SparkyTours is open: run a tour company from one place

This is the first post in our launch series. Over the coming weeks we are sharing the Sparky products one at a time, and we are starting with the one we have spent the most time on.

SparkyTours is for people who run tours: boutique operators, family travel companies, small agencies. It follows a trip from the first enquiry to the final invoice, so planning, selling and running a trip live in one place instead of four spreadsheets and a WhatsApp group.

Plan it once

You design a trip on a canvas, day by day: a hotel, a transfer, an activity, a meal, a guide, some free time. The blocks come from a library you build up, with the vendors you actually use and the rates you have agreed. When the trip is ready you promote it to a tour and run departures from it. Improving the library later does not quietly rewrite an itinerary you have already sold.

Sell it

Picture an operator with three people on her team and a 12-day trip. She sets two departures, sets capacity, and sends a family a branded proposal by link, or in one tap on WhatsApp. Costing shows her margin before she quotes. Season and group-size rules adjust the price, and a revised quote becomes a new numbered version, so what the family saw is never overwritten. Payments are tracked as deposit, installments and balance, with reminders that go out on their own, and on paid plans travelers can pay online into her own Razorpay account.

Run it

Once a group is on the road the work changes. There is a numbered voucher for every confirmed hotel and transfer, pickups with the driver, vehicle and plate, a daily checklist for the ops team and an incident log. Booking deadlines such as hotel release dates and ticketing limits sit in one list, with reminders before they cost you money. A readiness view shows who still owes a form, a document or insurance, and flags a passport that will not outlast the trip.

Travelers can be invited into SparkyLive, our free companion app, where they see today's plan first, get reminders, message your team and keep emergency details one tap away. We cover SparkyLive in its own post.

We run our own family travel company, Classy Explorers, on SparkyTours and SparkyLive. Its website reads its trips and prices from Tours, its bookings land back in it, and its travelers get their plan in SparkyLive. Using the products while we build them keeps us honest about what an operator needs.

Everyone starts on the free Lite plan, no card needed. Paid plans upgrade a whole suite on one subscription, so you manage it in one place. What each plan includes is on the pricing page.

The full list is on the SparkyTours features page, or you can sign in and try it.

This post is part of our launch series, one Sparky product at a time. The rest of the series is on the newsletter page.