

The company works closely with restaurant partners and often visits places that are already busy. Its team carefully plans routes and timing to make sure groups can enjoy those experiences without changing the restaurant’s atmosphere.

The result is a highly customized tour, every time.

A route can depend on the specific day, time, guests, dietary requirements, and restaurant needs. For the Walk and Eat team, that manual planning is an important part of delivering the experience they want.

It also creates a lot of information that needs to move between the guest, the team member coordinating the tour, and the guide delivering it.

A booking system built around the operation

Keep critical information in one place

Walk and Eat uses the FareHarbor calendar and Dashboard to keep tours, bookings, and guest details in view for the whole team.

Everyone works from the same information.The result is a clearer handoff from the guest to the team member coordinating the route and reservations, and then to the guide running the tour.

“Everyone’s on the same page because we’re all looking at the same page, which is our FareHarbor Dashboard,” Amy says.

Collect important guest information before the tour

Dietary requirements are particularly important for a food tour.

During the booking process, Walk and Eat can collect information about what guests can and can’t eat. If the team needs clarification, they can follow up with the guest through FareHarbor.

For instance, it might mean determining whether a gluten restriction is an allergy or an intolerance. Those details can affect what the team orders and where the tour goes.

By capturing that information before the tour, Walk and Eat can incorporate it into the planning process instead of trying to solve it on the day.

Customize the system to protect capacity

Walk and Eat recently made its private tours bookable directly through its website.

Previously, the process involved emails, back-and-forth conversations, and PDF documents. Moving their private tours online gives the team a more streamlined way to manage reservations.

But making more options available online created another concern: guide capacity.

Walk and Eat doesn’t have an unlimited number of guides available each day. With help from the FareHarbor support team, the business customized their Resource Requirements to manage guides as a limited resource.

The team can make multiple private-tour options available online. Once its available guide capacity is booked, the remaining options automatically close.

The setup lets Walk and Eat sell more private tours without creating reservations it can’t fulfill.

“It makes sure that we are never overbooking ourselves outside of our capacity,” said Amy. 

The results: more room to focus on the experience

FareHarbor has become a vital part of how Walk and Eat runs its day-to-day operations. The team uses it to organize tours, access guest information, communicate dietary requirements, manage guide capacity, and support online bookings.

It also gives Walk and Eat a foundation for growing its private tour business without losing control of its limited guide capacity.

“I didn’t start a food tour company so I could think about booking systems,” Amy says. “I think that’s the testament to FareHarbor: it allows me to focus on the things that I love and the parts of my business that I can grow in really interesting ways.”

Ready to spend less time managing bookings?

Your booking system should do more than process payments. It should help you run your business more efficiently.

With FareHarbor, you can manage bookings, guest information, availability, and more from one central system — with tools you can adapt to the way your operation works.

Request a free demo to see how FareHarbor can support your food tour business.