Tullia Caballero was born in the UK to Spanish and Italian parents. By the age of 18 she was fluent in four languages and lived in two continents and five countries. She graduated as an Interpreter and translator and preferring the outdoors to a desk, she worked as a tour leader, interpreter and wildlife and hiking travel designer for World Wildlife Fund - Italy, before joining the largest Dutch adventure company, SNP, as Italy product manager. This position led her to set up S-Cape Travel Italy - today a leading adventure travel company part of the S-Cape group with offices in Italy, Spain, Greece and The Netherlands serving 20,000+ passengers per year. Tullia has walked and cycled all over Italy, her adopted home since her teens and has traveled to over forty countries. She is an active and enthusiastic member of ATTA since 2009 and a member of the Slow Travel Network that has raised over 13,000 Euro with a crowdfunding project to waymark the 1000km long Via Francigena cycle route and walking trail across Italy.

This self-paced OnlineEDU course details how to successfully add multi-day self-guided active tours (primarily walking, trekking or bicycling) to a tour provider’s portfolio. Using a step-by-step approach, it outlines the critical pieces required to develop and run self-guided tours; the educators provide practical advice in a timely manner to business owners and product developers. For regional tourism boards, tourism consortia, accommodation providers or other stakeholders wanting to capitalize on the trend of self-guided travel, it can be useful to understand what elements are critical to the successful development and promotion of this unique subset of travel.

Let’s begin from the beginning. You already know how to develop guided tour itineraries, but what do you need to know to develop Self-Guided Tour itineraries? We begin with traveler motivations and expectations. Then we explore the variety of self-guided tours you might develop based on activities, destination /infrastructure support, and supply chain considerations. We will provide an overview on the “hard” and “soft” provisions needed to be successful in this endeavor (which will be explored in detail in later sections), and finally, we’ll review how to keep sustainability at the foundation as you build Self-Guided tour products.

This section will share the macro-level details that need to be considered as a first step in developing Self-Guided Tours such as seasonality, using established or new routes, accessibility and geographical features, understanding the established self-guided market and competitors/collaborators, risk and safety management, time and costs to your business, and the value proposition for local economies that benefit from this specific travel product.

Now that you’re ready to design Self-Guided Tours, let’s take a close look at how to choose and develop an itinerary. We’ll identify how to choose the overall route, the daily route based on the big picture fundamentals discussed in the previous section, what style of trip to design, what level of difficulty, and how to incorporate leisure time for travelers to enjoy highlights of the route.

In this section, learn how to choose the right suppliers, combine and track all of the logistical elements of the tour, carefully balance the variable costs included in pricing a trip, and enhance sustainability practices with your clients when there is no guide to support them.

Self-Guided Tours are a high volume/low revenue process (high volume of departures but low customer numbers on each one). It is therefore imperative to have a strong, detailed oriented, streamlined workflow to make this product cost-effective and profitable. In this section, we’ll also evaluate technology that can help your team avoid human error.

In this section, we assess the fundamental information we need to provide for a Self-Guided trip, how technology can help us be more sustainable and efficient, and we discuss the world of maps, mapping and navigation.

Oh no! There’s a problem and no guide to solve it behind the scenes! In this section, we identify some potential problems that can occur on tour and their possible solutions--or more importantly, how to prevent them from happening. We explore what resources to use without staff on tour, what type of emergency contacts and risk management systems to have in place and we look at medical emergencies, navigation problems, weather or other forces of nature.

In closing, we’ll examine best practices for selling and marketing Self-Guided Tours. Learn how to maintain your branding and quality standards across different itineraries. Consider the difference between pricing for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). Learn how to work with and train distributors, travel agents or other operators (as resellers or as suppliers), and explore sales funnels that work well for Self-Guided markets such as specific trade shows and online distribution portals.