Waivers for tour operators and guides

Every tour is different, and your waiver should describe the tour you actually run. Most guided tour waivers start with the terrain: uneven trails, ice, snow, river crossings, cliffs and the simple fact that the backcountry is not maintained like a city sidewalk. Weather comes next. In much of Canada conditions can change within an hour, and a waiver that names cold, wind, whiteouts and storms is clearer than one that only mentions "the elements".

Remote locations raise their own points. Mobile coverage may be patchy or absent, help can take hours to arrive, and first aid may be all that is available until then. Guests should read that before they leave, not discover it on the trail. Transport matters too: if guests ride in your van, a boat or a snowcoach between sites, the waiver should cover the travel as well as the activity.

Many tours also involve other businesses, such as a partner who supplies the boats, a lodge that hosts lunch or a local guide for one section. Naming those partners as releasees means one signature covers the whole day.

WaiverNorth doesn't write this text for you, and it shouldn't. You publish your own wording, ideally reviewed by a lawyer, and every published version is locked, so you can always show exactly what each guest agreed to.

Beyond the guest's name and signature, most tour operators want enough information to run the day safely and to find the right record later. A typical WaiverNorth form collects the participant's name, date of birth, email address and phone number, plus country and postal code. An optional emergency contact, with a name and phone number, is often the most useful field on the whole form when something goes wrong in the field.

Custom fields cover the rest: the tour date, a booking or reservation number, the guest's experience level, or a question about medical conditions or allergies your guide should know about. Answers you mark as needing attention are flagged in the console, so the guide sees them before the group leaves. Custom fields range from 2 on Basic to 25 on Business.

Because the booking reference is its own field, staff can search by it on the day and see at a glance who in a group has signed and who hasn't.

Plenty of tours start where the mobile signal ends: a trailhead, a dock, a gravel pullout two hours from town. Guests who didn't sign from the booking email still need to sign before the group leaves, and a waiver system that needs the internet is no help there.

The WaiverNorth kiosk runs on a tablet and is installed from the browser, with no app store involved. Once installed, it keeps accepting waivers without any connection. Each signed waiver is held in a queue on the device, and when the tablet is back in range, at the office or in the van on the way home, the queue uploads on its own. Nothing is lost if the signal drops in the middle of a group.

Kiosks are unlimited on every plan, so every guide can carry one. Each kiosk is signed in once by your staff and then shows only the waiver form, never your records.

Families are a big part of many tours, and minors can't sign a legal release on their own. When a guest's date of birth puts them under your age of majority, the form asks a parent or guardian to sign for them, and you can require the minor to sign as well. The age of majority is set per waiver, because it differs across the country: 19 in British Columbia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and the three territories, and 18 in the other provinces. You can also set a minimum age, so guests who are too young for a tour are stopped before they sign.