How to be a Tour Guide

Introduction

"Thank you for your email, I will be out of the office for the next 14 days on tour around the Greek Islands. For urgent enquiries, I can be found by the pool sipping cocktails each night between 7–9 p.m."

Sound crazy? Maybe. But would you like to have an email autoreply like that? Definitely.

The thought of becoming a tour guide will cross the minds of most people who travel at one point or another. Exotic locations, free travel, people hanging on to your every word – I won’t lie, it’s an amazing life! I’ve worked with guided tours in over 15 countries and been an advisor on tour start-ups across three continents. There’s no better job in the world.

I first got my start in the tour guiding business, as a lot of people do, by accident. With a degree in Business and Communications, I had been working as a Marketing Manager for three years when one day I realized I was all work and no play and a very dull boy.

I quit my job on the spot, did a guided tour (as a client), and loved it so much, I applied for a job as soon as the holiday was up! I ended up working for Contiki, who are the Australian and New Zealand leaders in escorted European touring for 18–35 year olds. Contiki has a reputation for hard sightseeing by day followed by hard partying each night. Their training is some of the best in the industry.

I was lucky when I started. I got to clean toilets.

Why was this lucky? Because for a year, I got to work at a Gasthof in Austria and talk to every single guide that came through. I got to pick their brains, ask them questions, and most importantly, watch them interact with clients.

Without this knowledge, I would never have been a tour guide. Without the friends I made that took me under their wings, I would have never gotten past the training trip.

Not everyone is so lucky.

During my time working as a tour guide, I’ve seen literally thousands of people apply for jobs, and I have to tell you, 70% of them fail. The problem was not that they were ill suited to the job. Rather, it was simply that they were ill prepared. Unless you can somehow get on the inside, it’s really, really hard to get a job out there. There are no books. There are no classes. There is no way to learn what you need to know to be a success in this industry.

Until now.

This book has been designed as the ultimate training tool for tour managers. It’s full of inside tips, practical advice, and expert knowledge... kind of like a tour guide now that I think of it!

I’d like to acknowledge right off the bat that this book would not have been possible without a lot of help. One tour manager alone could never know everything required, in every situation, to make a complete training manual like this. This book has been checked, validated, and built with the help of friends from every corner of the world.

In particular, I’d like to thank Charles from Seahorse Tours in the Philippines. Charles’ 30+ years in the industry have seen him own his own tour agency, guest speak at the Philippines Department of Tourism, guest examine at the International Eco-tourism Institute, and now provide valuable advice as a consultant on my book.

Much of the excellent artwork in this book has been done by the amazing Kerin Ramirez. I’m absolutely blown away by the level of artistic talent this one man contains – thank you Kerin for your contribution.

Finally, I’d like to thank Nathan, Matt, Dana, Hans, Esther, Ducky, Tracy, Simone, Phul, Mike, June, Jeff, Kristene, Nick B, and Kate for the advice, feedback, early proofreading, and encouragement given to me as I created this book. To those that are tour managers, both named and anonymous, thank you too for the permission to use your crazy stories. Your contributions from around the world – Europe, Asia, North America, the Pacific, and beyond – are recognized and gratefully received.

I can’t guarantee readers a job when they finish this book, but with the help of the people above, I can guarantee them a damn good fighting chance.

Part I: Getting to Know You

1. Tour Guiding 101

What is a Tour Manager... I Mean Tour Guide?

What is a tour manager? And what is a tour guide? Is there a difference? Great questions. Let’s start out with setting some definitions.

Tour Guide: An expert who shows visitors around topics of interest in an area.

Tour Manager: Organizes and accompanies visitors on tours around topics of interest in an area. Also called a tour director or tour conductor and referred to as TM for short.

As you can see, the titles are pretty similar. Tour managers (TM) usually tend to do a little bit more administration; tour guides (TG) usually have a little bit more specific knowledge.

But really, if you were to ask anyone in the industry, the difference is usually in the length of a tour. On short tours (under one day), the person in charge is usually called a tour guide. There’s less administration required and usually more specific knowledge needed to conduct the tour. On long tours (over one day), the person in charge is usually called a tour manager. There’s more administration and more general knowledge required.

Tip: there’s an exception

There is an exception to the rule that tour guide and tour manager are interchangeable titles. In some specific countries, a license is required to become a tour guide. These are usually countries with major historical attractions, such as Greece and Egypt. In these countries, a tour manager takes on an administrative role only and employs tour guides whenever the group tours an attraction of importance.

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Note that a tour guide is different from a local guide, who is someone that only takes on responsibility of a tour for a brief period of time – usually to guide them around an attraction. I’ll describe the duties of a local guide in more detail later in this chapter.

In this book, I will use both the terms tour guide and tour manager interchangeably. As far as I’m concerned, apart from timeframe, the only difference between being a tour manager and being a tour guide is that it’s easier to impress someone with a Tour Manager title.

So what’s it actually like being a tour manager?

