Should your tour company be running on an agent?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about everything I do with Claude, and I said I was 90% Claude. How the times change. I want to correct myself: I'm now running agents.

So, what I actually mean by "agent"

There's a lot of loose language around this, so let me be specific about what I've got running. I use Hermes — an open-source agent from Nous Research, released back in February and MIT licensed. It runs on my own machine. No telemetry, no cloud dependency, nothing calling home. It has persistent memory, so it doesn't wake up every morning with amnesia the way a chat window does — it remembers what happened last week and what I told it in March.

The distinction that matters: a chatbot waits for you, an agent doesn't. Mine is doing things at 6am while I'm asleep and at 11pm while I'm at dinner, and most days I don't open it at all.

The other distinction, and the one I got wrong in my last post: I choose which model sits behind it. The agent is the thing I own. The model is a component I can swap — and I have, repeatedly.

Three brains, same agent

To begin with I started on DeepSeek V4, then moved to Kimi K3. Both open weights, both cheap, both perfectly capable of the work I was throwing at them. Then a conversation with Jack Harris changed how I was thinking about it, and now I've got several agents running off my $200-a-month Codex plan — all doing different jobs, all hooked up to one subscription.

Here's the thing I want other operators to take from this: none of those swaps changed the work. The reviews still got answered. The receipts still got reconciled. I changed the engine three times and the engine kept running. When you own the agent, the model becomes a line in a config file — something you upgrade when something better ships, or downgrade when a task doesn't need the expensive one.

The six jobs we took off a tour operator's plate

This is the part people ask me about, so here's the actual list — six jobs I helped a tour company hand over to an agent. Nothing here is theoretical; all of it ran this week, and honestly I'm only just getting started.

• Customer reviews. Every review that comes in gets read and a response drafted, in line with the SEO and review-response tactics I've learned over the years.
• Booking notifications. Every new booking gets flagged to the team as it lands, with the context they actually need rather than the raw notification.
• Twilio upsells and cross-sells. The one with a direct revenue line attached: automated SMS to guests at the right moment in their trip — the upgrade, the second tour, the thing they didn't know was on offer. The agent understands the product ordered and the location, and offers add-ons from a preset file.
• Weekly Google Ads reports. Every Monday, without anyone asking, in a format that reads in ninety seconds instead of clicking through the dashboard.
• Financial updates from email. It reads the emails that make up the financial picture and reports what changed. That used to be a Sunday-evening job. It isn't anymore.
• QuickBooks receipt reconciliation. My favourite, and the one I'd point any operator at first — now working for guides straight from their own receipt Slack channels, reconciled and added to Google Drive as it happens.

The receipt thing

Here's how expenses used to work in a tour business. A guide pays for something — a food-tour expense, say. They get a paper receipt. It lives in a pocket, then a bag, then a drawer, and at some point somebody sits down and types it all into QuickBooks. Or, more honestly, the receipt is lost and the expense never gets recorded at all.

Now the guide takes a photo of it. That's the whole process on their end. It goes into QuickBooks, matched and categorised, and nobody types anything.

I want to be precise about why this one matters more than it looks. It isn't the time saved — that was never more than an hour or two a week. It's that the job was one nobody wanted to do, which meant it was the job that quietly didn't get done. Automation is at its best when it takes something that was failing silently and makes it just happen. Not the glamorous work — the work that was already broken.

What I'd tell another operator before they try this

I don't want to write the version of this article where everything is frictionless, because it isn't.

Hermes is self-hosted, which means you need to be comfortable in a terminal — though as Alex Farlander pointed out, Codex makes it far easier now. The trade you're making is control in exchange for responsibility, and that's a real trade, not everyone should take it. If you want to dip a toe in without the Hermes setup, Grokbot is a good place to start.

Whichever path you take, start with one job, not six. This got built up over time, and the reason it works is that every piece earned its place before the next one got added. Try to do all of it in a weekend and you'll have six half-working automations and no idea which one is lying to you.

Keep a human in the loop wherever the company's name is attached. Reviews are public. SMS goes to real guests who are mid-trip. The financial stuff feeds decisions. Someone on the team checks anything that faces a customer, and I'd tell anyone else to do the same.

And be honest about what this is worth. The value isn't headcount, it's attention — six things nobody has to carry in their head anymore. If your bottleneck is something else, this might not be your answer.

Where I've landed

The AI conversation in our industry is still mostly about who's using ChatGPT or Claude. That was my last post, and it's a conversation that resets every few months when the next thing ships.

The more useful question is: what do you own? I own the agent. I own the integrations. I own the memory of how my business runs. The model is rented, and it's the cheapest and most replaceable part of the whole stack.

If you're still picking a model, you might be solving the wrong problem.

This is one piece of a bigger picture. For the wider view, read my full guide to AI for tour operators, or the practical starting points in 5 ways to start optimising your tour company with AI.