Vizit: Software for Complex Guided Tours

Based in Ghent, Vizit organizes guided tours throughout Belgium, with a strong focus on culinary and themed walking tours.

These activities can involve much more than just one guide and one starting time. For example, a full day might include a walk, a restaurant visit, bus transportation, and a tasting at various locations.

That makes the behind-the-scenes planning quite complex.

In 2015, Code-on therefore developed a custom system for Vizit. It was one of the projects through which we gained firsthand insight into the software needs of organizations that offer guided tours.

Schedule more than one guide

Suppose an excursion starts at 10 a.m.

The group is expected at a restaurant at noon. At 1 p.m., a bus will take them to the next location, and a local beer tasting is scheduled for 3 p.m.

For visitors, that constitutes a single activity.

For the organizer, these are various arrangements that all need to fit together.

External partners must also be involved

For example, the restaurant needs to know when the group will arrive, how many people are in the group, and whether there are any specific arrangements.

The same applies to a bus company, a café, or any other partner.

It's not just the schedule that has to be right. Partners must also be informed, confirm their participation, and agree on prices.

For Vizit, this meant that customers, guides, and various external parties all had to be tracked within the same daily schedule.

A system tailored to that operation

Vizit's existing system was phased out at that time. As a result, Code-on was commissioned in 2015 to develop a new solution.

Given the specific way Vizit operated, a custom solution was the logical choice at that time.

The new system made it possible to plan guided tours and daily programs in much greater detail and to involve the various stakeholders in the process.

So that went beyond traditional tour planning.

While organizations offering shorter tours primarily need to know which guide is available and when, Vizit also had to be able to organize the successive parts of a full-day excursion.

From internal software to the website

After developing the custom system, Code-on also created Vizit's website.

That was the logical next step.

The guided tours and culinary activities organized behind the scenes also needed to be clearly presented to potential visitors.

The website provided Vizit with a central platform to showcase its offerings, various themes, and practical information.

Later, events were added as well

As the website continued to grow, there was also a need for a separate way to manage events and process registrations.

Once again, this involved the integration of various processes: registration, payments, and communication with participants.

As a result, not only did the website grow, but the digital infrastructure supporting it also expanded along with Vizit's offerings.

What We Learned at Vizit

The project highlighted how differently organizations can approach guided tours.

Compare Vizit, for example, with Gentse Gidsen.

At Gentse Gidsen, much of the work revolved around availability and assigning guides to relatively well-defined tours.

In Vizit, activities could consist of various sequential components, locations, and external partners.

So the software had to be structured differently.

Yet the same fundamentals emerged again

Despite those differences, we also saw the same basic processes recurring:

• A customer submits a request;
• An activity must be scheduled;
• Guidelines must be followed;
• Practical information must be available centrally;
• Communication must reach the right people;
• This is followed by administrative and financial follow-up.

We also observed those recurring processes in other projects for tour guide organizations.

From Custom Solutions to Eguide

The custom software for Vizit was not Eguide.

But projects like Vizit did contribute to the experience from which Eguide later grew. [link to blog: How Eguide Came to Be. By getting to know various organizations up close, it became increasingly clear which processes were common and which remained very specific.]

That common foundation was ultimately integrated into a specialized SaaS platform.

Today, Eguide supports, among other things, bookings, scheduling, guide management, customer management, and financial tracking.

Not everything has to be off-the-shelf software

The experience with Vizit also shows why custom software is sometimes still the right choice.

When an organization has processes that differ significantly from what an existing platform supports, a custom solution may be necessary.

That is why Code-on continues to develop custom software and websites to this day.

Eguide provides a specialized platform for organizations that organize guided tours and activities. If a digital need falls outside of that scope, custom solutions can still be an option.

Software Based on Real-World Operations

Vizit was an important project for Code-on because its complexity wasn't just theoretical.

For an excursion to go smoothly, everything had to fall into place: the guide had to be there, the bus had to leave on time, and the restaurant had to know that a group was coming.

Software had to support that reality.

That same philosophy still guides Eguide today: first, understand how the organization works, and then ensure that the software makes those processes easier to understand.

Discover how Eguide brings together bookings, scheduling, and guides today.