🐝 Cycle Cities Buzz - This Week: Symposium News, Gold Nuggets & New Tools 🚲

Hi Reader,

There’s quite a lot packed into this week’s newsletter: from the latest Symposium reminders, to our next Groupwork Gold Nugget, a new tool, and a conversation that came up in the community.

One of the things I really like about Cycle Cities is that the value keeps moving.

An operator asks a question. Others share what they’re doing. We spot useful patterns. Those conversations become Gold Nuggets, tools, webinars and ideas that everyone can take back to their own business.

Here’s what’s happening this week.

Symposium News 🤝

A quick reminder about the hotel discount I shared last week.

If the discount code doesn’t work when booking directly through the hotel website, please let me know.

The following content is only visible for the Cycle Cities Members.

Remember you can use the code:

CycleCities210227

The offer is available for stays between 21–25 February 2027, with a minimum stay of 2 nights.

And if you’ve already registered for the Symposium, check your inbox, I sent you an email this week asking whether you’d be interested in contributing to the programme, either with a short talk or as part of a conversation/panel.

The Symposium is the perfect opportunity to share what you’ve learned, what you’re working on and what you think other operators should be talking about.

This is your community, the programme should reflect that.

⏰ Early Bird ends in just 3 days

If you haven’t registered yet, now is the time to do it and secure the reduced Early Bird rate.

Join us in Hamburg 2027

Groupwork Gold Nuggets 💛

We’re continuing with the final question from the High-Volume Hubs group, where Wollo Wollenberg, Lars Michaelsen, Emmanuel Darley, Ari Apteker, Rob Dijkhuis and Sergio Morales discussed the challenges of operating at scale.

How do you automate guide scheduling for 30+ staff?

The following content is only visible for the Cycle Cities Members.This is a very different problem from scheduling a handful of guides.

The group discussed approaches including collecting guide availability and skills before the season, matching guides to specific booking requirements, allowing qualified guides to claim open tours, and creating a way for freelance staff to signal their real-time availability.

One particularly interesting idea was a “hot button” system for filling last-minute gaps caused by illness or unexpected bookings.

The bigger takeaway?

Once your team grows, scheduling stops being an admin task and becomes an operational system.

And that’s exactly the kind of practical knowledge we want to capture through the Gold Nuggets: not generic advice, but things operators are actually thinking about and testing

Tool of the Week 🛠️

#18 — The Product & Customer Profitability Tool

We’ve been developing a new tool that brings together four areas we’ve already explored separately:

Pricing + Customer Journey + Profitability + Capacity

The starting point is a simple question:

What if your most popular product isn't the product you most want to sell?

Instead of looking only at sales volume, the tool looks at things like:

Product
Customer type
Group size
Booking channel
Price
Guide hours
Bike usage
Operational complexity
Contribution

The goal is to help you understand which products and customers actually create value for your business.

Because sometimes the product that sells the most isn't the one that contributes the most.

Download it here

Community — Highlights ➡️

A question from Rupert at Maria's Bike Tours sparked a conversation this week:

How many people actually see your Instagram Stories?

It led to a useful discussion around Stories, Reels and Feed posts, and whether operators should be putting more effort into social media before they know what is actually working for them.

My view is that consistency matters more than trying to produce huge amounts of content.

For a small operator, posting 2–3 times a week consistently is often much more manageable than posting 10 times one week and then disappearing for the rest of the month.

And there isn't necessarily one format that works for everyone.

Stories, Reels and Feed posts serve different purposes and can reach different audiences.

We’ll talk more about this in our upcoming webinar: