Rezdy Virtual Assistant: a VA who runs the manifest while you run the tour

Nobody searches “rezdy virtual assistant” from a desk. You search it from the wheelhouse, or the bus depot, or the beach car park at 6:50am, because Rezdy took bookings all night while you slept and now there are two reschedule requests, a dietary note buried in an order, an agent asking about commission, and a family of five standing at the wrong pick-up point. Rezdy is very good at selling your tours. It has never once loaded the vehicle, and the gap between those two things is currently your evenings.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Rezdy

Start with the morning, because for a tour operator the morning is the whole game. Before your first departure, your VA has already been through the day’s sessions on the bookings dashboard: passenger counts checked against capacity, the manifest for each session opened and read properly, special requirements pulled out and messaged to the guide (the vegetarian on the lunch cruise, the knee injury on the walking tour), and the pick-up list sequenced by stop so the driver runs one clean loop. If a booking came in overnight with a note that changes the plan, you hear about it before you leave the house, not from the customer at the dock.

Then the inbox and the phone, which for tour operators never really stop. Reschedule requests are the daily bread: your VA moves the order to another session inside Rezdy, confirms the new time with the guest, and updates the order notes so the manifest stays true. Cancellations get processed against the policy you set, with refunds pushed back through the payment gateway on the original transaction. When weather kills a departure, the VA works through the whole session’s manifest guest by guest, offering the reschedule first and processing refunds for the ones who cannot make another date, which is two hours of work you currently do at 5:30am in the rain.

Availability is the quieter, more important layer. Sessions do not open themselves: your VA loads the new season’s schedule, blocks the maintenance days and the public holidays you do not run, adjusts capacity when the second boat comes back from survey, and allocates resources so Rezdy knows a guide or a bus cannot be in two places at once. Resource allocation is the difference between Rezdy protecting you from overselling and Rezdy cheerfully double-booking your only kayak trailer.

Guest communications run on a maintained system, not set and forget. Rezdy’s automated emails and SMS only say what someone last told them to say, so your VA keeps confirmation templates accurate (meeting point, what to bring, cut-off times), tunes reminder SMS timing per product, and runs the post-tour follow-up with the review ask. Operators consistently underrate this one: the follow-up email is where Google and TripAdvisor reviews come from, and reviews are where next season’s direct bookings come from.

Weekly, the money pass. Rezdy’s booking and sales reports get exported and reconciled: revenue by product and by channel, direct versus OTA versus agent, commissions checked both ways, and pay-later agent invoices generated and chased on a cadence you approve. You get a short summary you can read in two minutes, plus a flag on anything odd, like a session that keeps departing half-empty or an OTA payout that does not match the bookings Rezdy recorded.

Agents, resellers and the Channel Manager

This is the part of Rezdy that quietly eats owner time, because it is fiddly and it involves other people’s money. Rezdy Marketplace lets agents and resellers sell your tours under rate agreements you control: your VA sets those agreements up correctly, keeps each agent’s commission percentage right, and makes sure new products actually get added to the agreements instead of sitting unsellable.

The Channel Manager side is Viator, GetYourGuide and the other OTAs. The connections mostly hum along, but they need a human watching them: when you edit a product (new duration, new pick-up point, price change), the mapping to the OTA listing needs checking, because a silent mismatch means the OTA sells the old version of your tour and the guest arrives with the wrong expectations. Your VA makes the post-edit mapping check a standing routine, confirms availability is pushing through, and reconciles what the OTAs paid against what Rezdy says they sold. None of it is hard. All of it is exactly the kind of recurring, detail-heavy admin that never gets done when the person responsible is also driving the bus.

The honest bit

Things Rezdy will not do, whoever you hire. The waiting list does not work itself: Rezdy can collect names against a sold-out session, but when a cancellation opens a spot nobody gets rung automatically, and the on-hold entries just sit there until someone converts them. Your VA works the list by phone or SMS the moment a place opens, which is the difference between a refund and a full boat. Rezdy also does not answer your phone; tour bookings are phone-heavy, especially with older travellers and last-minute same-day callers, and a VA covering the line during business hours is a separate, very fixable problem.

Two more truths. The Marketplace connects you to agents but does not negotiate for you: rate agreements, commission levels and who you let sell your product are commercial calls, and the chasing of pay-later agent invoices is manual work someone has to own. And Rezdy’s reporting is honest but flat: exports and tables, not insight. The insight comes from a person who reads the exports every week and notices the pattern, which is precisely the job.

One more, since owners ask: the 2023-24 merger with Checkfront and Regiondo under Vertica Capital has not changed the product you log into. Rezdy continues as its own brand with its Australian roots (it was founded in Sydney and still runs a large share of AU tour and activity bookings, more than $1.3 billion a year across the platform). Your VA’s workflow is unaffected.

What stays with you

A VA runs the system; they do not run the business. Pricing stays yours: what a seat on the sunset cruise costs, what net rate you give Viator, what commission an agent earns. The weather call stays yours, because cancelling a departure is a safety and reputation decision, not an admin one; once you make the call, the VA executes the whole notification and refund sequence. Goodwill refunds beyond your written policy get escalated, not improvised. And anything that touches your operating licences, permits, insurance or vessel survey requirements lands on your desk with context attached. The clean split: your VA moves the bookings, you decide what the bookings are worth and whether the boat leaves the dock.

What it costs and where to start

Rezdy admin sits on the admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, and most operators land at 10-15 hours a week, roughly $500-1,100 a month. Seasonality works in your favour here: scale hours up for peak, wind them down over winter, with no lock-in beyond 14 days notice. Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 5-7 days supervised inside your Rezdy before any solo work, starting on manifests and reschedules because that is where an error costs you on the day. There is a $500 refundable deposit credited to your first month and a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, across 87+ Australian placements since 2024.

If you want the broader industry picture, the hospitality page covers operators like you, the customer support tickets page shows how guest enquiries get handled, and the VA cost guide has the full pricing breakdown. Otherwise book a discovery call with Jenn, ideally before the next school holidays hit your inbox.