The invisible side of tourism: why the management of guides and agencies is still so informal. 

Brazilian tourism is experiencing a period of expansion. More guides are becoming formally registered, more agencies are structuring themselves, and more destinations are being discovered by Brazilian and foreign tourists. According to data from the Ministry of Tourism (MTUR, 2025), between 2023 and 2025 the number of registrations in Cadastur increased from 157,321 to 188,625 — a growth of almost 201% of the total number of jobs in the country, with tourism agencies and guides standing out. Today, Brazil already has more than 37,000 registered tourist guides (AGÊNCIA CIDADES, 2025), and the sector accounts for approximately 8 million jobs in the country, equivalent to 8.11% of all formal employment nationwide (AGÊNCIA CIDADES, 2025). 

In other words, on paper, tourism has never been so formalized. Cadastur (the Brazilian Tourism Registry) grows year after year, legal requirements advance, and the profession of tour guide gains increasing institutional recognition—including its own national day, established by Law No. 14.971/2024 (AGÊNCIA CIDADES, 2025). But there is a layer of the business that these numbers don't show, and which will hardly appear in any official formalization report. It is precisely this invisible layer that Girus has been closely observing and wants to understand better. 

Formalized in the registry, informal in daily practice. 

Having a registration with Cadastur says a lot about the regularization of the activity: it proves that the professional meets the legal requirements, has recognized technical training, and is authorized to work. What this registration doesn't say is how this guide, or agency, organizes the most practical and crucial aspects of the business on a daily basis: the schedule, reservations, staff availability, and communication with the client. 

And it is precisely at this point that informality still dominates a large part of the sector—not the informality of documentation, which has been consistently decreasing according to the Ministry of Tourism's own data, but the operational informality, the kind that doesn't appear in any statistics because it happens on each guide's cell phone, in WhatsApp conversations, in notebooks and spreadsheets scattered around. In practice, we observe—both in our direct work with municipalities, agencies, and tourism service providers, and in informal conversations with the market itself—a routine marked by: 

 

• Schedules controlled by WhatsApp messages, spread across various contacts and different groups. 

• Notebooks, notepads, or makeshift spreadsheets as the sole source of truth regarding reservations. 

• Availability of guides decided "on the spur of the moment" or resolved by a last-minute phone call. 

• Reservation confirmations are done manually, one by one, without a defined standard between the seller and the executor. 

• Lack of any organized historical record regarding occupancy, revenue, or performance of the tours over time. 

This is not a criticism of professionals in the sector—quite the contrary. It is, in fact, a reflection of how tour and experience tourism has grown in Brazil: organically, based on individual effort and passion for the work, without the market having offered, until now, tools specifically designed for this reality. Unlike the hotel or retail industries, which have had mature and widely adopted management systems for years, the segment of tour guides and agencies continues, to a large extent, to depend on improvisation. 

Why is this a problem that grows along with the sector? 

When the volume of tours and clients was small, this type of informal management worked—with effort, but it worked. A guide could, alone, remember all their weekly appointments. A small agency could coordinate three or four guides by phone without major problems. The problem is that informal management doesn't scale. It works up to a certain point and, after that, it starts to generate exactly the types of failures that cost money and reputation. 

 

• Guides were scheduled twice for the same time slot due to a lack of a consolidated overview of the agenda; 

• Customers who receive no response or booking confirmation, and simply give up; 

• Lost sales due to slow service, especially in highly competitive destinations; 

• A real difficulty in knowing, at the exact moment, which guide is available for which date; 

• Poorly communicated cancellations, which generate confusion between the client, guide, and agency — and often result in financial loss. 

Each of these points, in isolation, may seem like an operational detail, a day-to-day setback. But, added together over months and years of activity, they paint a picture in which the sector's growth—the same growth that the Cadastur numbers celebrate—may be limited not by a lack of tourist demand, but by a lack of infrastructure to manage that demand. 

It's a paradox we frequently see in our work: guides and agencies with full schedules, a good reputation built over the years, and repeat clients, but who continue to lose time, sales, and peace of mind because business management simply hasn't kept pace with the growth of the operation. The result is an overworked professional, responding to messages outside of working hours, trying to remember appointments without the support of any system, and constantly running the risk of a silly scheduling error turning into a serious problem with the client. 

Independent guide or agency: the problem changes form, but doesn't disappear. 

This informality in management appears in different ways depending on the size of the operation, but it is present in virtually all profiles within the sector. For the independent, self-employed guide, the challenge is usually to do everything at the same time — attend to clients, promote their work on social media, confirm reservations, organize payments, and still conduct the tour, often using the same cell phone and in real time, without any team support. 

For agencies and tour operators with larger teams, the problem shifts to coordination between people. How can you know for sure which guide is available for which date, without relying on scattered messages in WhatsApp groups or the memory of the person in charge? How can you prevent two different people on the team from confirming the same guide for the same time, creating a conflict that will only be discovered the day before the tour? How can you maintain an organized history of occupancy and revenue, capable of guiding pricing and hiring decisions, instead of relying on scattered notes in spreadsheets that are not always up-to-date? 

In both cases — from individual guides to agencies with robust teams — the common thread is the absence of a tool designed for this specific dynamic. Generic management systems, geared towards hotels or traditional e-commerce, rarely capture the reality of a guided tour well: limited spaces, specific guides linked to each date, availability windows that constantly change depending on the weather, the season, or the personal schedules of each professional. 

What Girus wants to understand better 

It was by observing this pattern repeating itself — in our direct work with municipalities, agencies, and tourism service providers in different regions of Santa Catarina, and also in the way the tour and experience market itself is organized on a daily basis — that we decided to delve deeper into this issue before proposing any solution. 

We want to understand, in greater depth and directly from the source, How guides and agencies of different profiles and sizes are actually managing their activities today.What tools do they use to manage schedules and reservations? What conflict or confusing situations have they faced? What is the biggest burden on their daily routine? And what would they do differently if they had the option of a tool tailored for this type of operation?. 

To that end, we launched a quick survey—just 9 questions, taking about 3 minutes—open to independent guides, guides affiliated with agencies, tour operators, and agencies. It's not a survey to confirm a pre-existing hypothesis. It is, above all, an invitation to hear, in practice and without filters, from those who experience this problem every day—because we believe that the best way to build any solution for tourism is to start from the real-life experience of those on the front lines of the operation. 

👉 Click here and answer the survey “How do you manage tours and bookings today?” 

If you are a tour guide, work for an agency or tour operator, or lead a team of guides, your answer helps build a more realistic and complete picture of this sector — and, from there, solutions that make sense for those who are actually on the front lines of Brazilian tourism.. 

Girus continues to believe that technology and tourism should go hand in hand, always serving those who work in this sector every day. And, before any ready-made solution, we want to understand the problem well — because it is this in-depth understanding that makes what comes next truly useful for guides and agencies across the country.