I wrote about the importance of guest feedback in this post. Since then, one of the main questions I’ve gotten when discussing the tours with friends IRL is “what kind of feedback have you gotten?”
I love thinking & talking about this stuff, so with this post I’m starting an ongoing series where I’ll detail specific feedback I’ve gotten & how I iterated.
Feedback = “Just tell us what to order“
Background: Many/most food tours take you to 7-9 places, just give you a small tasting of a food or drink at each, you eat it quickly standing on the street, and there really isn’t much of choice as to what you get. But, since there are so many “stops”, it’s no biggie if guests don’t like or won’t* eat any of the choices.
Conversely, my DC food tour stops at 5 places, we go in to sit at a table to eat & drink as a group at 4 of them, and the portions are comparatively large. It’s thus a bigger deal if a guest doesn’t like, or won’t eat, any of the choices. As a result, I originally built in lots of options for each guest to select from at each stop.
So, once we sat down down, I told them all the choices, gave them time to discuss & decide, gathered their orders, and then placed the order with the server. I knew this would take more time, but I thought I had to be pre-flexible because everybody is so picky** or has an allergy these days.
The feeback I’ve gotten on the tours, though, is:
“You’ve curated & brought us to these specific family spots. You know the best things here. Keep that curation going. Just tell us what to order.“
So that’s what I now do — I tell them the drink & food choice I’m going to order for all of them. I then sit back to watch their reactions and wait to see if there’s push back. If there is, I give some options. That’s the fallback, though, not primary.
The result is that I now love the tours even more. I’ve spent so much time building them, it’s nice to know & feel that guests trust my choices. That said, if they end the tour hangry, I’ve got a jumbo fallback for that also…
*That’s why I ate so much pickeled herring on this tour in the Netherlands
**Me too!
eyeintim 
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