Golden Tours – Improving Operational Efficiency Through Sage200-STANDARD ERP Implementation.

Logo for Golden Tours featuring a stylized blue horse with orange and blue wings, and the text 'Golden Tours' with a 'V' shaped accent.

Golden Tours is one of the UK’s leading sightseeing and tour operators. Founded in 1984, they specialise in London sightseeing, hop-on hop-off bus tours, UK day trips, attraction tickets, city walking tours, theatre & rail packages, offering a wide variety of travel experiences across the UK. Their offerings range from open-top bus tours and iconic attraction visits to full-day excursions beyond London, combining convenience, heritage and flexibility. 

Through decades of service, Golden Tours has built a reputation for quality, value, and reliability, delivering experiences to millions of guests from around the world. Golden Tours positions itself as a one-stop provider for sightseeing and touring in London and the UK, combining diverse travel services under one brand to deliver “impeccable service, first-class experiences, and great value.”  

Business Challenges.

From within the frontend tour booking management system, Golden Tours manages hundreds of tour products, each with different pricing models, fulfilment workflows, suppliers, cancellation rules, and revenue streams. For accounting and finance operations, Golden Tours was using and On-Premise accounting system. During the COVID-19 period, staff working from home were unable to reliably access the On-Premise accounting system. With a high volume of transactional data processing requirements, users were unable to complete their activities in time, which resulted in no timelyreporting and management information, which affected operational visibility and decision-making. To ease the pressure of work on the onshore users, the company decided to move their accounting and finance operations to an offshore team outside the UK. However, without a reliable and 24x7 accessible system, it was difficult for the offshore team to work efficiently, which further made back-office operations difficult.  

Together, these challenges placed pressure on teams, increased operational risk, and limited Golden Tours’ ability to scale sustainably, and more importantly to grow the business when there were plenty of opportunities post COVID-19 period to grow the business.  

ACS-APT Solutions:

After Golden Tours and ACS-APT agreed to work together, ACS-APT studied and analysed the challenges Golden Tours faced. This helped ACS-APT identify the most appropriate cloud-based Accounting and Finance system on the market, without requiring extensive end-user training, and keeping business disruption to a minimum. ACS-APT proposed and presented a fully cloud-based Sage 200 Standard ERP system to Golden Tours’ management. Given the requirement for 24x7 system accessibility, the lack of on-premise infrastructure needed to run the system beyond the internet and user computers, and the system's ability to meet most requirements, it was an easy decision for Golden Tours’ management to go with the fully cloud-based Sage 200 Standard ERP system. 

After implementation, the new fully cloud-based Sage 200 Standard ERP system immediately met expectations and proved easier to use, with no on-premise infrastructure management. 

  • No major initial investment due to a low monthly system and user license subscription 

  • Centralised ERP Platform with over 99% uptime. 

  • Remote accessibility for staff working from home and teams working in the offshore offices 

  • Process standardisation & workflow automation  

  • Reduced administrative burden and error risk, and timely data entry and ledger closures, thus Improved Data Management & financial reporting  

  • Resilient and scalable Infrastructure for Growth and operational cost optimisation - allowing adding or reducing user licenses as per season demand 

  • Clear financial visibility due to data-driven decision-making and improved forecasting and resource planning 

Conclusion.

For a dynamic, multi-product tour operator like Golden Tours where customer experience and operational complexity go hand in hand, having robust, reliable & scalable cloud-based financial and operational systems is not a luxury, but a necessity. 

Through this partnership, Golden Tours transformed complexity into clarity, cost-pressure into controlled growth, and ambition into scalable reality, delivering a robust financial system for better decision-making and business growth while controlling operational costs with increased operational ease and profitability for long-term sustainability.