Eighteen passengers, eleven flights, one transfer company
Your tour starts at a hotel in Porto. Passengers book their own flights and you include an arrival transfer. The flight details arrive over several weeks: some from London, some from Manchester, two from Dublin, a couple arriving the night before for a pre-tour stay. Your office builds a transfer plan in a spreadsheet, grouping passengers who land within a sensible window, and emails it to the transfer company.
Then an airline moves a Manchester flight by three hours. The passengers tell you, or they do not. The transfer company works from the list they were sent a fortnight ago, and on arrival day two passengers wait at arrivals for a car that was sent at the old time.
Transfer planning is rebuilt by hand each time something moves
Grouping arrivals is a puzzle: how long can passengers reasonably wait, how many fit in each vehicle, which flights are close enough to share. Solving it once is fine. Solving it again every time a flight changes is where it goes wrong.
- Flight details arrive over weeks, in emails and forms.
- The transfer plan is a spreadsheet rebuilt by hand.
- Flight changes are reported late by passengers or not at all.
- The transfer company works from whichever version it last received.
- The tour leader does not know who is on which transfer.
Missed transfers spoil the first day
Arrival is the first moment of the tour. A passenger stranded at an airport, ringing an out-of-hours number, starts the holiday unhappy, and the cost of a taxi falls on you. Over-cautious planning costs money in another way, with more vehicles than needed because nobody trusted the grouping.
The office also spends the final week before departure checking flight lists, often more than once.
A transfer planner that keeps up with changes
We build a transfer planning tool linked to each departure's passengers.
- Flight details come from the passenger details page or the booking system, including arrival airport, flight number and scheduled time.
- Arrivals are grouped into proposed transfers by rules you set: maximum wait time, vehicle sizes available, and airports served.
- The office reviews and adjusts the proposed plan on screen, then sends it to the transfer supplier in their format, with a version number.
- Flight numbers are checked against a flight schedule data service in the days before arrival, and schedule changes are flagged even if the passenger has not told you.
- When a flight changes, the planner shows which transfer is affected and proposes a new grouping. Once approved, only the changed transfer is sent to the supplier.
- Passengers get their transfer details (meeting point, time, what to do if delayed) and the tour leader gets the final transfer list on their phone.
| Change | What the planner does |
|---|---|
| Passenger adds flight | Placed into a proposed transfer |
| Airline changes schedule | Change flagged, new grouping proposed |
| Passenger cancels | Removed, vehicle size reviewed |
| Transfer plan updated | Changed transfer sent with new version |
| Arrival day | Leader has current list and flight times |
What arrival week looks like
Three days before the tour starts, the planner shows two schedule changes picked up from flight data. One moves a passenger into a later transfer with two others. The other needs a new small car. The office approves both changes, the supplier receives the update, and the passengers get new transfer details.
On arrival day, the tour leader knows who is on each transfer and when to expect them at the hotel.
Departure transfers at the end of the tour work the same way, grouped from the return flights, so the last morning is planned with the same care as the first. Passengers leaving early or extending their stay are picked up by the planner rather than handled from a sticky note.
Do arrival transfers cause problems?
- Transfer plans are built in a spreadsheet and resent in full.
- Passengers have waited for transfers sent at old flight times.
- You rely on passengers to tell you about schedule changes.
- The transfer supplier and tour leader have different lists.
- You book extra vehicles because the grouping is not trusted.