Get Out Kayak (GOK) & The Kayak Trail (TKT) · Season debrief · 2026
By nights out it is closer: 56% GOK, 44% TKT.
A whole season, start to finish, and the shape it took.
Week 31 was our biggest at 156 guests. Weeks 23 to 36 carry almost the whole season.
A guest counts here on their first and last day as well as the ones in between, so this is everyone who was out on the water on a given day rather than a headcount at one moment. The busiest was 11 July with 104 guests in 75 kayaks; 91 of those stayed out that night. The gap between the two lines is the double kayaks — the more doubles we run, the more people we can carry on the same fleet.
Guided tours sit on top of the TKT bar in purple, because we set their length rather than the guest. Among self-guided guests, three and four days is where most people sit: GOK carries the short end, with every self-guided two-day trip, while TKT stretches the other way and never goes below three. The purple blocks are two very different things. The 124 at five days are the operator groups, all on the identical Wednesday-to-Sunday trip, and they are what lifts five days to the second-biggest column overall. The 50 at two days are a single booking — the Nature Travels group in June, 50 people and 25 kayaks in one go.
22 countries. A further 184 guests came through partners and operators with no country recorded.
The peak was long, and there was nowhere in it to rest.
From 16 June to 17 September, a group went out every single day. Count any movement at all, out or back, and the run is 121 days, from 21 May to 18 September. Someone was down at the harbour for every one of them.
Through that stretch we handled around 30 guests coming or going each day, and about 59 were out on the water on an average day.
6 440 hours between week 18 and week 40, across 15 people.
The part that matters most, in the guests’ own words.
new reviews on Google this season, across the three listings people actually use. Almost all of them are five stars: of the 319 reviews ever written about us, 313 are five stars, five are four, and one is a two. We hand people a kayak and send them out into open water for four days, and they come home and write things like the ones below. That is what we did this summer — and the two-star is worth reading properly rather than explaining away.
“Arne was a perfect guide. Patient, calm, clear, helpful. A real pleasure to follow him.”
Google · 18 Aug 2026“Anna was an excellent guide, she navigated and guided us to locations suitable to the weather and kept us safe.”
Tripadvisor · July 2026“Freddie was our guide, and was fantastic. He chose challenging but achievable routes which gave us a real sense of achievement.”
Tripadvisor“Everything was prepared and explained perfectly, and they were even very accommodating when one of us had to arrive one day later.”
Google · 27 Aug 2026“Great introduction from the team, brilliant advice in terms of staying safe on the water, lovely suggested route, excellent kit.”
Google · 1 Sep 2026“We took the food option and it did not disappoint — we ate better than at home!”
Tripadvisor · July 2026Fewer day trips, longer trips, and our first operator tours.
| Counting… | Whole season 2025 record is short | From 3 June only both years, like for like |
|---|---|---|
| Everyone we took out | 1 602 → 1 681 +5% | 1 586 → 1 563 −2% |
| Guests staying overnight | 1 392 → 1 673 +20% | 1 376 → 1 561 +13% |
| Guest-nights | 4 208 → 4 919 +17% | 4 154 → 4 602 +11% |
| TKT | 323 → 638 +98% | 323 → 619 +92% |
| GOK | 1 069 → 1 035 −4% | 1 053 → 942 −11% |
The left column flatters us. Our 2025 record only starts on 3 June, so last year has no May in it, while 2026 has a full one — 112 guests and 317 guest-nights, most of them GOK. Cutting both years at 3 June removes that advantage. It takes 112 guests off 2026 and only 16 off 2025, which is why every figure comes down and GOK in particular drops from −4% to −11%. The right column is the fair one.
Twenty-three guided departures in all: eleven for operators, eight of those for Much Better Adventures where last summer we had none, and twelve of our own.
Eleven departures, every one of them a Wednesday to Sunday, running almost weekly from mid-June to early September. Much Better Adventures took eight of them, Oaguk two and Nora The Explorah one. The only real gap is the last week of July.
Alongside the operator groups we ran our own three-day guided tours, including the ones Nature Travels books for us. Twenty-three of the thirty-two went out on a Friday and came home on the Sunday, and another seven ran Thursday to Saturday. So on a normal summer weekend we could have an operator group coming in and one of our own guided groups coming in on the same afternoon, on top of everyone else.
None of this is about how hard anyone worked. It is about how we built the week.
Sunday brings back nearly twice as many guests as the next busiest day, and it is the same story for both brands.
Guided tours are left out here, because their days are fixed by us rather than chosen by the guest — operators run Wednesday to Sunday and our own run mostly Friday to Sunday. What is left is the 1 445 guests who picked their own dates, and they spread themselves much more evenly. The busiest choices are Friday to Sunday and Saturday to Sunday, at 127 guests each. Read the right-hand column for the day people set off and the bottom row for the day they came home: departures sit between 111 and 252 across the week, while returns run from 125 up to 372 on a Sunday. Even with every guided group taken out, Sunday still takes 26% of returns.
of every kayak we handed out all season came back on a Sunday — 374 of 1 172 boats, landing on one weekday. The next busiest day, Friday, takes 17%. Three Sundays had more than 30 boats coming in at once, and 23 August had 42.
Just under a fifth of what we do, spread very thinly across the summer.
These are departures only; we do not record returns by base, so a trip that starts at Sollenkroka and ends at Stavsnäs counts here once. Thursday, Friday and Saturday carry 61% of the guests setting off from Sollenkroka. Add Monday and it is 72%. Sunday is the thinnest day of all, with 26 guests across ten separate opening days.
We ran departures on 63 separate days between 21 May and 8 September. Twenty-five of those days carried two guests or fewer — 40% of the opening days, for 17% of the guests.
for 303 guests. That is a base kept staffed, kitted and reachable for more than half the summer, to look after about five people a day.
None of it is settled. Pulling it apart together is what the day is for.
Every one of these comes out of something the season put us through. None of them are decided. Say where we have got it wrong, and what we have missed.
The taxi bookings piled up in exactly the weeks nobody could be spared. Two of the four new people planned for 2027 are for maintenance and cleaning. Making one of them a driver through the peak would take care of this.
Operator groups ran Wednesday to Sunday and our own guided tours mostly Friday to Sunday, so both land on the day that already takes a third of the season’s kayaks. Tuesday to Saturday is on the table for the operators. Most of those guests spend a night in Stockholm afterwards anyway.
Somewhere to put kayak repairs, tent drying and kit refills before the backlog builds up. Monday is the quietest day that is not already food and prep day: about 12 kayaks move on an average Monday against 23 on a Sunday.
May and September took 22% of our hours for a small share of the guests. There are two new self-guided products planned for June and September, and they need almost no guide time.
63 opening days for 303 guests, and 40% of those days carried two people or fewer. Running Thursday to Saturday, or those plus Monday, would keep most of the volume on half the days and free up the rest of the week for maintenance and for covering Stavsnäs.
On 27 days we had more than 40 guests coming and going. Was the thing that slowed us down the kayaks, the drying space, the clean kit, or simply people? We can plan around any of them once we know which it was.