If you have a nut allergy, Tom Medin will tell you plainly: you can’t come on his food tour. He just needs to actually find that out before you show up, not after.

Tom owns Local Taste of the City Tours, a San Francisco food tour that takes guests through local bakeries, restaurants, and cafes across one of the world’s culinary capitals. He’s been guiding in the city for nearly a decade, and for him, the waiver isn’t just a signature, it’s the one place he can reach every guest directly, not just whoever made the booking.

Getting Past the Lead Booker

Guests expect food tours to accommodate allergies and intolerances, but Tom’s reservation system made that hard to enforce. The person booking would rush through the form and click past questions meant for everyone in the group.

“There’s a lot of allergies which we can do something about. We can’t do anything for nut allergies, so if you have a nut allergy, you can’t come on the tour, unfortunately. So we need to collect this information from the guests directly, and waivers allow us to do that.”

— Tom Medin, Local Taste of the City Tours

Because the waiver is collected after payment, there’s no risk of a guest abandoning checkout partway through, either.

Setting Expectations Before the Tour Starts

Latecomers throw off the whole group experience, so Tom uses the waiver to make sure every guest gets the start time and directions well ahead of the tour.

“If you’ve ever given a presentation and had someone arrive late, you feel like you’re now giving two presentations, one to the people who were there from the start, and another to the latecomers. It’s the same with food tours, which is why we emphasize to people that they need to be on time,” Tom said.

Turning Waiver Data Into Seasonal Marketing

San Francisco leans hard into its holidays, and Tom uses the data collected through waivers to plan around them.

“You have to say to yourself as a food tour operator, ‘what are the events that will be going on for longer than a day, and how do I target people for those holidays.’ For example, Valentine’s Day is a huge day here, and we can do Valentine’s Day tours all month. Same as Halloween and Pride Month! So we’ll use the waiver data to target people for those holiday months. We also do big business in gift certificates every year,” Tom said.

Opening the Door to Corporate Bookings

Corporate bookings are high-value, but Tom found cold outreach doesn’t work for landing them. Past guest data does.

“Our corporate market is very different from other markets. You can send cold emails to Facebook until you’re blue in the face, and they won’t go anywhere. But what we can do is find people who were on our tours that fit a certain demographic, and say ‘hey, think about booking us for a corporate event.’ We’ve now got an in with these companies, and decisions get made internally for these events, which is huge for us.”

— Tom Medin, Local Taste of the City Tours

A Waiver That Talks to Every Guest, Not Just the One Who Booked

For Local Taste of the City Tours, the waiver stopped being paperwork and became the one channel guaranteed to reach everyone showing up, allergies included.

If this sounds like where your business is at, get in touch with our team to see what Wherewolf could do for you.