Why we built ONTOUR: a tour shouldn’t run on forty spreadsheets

Touring looks glamorous from the crowd. Backstage it runs on spreadsheets, forwarded emails and phone calls. Someone is fixing tomorrow’s load-in from a hotel lobby at 2 a.m. Advancing one show can take days of back-and-forth, and a tour has dozens of shows.

We built ONTOUR so that the whole run of dates lives in one place instead of forty spreadsheets and an inbox.

The problem: a tour is a thousand moving parts

A single night on the road involves a venue and its specs, a load-in time and a curfew, hotels and flights, a merch count and a guest list. The box office report arrives after the show and the settlement comes at the end of the night. Multiply that by every date on the run and every person on the crew. Now add the day something changes: a flight cancels, a venue moves or a date gets added.

The tools most tours use weren’t built for any of this. Spreadsheets don’t know that a venue has a curfew. Inboxes don’t know that the hotel confirmation belongs to the Tuesday show. So a person ends up being the database, usually the tour manager.

Routing that thinks

ONTOUR starts where a tour starts, with the route. AI route sequencing orders the dates to cut miles, dead days and hotel nights. When plans change, auto-rerouting rebuilds the run around the change so nobody has to redo the whole map.

A calendar that reads your email

Everyone on the tour shares one calendar. ONTOUR parses hotel, flight and advance emails into it, so a confirmation lands on the right date without anyone copying it over.

1,346 venues, already mapped

ONTOUR ships with 1,346 venues mapped with capacity, load-in details, specs, curfews and contacts, plus settlement history. The first call to a new room starts with the answers already on screen.

Advancing, tracked

Every show moves through the same statuses: Held, Advancing, Advanced. The whole tour can see which dates are locked and which still need a call, without a status meeting.

Merch, tickets and the money

• Merch: count-in and count-out for each show, SKU rollups across the run, and low-stock alerts before the table runs dry.
• Ticketing: sell-through for each date, with comps and holds tracked.
• Guest lists: names and +1s, synced with the box office.
• Vendors: send RFPs and collect bids in one place.
• Settlements: reconciled nightly, with per-diems alongside.

Built on real touring data

ONTOUR’s picture of touring draws on public sources like setlist.fm and Wikidata. Its data spans 24 million fan records.

Who it’s for

ONTOUR is built for everyone who moves a show from city to city. That means solo artists and working tours, labels and agencies, venues and vendors. Pro sports teams do the same thing on a different stage, so it’s for them too.

Every show. Every venue. Every detail.

Why it’s part of ONTOURAGE

The name ONTOURAGE starts with “on tour”, so this is the app that comes closest to the name. ONTOUR is the tour manager of the entourage. It keeps the whole run of dates organised so the people on the road can focus on the show. It runs on the web at ontour.app.