UK Arts Touring: Held Together by Spreadsheets, Sellotape and Hope.

Touring is one of the most important ways work reaches people. It’s how productions live beyond their premiere. It’s how artists and practitioners build careers, develop audiences, and create momentum. It’s how venues bring new ideas into their spaces and how festivals shape their identity. Touring is the lifeblood of the sector in so many ways.

And yet, behind the scenes, it’s often held together by spreadsheets, sellotape and hope.

Over the years, I’ve worked on many tours, in different roles and from different perspectives. And there’s a familiar pattern to how it all comes together. Let’s be honest about it, it’s slightly chaotic and oh so manual.

At first, it’s about trying to map out the shape of a tour. Plotting possible dates in a spreadsheet or a static calendar. Holding multiple enquiries at once. Trying to see what fits where. Thinking about travel days, get-ins, get-outs. Whether there’s enough time to move from one place to the next without exhausting everyone involved.

You start to think about the route itself. Does it make sense geographically? Is it efficient? Are there gaps that could be filled? Could you cluster things differently? And then there’s everything that wraps around the performances. Workshops. Talks. Participation work. Activity that adds value, but also adds complexity. Where does that sit? When could it realistically happen?

And of course, the finances. Another spreadsheet. Or another tab.

One version modelling guarantees. Another modelling splits. Different assumptions about ticket prices, capacities, audience uptake. Endless small adjustments. Changing one figure to see what it does to the overall picture. Trying to get to something that feels grounded enough to make a decision. And then something breaks. A formula doesn’t copy properly. A number gets overwritten. A version gets lost. Suddenly, you’re questioning whether any of it is reliable. It becomes stressful, time-consuming, and, frankly, a bit of a nightmare.

It works, in the sense that tours do happen. But it’s rarely efficient. And it’s rarely connected. Each producer or tour booker builds their own version of something to manage the process. Each company carries their own templates. Each tour starts again from scratch.

For something that is so fundamental to how work is shared, the underlying infrastructure is surprisingly fragile.

One of the biggest challenges is visibility. Before a tour is confirmed, you’re making decisions based on partial information. You’re estimating income based on a mix of experience, instinct, offers, and whatever data you have to hand. You’re trying to understand not just whether one date works, but whether the tour as a whole makes sense. And that’s before even knowing which venues are actively looking for work, who is the right fit, or which ones align with your priorities, scale, or audience.

It’s a process that requires clarity. But the tools we’ve had haven’t always made that easy.

And the truth is, the sector itself has changed. Financial pressures have reshaped organisations. The roles that once held this knowledge and managed this process have, in many cases, disappeared. What was once someone’s job is now part of someone else’s job. Or squeezed in around everything else.

In either scenario, you can spend hours searching for basic venue information. Emails back and forth. Trying to piece together availability, contacts, context. Trying to make it all work. It’s not as straightforward anymore. And it hasn’t been for some time.

The technology revolution has transformed everything from planning and payments to ticketing and CRM, improving efficiency, unlocking insight, and removing huge amounts of manual work. Yet tour coordination remains largely untouched.

It’s time for change.
Meet Tourly.

Tourly is a digital platform and marketplace designed specifically for touring. The vision is to create something that properly reflects how touring actually works, and what it needs to do it well. Not just a tool, but an accessible, easy-to-use digital environment to help coordinate and manage touring end to end, no matter what scale you’re working at. Whether you’re an independent artist, a mid-scale touring company, a venue with 100 seats or 1,000, and even a festival programming across multiple spaces.

Ultimately, it’s a platform where artists and companies can plan and model their tours, and where venues and festivals can discover and connect with work that makes sense for their audiences and their spaces.

It’s about creating better visibility, better discoverability, stronger connections, and more confident decision-making across the whole ecosystem, all in one place.

That full vision is still in development. But I wanted to begin with something practical. Something that solves one of the most frustrating parts of tour planning right now. Because, honestly, the current way of doing this has driven me mad for years.

So the first thing I’ve built and released is a Touring Income Forecaster app.

Meet Tourly: Touring Income Forecaster

It’s a simple tool, but an important one. It allows you to enter the basic information you already have, or can easily find — venue capacity, ticket prices, projected sales, deal terms — and it calculates the potential income across each venue and across the tour as a whole.

It doesn’t pretend to predict the future. Touring will always carry uncertainty. But it gives you a structured way to explore different scenarios. To understand the implications of a split versus a guarantee. To see, with logic and consistency, what a tour might realistically return.

Too many forecasts I’ve seen over the years have been built on instinct alone, without a clear or consistent methodology behind them. And that becomes a problem when you need to explain your assumptions to senior management or a board. If the logic isn’t clear, the confidence isn’t there. You can easily forget what you assumed in the moment of planning, and the panic can set in quite quickly when you realise you didn’t write that logic down.

Most importantly, this removes the need to constantly rebuild spreadsheets and formulas just to get a sense of where you stand.

The arts and cultural sector is complex. But when it comes to forecasting touring income, the underlying methodologies and deal structures are actually well established. What’s missing isn’t the logic. It’s the consistency. Too often, that logic is buried in individual spreadsheets, interpreted slightly differently each time. It feels vague, fragile, and uncertain, when it doesn’t need to be. So everyone builds their own version. And everyone hopes it’s right.

For me, this is about more than efficiency. It’s about confidence. It’s about giving people the tools to understand their work more clearly, and to plan with intention rather than approximation.

This is the first step. So, if you’re planning a tour, or thinking about one, you can try the Tourly: Touring Income Forecaster now, for free. And of course, spread the word!

It’s straightforward to use. The logic is transparent. And you remain in control of the assumptions. There is a Help Guide explaining everything, as well ToolTip help throughout. I’ll continue improving it and make adjustments, and ultimatley, it forms part of how to test out things for the bigger Tourly platform.

If you use it, find a bug, need help, or just want to share your thoughts, you can reach me directly at info@tourly.uk. And if you’re interested in where Tourly is heading, I’d really like to hear from you.

I’m also beginning to bring together a small group of founding partners. Venues, producers, festivals, companies and artists who want to help shape what Tourly becomes. My intention is for this to be built by the sector, for the sector. Grounded in the realities of how touring actually works, and guided by the people who do it every day.

That also means taking a different approach to how it grows. Not driven by venture capital or external pressure, but developed carefully, with purpose, and in a way that genuinely serves the people it’s for.

If that’s something you’d like to be part of, I’d equally welcoming you getting in touch.

This is just the beginning. Touring is about to change.