In April everything works. Ten transfers a day, three drivers, two hotels, and one phone you can keep up with. In July you have four times the volume with the same people, and suddenly the exact same tools do not get the work done.
That is not a surprise, but it is almost always treated as one. Anything set up mid-season is set up in a hurry and costs twice as much. So let us look at what actually breaks, and what can take its place in May, while there is still time.
What breaks in July and not in April
Your memory. In April you remember who is going where. In July you do not, but you keep operating as if you do, because that is how you learned. That is where transfers get lost.
The phone as an assignment tool. Twelve calls to drivers a day is manageable. Forty is not, especially when half of them happen while you are driving or while a hotel is on the other line.
The new people. The driver who started in June and the person you hired for reception do not have the unwritten context the old hands have. Anything that is not written down somewhere will be asked, and it will be asked of you.
Night arrivals. In April planes land when they say they will. In August, one flight ninety minutes late rearranges four other pickups.
The hotels sending you messages. In April every message gets answered. In July the messages pile up, and a hotel that waited two hours for a confirmation starts thinking about alternatives.
What you set up in May
One place where all bookings arrive
If bookings come from four channels and end up in four different places, July will find you searching. The goal is one queue.
In practice: bookings that arrive by email from booking platforms and partners can be read and dropped straight into the queue without anyone retyping them. Partner hotels can enter their own requests instead of messaging you. And the guest can request a transfer by scanning a QR code at reception. All three end up in the same place.
The gain is not the automation as such. It is that in August there is one screen that answers the question "what do we have today," without a person having to be asked.
Assignments that do not go through the phone
Driver assignment is the thing that eats most of your hours in season. Instead of a call, the driver gets the notification on WhatsApp, with SMS as a fallback if delivery fails, and answers from the app whether they accept or reject.
The rejection is the important part. A driver who cannot take the job and says so straight away gives you time to find someone else. The alternative, not knowing whether they even saw the assignment, is the one that keeps you awake.
One point to be clear about so the team does not build the wrong expectation: no automatic reminder goes out before each pickup. The notification goes out when the assignment or the change is made. Checking the day's schedule is still a human job, it just happens against one list instead of four.
The arrivals schedule
If your office works the airport, flight status needs to be where you are already looking, not in a second tab. On the dispatcher screen the flight status sits next to the transfer, so a delay becomes visible the moment you look at the schedule rather than when the driver calls from arrivals.
Clear agreements with partners
May is the right month to lock in commission percentages per hotel, because in September nobody remembers what was agreed verbally in July. If the percentage is recorded on the hotel, the monthly settlement comes out of the transfers themselves. More on that in how to track commission without Excel.
Paperwork you do not produce yourself
The PDF voucher and the Excel export sound like details until the week a hotel asks for confirmation on every pickup and the accountant asks for the month's totals at the same time.
A realistic timeline
Do not change everything at once. An order that works:
Early May. Enter the hotels, the drivers and the commission percentages. It is the most boring job and the only one that cannot be done in a hurry later.
Mid May. Point one booking channel at the new queue. One, not all of them. Leave the rest as they are until you see the first one working.
Late May. Put the drivers in the app and work two weeks with real assignments at low volume. That is when the questions come up, while there is still time to answer them.
Early June. Move the remaining channels and the hotels that enter their own requests.
Anything not set up by mid-June, leave for October. A process change in mid-July costs more than the problem it solves.
No tool makes peak season easy. It is just that the difference between a hard summer and a chaotic one is usually decided in May. If you want to see what exists and on which plan, there is pricing.
Read more
Tracking hotel commission without Excel
Every partner hotel earns a commission on each transfer. Why Excel always produces the wrong number, and what a per-hotel percentage actually fixes.
What transfer software really costs
Per user, per vehicle or a flat subscription? What you actually pay for transfer software, what to ask the vendor, and which signs deserve attention.
WhatsApp vs spreadsheet for transfer bookings
Most transfer desks run on chat threads and a spreadsheet. Here is exactly where that breaks, and how one booking queue fixes it.