Pre-Tour Checklist For School Teams Sports Tours Organizers

Before you wave goodbye to the team or set out on the road with them to go on tour, you need to ensure that everything is in place for a smooth travel experience.

The time leading up to the departure can be a busy period, as you have last-minute details to finalize and the team to keep motivated. No one ever said that group trip planning was easy.

As it turns out, we know a thing or two about group travel. To help you stay on top of the admin, we have put together a sports tour organizer's pre-tour checklist. In this, we have listed and explained the boxes you need to tick before setting off.

Sports Tour Organizer's Pre-Tour Checklist

Start by taking a quick minute to run through these checklist points and establish whether you have actioned the following:

• Are continuing to build up the pre-tour excitement for the participants
• Ensured that all the necessary payments are in
• Paid relevant deposits to suppliers, either with your WeTravel virtual card or via WeTravel Supplier transfers
• Emailed the dossier - or at the very least a packing list, itinerary, and emergency plan to participants
• Received all the signed indemnity forms
• Set up communication channels for the team to use on tour
• Confirmed everyone has the necessary travel visas and insurance
• Collated all the hosts’ information in one secure place
• Confirmed the accommodation and transport
• Sent dietary requirements and sleeping arrangements through to hosts
• Confirmed the match fixtures with opponents
• Have access to the necessary boarding passes, train, or bus tickets
• If driving - packed a first aid kit and stocked up on waters to take on the bus
• Arranged a pre-tour meeting with the team to run through everything

Now that you have the sports tour organizer's pre-tour checklist, let us examine these points in a bit more detail.

Continue To Build Excitement Around The Tour

Part of the pre-tour experience is drumming up excitement for the attendees. If they arrive on tour excited and ready for the competition ahead, you can expect everyone to have a more enjoyable trip.

Of course, as the tour organizer, this is good news for you. Happy customers tend to pass on good news or even become repeat clients. Either way, it is valuable marketing for your tours and business, as you could get access to other schools that might need your skills or increase your margins with a return customer.

Ways to do this include setting up communication and social channels for the participants to access. As a school team, it is likely that parents will also want to see photos of their children playing the matches while on tour. This means you will need to open up a suitable communication channel for everyone to join.

A suggestion could be to invite everyone to a Facebook or Whatsapp group once they have completed their trip registration and paid a deposit. In the time leading up the tour, you can share destination tips, insights into the opponents’ teams, and general information about the trip on this.

Just before the travel dates, it is also a good idea to bring all the participants, parents, and stakeholders from the school together for a pre-tour meeting. Here, you can go over some of the general expectations of the trip as well as answer any questions.

Reconcile Payments

Arguably, the most important point on the sports tour organizer's pre-tour checklist is to reconcile the ingoing and outgoing payments. This will highlight how things look financially and give you an indicator of what you need to action.

When you are using the WeTravel platform to collect payments, you can set automatic prompts to send to participants so that they pay on time. If any of the participants have fallen behind for some reason, now is the time to remind them to settle up.

Also, check to see if there are any transfers you still need to remit to suppliers. If you have left things to the last minute, both WeTravel's supplier transfers and virtual card process your partner payments immediately. The recipient will receive the money right away so there's no need to wait days to receive confirmations.

Prepare and Send The Necessary Documentation

A lot of documentation goes into bringing together a tour. As we mentioned above, there is the dossier, itinerary, packing lists, and emergency plan to put together and then send to participants, parents, and school stakeholders.

In turn, they also need to send you completed indemnity forms, along with copies of the visas and travel insurance where necessary.

Without these sorts of document guidelines and requirements in place, you run the risk of not being adequately prepared for travel. The idea is to collate all the trip documentation into one easily accessible location. This includes having the details of the accommodation, transport, and hosting teams available at a glance.

Wrap Up The Finer Details

Confirming the match fixtures for the team is always going to be a top priority when it comes to finalizing some of the finer details. However, there are the usual items such as accommodation and transport to tick off the sports tour organizer's pre-tour checklist as well.

The hosts will want to know whether or not there are any dietary requirements to consider, as well as details of the sleeping arrangements. Depending on the transport you have booked, you either need to have all the tickets on hand or alternatively, a bus ready to welcome the team on board.

Final Thoughts

While this is just a rough sports tour organizer's pre-tour checklist, we hope it has helped you to remember the last-minute, crucial details, which ultimately ensure the tour goes off without a hitch.

If you would like to know more about WeTravel’s payment platform for travel organizers, watch the short clip below. We have designed it especially to help group travel organizers like you collect payments, communicate with attendees, and manage bookings.