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Picture this: It’s 8 a.m., and your tour starts in an hour. You’re juggling WhatsApp messages, hotel front desks, and last-minute voicemails, all just to get everyone in the van on time. Managing pickups across different tools makes it hard to keep everything organized, and it's easy to miss important details.
Smooth pickups are especially important when considering that logistics issues consistently appear as a top factor in negative tour reviews (Source: Spring 2025 Travel Experience Trend Tracker, Pages 37-42).
At GetYourGuide, we built two features to help you coordinate pickups more easily: the Pickup Planner and Prescheduled Pickup Times, now available within your option setup.
In this post, we’ll show you how these features work and how they fit into your daily work.
Prescheduled Pickup Times: Set once, apply to all bookings
Our newest pickup feature eliminates repetitive work by letting you set pickup times once during your option setup and then automatically applying them to every new booking.
How it works
When creating or editing your activity, you can now set specific pickup times for each location* under Meeting Point and Pickup. For example:
- Hotel A: 8:00 AM
- Hotel B: 8:15 AM
- Hotel C: 8:30 AM
*Note: This feature is only available for pickup locations (that have an exact address), and not for pickup areas.
To set it up:
- Go to your product and click “Edit option.”
- Under “Meeting point or Pickup,” select "They get picked up."
- Choose "From a defined list of pickup locations.”
- Add pickup addresses and toggle “Plan pickup times.”
Once you've saved these prescheduled times, every new booking will automatically show the correct pickup time for that guest's location. Even better, customers can see these pickup times before they complete their purchase, helping them plan their travel day with confidence.
Recommended read: How to Use Prescheduled Pickup Times
Perfect for bus-style routes
Prescheduled Pickup Times work best for operators with "bus-like" location-based pickups that follow the same schedule. If you run tours where you always pick up from the same hotels at consistent times, this feature will save you significant time.
You can still make changes to individual bookings later using the Pickup Planner if plans change, but the scheduled times give you a solid foundation to work from.
Setting pickup times ahead allows you to:
- Stop repetitive data entry: Set times once, not for every single booking
- Help customers book with confidence: They can see pickup times before checkout, helping them plan and reducing confusion
- Reduce manual messages between you and customers about pickup times and lower no-shows/missed pickups
- Ensure reliability: Organized pickup schedules build trust
Curious to learn more? Watch our team walk you through the new tools:
The Pickup Planner: Your daily coordination dashboard
The Pickup Planner is where you manage day-to-day pickup coordination across all your bookings.
It helps you:
- Speed up pickup coordination with direct control from the Supplier Portal
- Save time by eliminating manual customer outreach for pickup details
- Keep your customers better informed with automatic updates
- Spend less time answering questions about pickup details
- Quickly change pickup times and places with real-time editing capabilities
These features will ensure you can consistently offer a reliable pickup experience for your customers, whether you have a few bookings or many.
The Pickup Planner is an essential tool for your daily operations. Yet, you may still be wondering how it works in practice.
How to use the Pickup Planner
The Pickup Planner gives you one place to edit pickup details for individual bookings (like pickup times, instructions, and location) directly through the Supplier Portal.
To get started:
- Log into the Supplier Portal
- Navigate to Bookings
- Select Pickup Planner
From there, you’ll have access to a dashboard that offers:
- An overview of all upcoming bookings requiring pickup
- Helpful filters to find specific timeframes and tours
- A to-do list format showing bookings needing pickup details within 24 hours
- Automatic traveler notifications via email and push notifications when you make changes
On this same page, you can also edit pickup instructions, location details, pickup times, and more.
For more detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to use the Pickup Planner feature, check out the Pickup Planner FAQ page.
Put the Pickup Planner into practice: top use cases
To help you get the most out of the Pickup Planner, we’ve outlined a few common scenarios where this feature can be especially helpful.
1. Track your pickup to-do list
When you’re operating tours all day, it’s easy to lose track of bookings that still need pickup details confirmed.
Maybe one guest still hasn’t checked into their hotel, another needs to be picked up from a separate accommodation, and the other two aren’t responding to your messages.
Before, you’d have to chase up four separate bookings and sift through message threads to keep track of all these details.
The Pickup Planner allows you to get a quick overview of all bookings that still need pickup details in one place. It creates a to-do list that shows exactly which bookings need your attention. You can sort them by time, tour, or level of urgency. This helps you stay on track of all these details so you’ll have more headspace to focus on your guests.
2. Coordinate pickups with ease
Imagine that it’s 9 a.m. and your city tour includes guests staying at 5 different hotels, where one is particularly out of the way.
Previously, coordinating pickup meant sending out a round of separate messages and hoping everyone replied in time so you could finalize the logistics.
With the Pickup Planner, you can view and coordinate each guest’s pickup details in one place instead of managing multiple different conversations separately. You can propose the most convenient pickup spot, set the time, and include any special instructions (like “meet outside at the south entrance” or “look out for the blue van with our logo”)).
The best part is that all guests automatically receive a notification with all relevant info. This makes organizing pickups and communicating with guests simpler, which helps build trust and reliability in your experience.
3. Optimize pickup routes in just a few clicks
Let’s say you’ve finalized your guest list and are now ready to hit the road. But just as you’re entering the first pickup address into your GPS, you see that there’s construction near the designated pickup point.
With the Pickup Planner, you can quickly adjust your route, modify guest pickup locations in real time, and tweak pickup times.
The Pickup Planner makes it easier to handle special requests, like last-minute changes. This means no more mental gymnastics trying to reshuffle your route on the fly while fielding phone calls and emails.
The Pickup Planner gives you the flexibility to adjust pickups with more ease.
Ready to put these tools to work?
With Prescheduled Pickup Times and the Pickup Planner working together, you can set up efficient pickup schedules and manage day-to-day coordination more easily.
Start using these tools today to spend less time coordinating and make the tour experience more enjoyable for you and your guests.
Check out the Fall Release → https://www.getyourguide.supply/fall2025
Get started.
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