2026 is here and the holidays are in full swing, with travellers and locals alike seeking ways to celebrate the new year. But for many tour operators, the celebration is dampened by a persistent, nagging reality: The Talent Gap.
Walk into the back office of a typical kayak operator or zipline company today, and you’ll likely see a familiar sight. A senior guide – someone with five years of experience, an encyclopedic knowledge of local geology, and the charisma of a late-night talk show host – is sitting hunched over a laptop. They aren't on the water. They aren't training new hires.
They are typing: "Yes, we have parking available. It is $10 for the day."
(And they are typing it for the fifteenth time that morning.)
In the current labor market, retention is everything. Your senior staff are the custodians of your company culture and the architects of your guest experience. When you force these high-value employees to act as junior receptionists, you incur two distinct costs:
Burnout in 2026 isn't usually caused by "too much work." It’s caused by "work that doesn't matter." A guide who loves nature will happily paddle through a rainstorm. That same guide will quit if they spend six hours answering emails about cancellation policies.
Many operators tell us, "I struggle to find good admin staff." The reality is, you might not need them – at least, not in the traditional sense.
The staffing shortage is often a tech shortage in disguise.
If 60% of your incoming inquiries are the same 10 questions (parking, weather, age limits, dietary restrictions, what to wear), and you are using humans to answer them, you are voluntarily entering a staffing crisis.
The fear of "robots taking jobs" has largely dissipated by now because the alternative – closing on Tuesdays because you don't have staff – is worse.
The most successful operators this year are adopting a model of "AI-First Support." This doesn't mean hiding your phone number. It means using an AI Agent (like Yonder) to act as the first line of defense.
Here is what the workflow looks like for a modernized operator:
By offloading the repetitive "noise" to an automated system, you effectively clone your best admin. The AI never sleeps, never gets tired of the parking question, and never asks for overtime.
This frees your human team to handle the complex, high-empathy situations: the lost items, the nervous guests, the special engagement proposals.
Yonder is a unified customer engagement platform built for tourism businesses that want to work smarter -- not harder.
.png)
.png)
