Guests, Not PAX: A Word We Chose on Purpose

By Kay Honig · 2026-11-05

November 5, 2026 · Part of our transparency series: how we actually run the company

Shade, a cooling hat and time for the photo. A hot day at Chichén Itzá asks for a different pace than a cloudy one.

The short version

PAX is the travel trade's shorthand for passengers. It is a headcount, and a useful one. At Kay Tours Mexico we don't use it for the people we host. We say guests in English and invitados in Spanish, because I believe the words a team uses decide what it notices. This article explains where that rule came from, where the word PAX itself comes from, what we can and cannot prove about the effect, and why the first instruction I gave our AI assistant was about this one word.

A small moment that made me write this

Every week our office team and our guides join a training call we call Capaducación, a mix of the Spanish words capacitación (training) and educación (education). One session is called CORAA and Artificial Intelligence. CORAA is the reservation and operations system we have been building ourselves for the past two years. We use the session to show what is new in it and how we use AI in daily work.

On November 4 I was showing the team how to correct CORAA AI, the assistant we connected to the system a few weeks earlier. It is a question-and-answer tool for our staff, and it makes mistakes, so someone on the team has to notice them, explain what it missed, and tell it the right answer.

While I was demonstrating that, I scrolled back to the very first instruction I had ever given it, on October 13. It is saved in its memory for the whole team, and it reads:

Say "guests", never "pax".

It is only four words long. Reading it again in front of the team, I realized it said something about our culture that I had never written down. So here it is.

Where the rule comes from

Before I started this company I worked as a guide for large tour operators. One of the first questions of any day was, "How many PAX do we have?"

I understood why. You need to know how many seats to assign, which vehicle to send and how many tickets to buy. What stayed with me is how often the conversation started and ended with that number. We talked a lot about how many people were coming and very little about who they were, what they were looking forward to, or how their day had gone.

"Four PAX" and "the Smith family, four guests" carry the same number. The second one also brings people into the room.

What changes before the tour even starts

This is an illustration, not a real family. Imagine a family of four writes to us about a private tour. In the first conversation we learn the children have never swum in a cenote and that it is the part of the day they are most excited about. The parents mention that their youngest usually naps after lunch.

Those details give each person on our team something to work with. Whoever answers the inquiry can suggest a day that fits. Whoever plans the itinerary can move the swim to the morning. On the day, the guide can watch how the family is doing and adjust the pace, or ask whether they want to stop at a roadside stand selling fresh mango. Another family on the same road might want to keep going. The same guide can make a different call depending on who is in the vehicle.

A stop nobody had on the itinerary. This is a real couple on a real day, not the family in the example above.

The family experiences one day. Our team sees it in pieces: an inquiry, a reservation, an itinerary, a pickup, a tour. Calling them guests is how we remind ourselves that all those pieces belong to the same people, who are paying good money and trusting us with a day of their vacation.

Where the word PAX comes from

I wanted to know what I was refusing, so I looked into it. Here is what holds up and what doesn't.

What we can document. The earliest use for passengers that I could trace is a 1946 passage in Air Facts: The Magazine for Pilots, which says passengers "are called 'pax' by the traffic department, who puts them on and takes them off the airplane." I have to be honest about how I found it: I saw that quote reproduced on a language forum, and I could not open the original magazine page myself. I found no earlier use on steamships, railways or in 19th-century documents, so I'm not claiming one.

Where the X most likely comes from. The best-supported explanation is that PAX is an abbreviation of passenger with an -x added as a shorthand marker, the same pattern as WX for weather, MX for maintenance, or Rx and Dx in medicine. Wiktionary, the German Duden dictionary and Canada's Office québécois de la langue française describe it that way. The Quebec dictionary adds that the professionals who use the word couldn't explain the X either. Nobody I found can name who first wrote it.

What it is not. It has nothing to do with the Latin pax, meaning peace, as in pax romana. They are two unrelated words that happen to be spelled the same. You'll also read that PAX stands for "persons approximately", or "passengers and passes", or "person at table". I found no dictionary or industry source that supports any of those, so I treat them as stories people tell.

How it reached tourism. It moved from aviation into tour operators and hotels as a headcount, for quotes, rooming lists and manifests. Airlines still use it as an official measure: IATA lists "Passenger Numbers (PAX)" among its standard traffic metrics, and Transport for London uses "Pax" in its bus and Underground passenger tables.

So PAX is a perfectly good word for counting. My point is only that counting is not all we do.

Why I believe vocabulary matters, and what I can't prove

I believe the words a team uses among itself shape what it pays attention to. When the question is "How many PAX?", the answer is a number. When the question is "Who are our guests this week and what are they hoping for?", the answer is a person.

There is some research behind the broader idea. In a well-known experiment outside tourism, simply changing the name of a game changed how much people cooperated. In workplace studies, making the impact of one's work on other people more visible improved performance in some settings. I have not found any study that measures what happens when a tour company replaces PAX with guests. What this has done for Kay Tours Mexico is my judgment as a former guide and as the owner, not a result I can prove.

Why I gave the same rule to our AI

CORAA AI reads our live operations data and answers questions from our team, such as how many guests are on a given day's services or which tour still has no guide. Its wording ends up in our daily work, so I wanted it to talk about people the way we do. That is why one of the first things I told it was never to call the people who travel with us PAX.

Two honest notes about it. First, it is a staff tool in beta, and it makes mistakes: it has mixed up reference numbers and miscounted totals, and our team checks its answers against the system before anyone relies on them. Second, it does not decide anything about a guest's day. People do that.

The instruction, version 2

On November 5 I rewrote that four-word rule, because it left too much to guess. The new version names the words to avoid, explains why, says what to do when a supplier writes "pax", and applies in Spanish too. It now reads:

Always call the people who travel with us "guests" (in Spanish, "invitados"). Never use "pax", "PAX", "passengers" or "clients" for them, in answers, summaries, tables and drafts. We use this word because guests are people we host. Their plans and needs shape the day, and a headcount does not.

When someone asks for a "pax count", answer with the number of guests, for example "4 guests". If a source record or supplier message says "pax", you may quote it only inside quotation marks, and say "guests" in your own words.

Keep this rule in every language. Do not lecture staff about the word. Just use it.

I tested it the same day. I typed, "How many pax are on tomorrow's tours?" CORAA AI answered, "There are 37 guests scheduled across 6 tours tomorrow." It used our word and never repeated mine. One test is not proof, so we'll keep checking it, and I'll write here if it slips.

What we're asking of ourselves

• In conversation, in messages and in the system, we say guests (invitados in Spanish).

• When a supplier or partner asks us for a "PAX" number, we answer in guests. The question can use the trade word. Our answer doesn't.

• We treat the rule as a reminder to ask who the guests are, not as a magic word. If the rule only changes the word, it did nothing.

If you work in tourism and you've tried something like this, I'd like to hear what happened.

Sources

• Air Facts: The Magazine for Pilots, 1946, quoted on English Stack Exchange and Aviation Stack Exchange (original page not independently opened)

• Wiktionary, pax

• Duden, Pax (Passagier)

• Office québécois de la langue française, PAX

• Oxford Learner's Dictionaries, pax

• Merriam-Webster, pax (peace senses only)

• FundéuRAE on "pax" in Spanish

• IATA, Understanding Air Traffic Metrics

• Transport for London, Bank Station Capacity Upgrade transport assessment

• Liberman, Samuels and Ross, The Name of the Game

• Grant, The Significance of Task Significance