The tour manager is the rock star of the tour. You need a lot of energy, you need to be a good talker, you need to be charismatic, enthusiastic, and patient. Being a tour manager is not a 9-5 job. From when you first greet your group to when you finally say goodbye, you’re working. On a short tour this might only mean that you have to gobble down lunch because you’ve got to get back to answering questions, but on a long tour it can mean greeting 50 people at breakfast, spending eight hours on a coach talking to them, then taking them to dinner that night and to drinks after. And if someone’s sick at 3 a.m. in the morning? You’re still the one who has to take them to hospital.

The tour manager is also a salesperson – you have to make and keep people happy and sometimes sell value add activities (often called Optionals) as well. You also have to sell yourself – many tour managers are paid very low wages with the expectation that they will receive tips at the end of a tour. We’ll talk more about tips and how to ask for them in chapters five and six.

Meet the Crew

Being a tour manager can be a solitary job, for all that you’re often surrounded by people. But you’re rarely truly alone. When you’re working a route, you’ll meet guides for other tour companies, and if you work on longer tours, you may also have offsiders of your own. The most common are:

Tour Driver:

These are the people that drive the transport you’ll be ferrying your group around in – usually either a minibus or larger 50 seater. Tour drivers (TDs) and tour managers (TMs) need to have very clear divisions of duties when they work together. Obviously you can’t drive their bus, but they shouldn’t be allowed to take on your duties either. It’s your job to talk to the clients, give them information, and check them into hotels. If a client approaches a driver, the driver should pass them back to you for an answer.

Drivers often develop outstanding rapport with guests, most probably because the TM is the one that has to keep people in line while the driver is the happy-go-lucky awesome person that drives from point A to point B. Drivers are an essential part of your team, and how well you get along with your driver is often the difference between a good tour and a bad one. Be wary, though! They tend to hog the CD player.

Mobile Cook:

You’ll encounter cooks predominantly on long distance tours where expense or lack of quality local options dictates that someone cook for your group each night, rather than eat out. Cooks will usually bring most of their food with them. As the tour guide, it’s worthwhile offering to help them prep every once in a while – they are feeding you, after all!

I was a mobile cook for several tours through Europe. Contiki used them on camping tours (where the clients were traveling on a budget and would prefer bulk meals over eating out each night) and on Scandinavian tours (where food was so expensive, it was cheaper to buy food for fifty people in London and bring it with us than to eat out in each city). The life of a mobile cook for me meant getting up before everyone else to get the bacon and eggs on, staying back after everyone else to clean up the mess, drinking all night because I had no responsibility for the group, and sleeping on the bus all day (because I’d been up all night).

Reps:

A short mention here about hotel staff and their counterparts, Reps. Hotel staff work for a specific hotel, Reps work for larger travel companies and are based at specific hotels, usually as a liaison between staff and guests. Where a TM or a TD (tour driver) have to use their brains, a rep has to use their muscle. They'll cook, clean, bartend, and scrub toilets. But they won't have to think as they do it, they'll only do it a couple of hours a day, and if they’re young, they’ll usually do it with a hangover. They’ll have a hangover because part of their job is also to socialize with guests. If you’re on a repeating tour (called a circuit), you’ll see the same reps every time you call into the same hotel. Reps will become like your family to you – make sure you bring them presents from far off locations occasionally when you come through.

Local Guide:

There is another term used in the industry that you will come across and that is a local or step on guide. Generally, these guides are either independent contractors or they work for a sub-contractor (for example, the local tourism authority). These people are destination guides who either conduct local day tours or have specific expertise, such as knowing the exhibits at a given museum. As the name implies, the guide steps on the bus and conducts the tours. Being a local guide can provide a very direct route to becoming a tour guide and is something to consider as an option when trying to decide your path into this industry.

Tour Types

When talking about tours, we’ll be dividing them by length: site tours, half day tours, full day tours, and multi-day tours. As you can imagine, the complexity and management requirements increase with the length.

Site Tour

Site tours may only last for 30 minutes or may take half a day, but will only ever be based at one site. Because the tour does not have to move locations, the guide for a site tour will have little or no responsibilities beyond conducting the tour.

Low responsibility does not imply low caliber of guide, however. Tour guides doing site tours are expected to be specialists on the subject they are describing. For example, tours of the Louvre are given by national museum guides. These guides are highly trained on the various pieces of art and art history in the museum. Most of them are university graduates in art history or a related field, and in an hour and a half they will impart more knowledge of the museum’s massive collection than you could have ever thought possible. The qualifications and competition for a position at the Louvre is very steep.

A site guide may give a number of tours in a single day.

Tip: volunteer

Many small museums and historical sites rely heavy on volunteers. Becoming a volunteer at one of these may help give you the in-depth knowledge necessary to give a site tour. After establishing yourself as reliable, you could suggest that you could give free tours, with tips accepted. Volunteering is a good way to practice and a great way to start guiding without having to look for clients.

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Half Day Tour

The half day tour is simply a four hour tour that is either in the morning or afternoon. It includes a pick up at a particular location and is usually a rolling tour (i.e. a tour where you are continuously moving, for example driving a bus around a city pointing out things as you drive by) with one or two stops. The duty of a tour guide on a rolling tour is to point out areas of interest as you drive by. Some tours may not include the rolling portion and just have a few stops.

Full Day Tours

The full day tour is generally an eight hour tour with a lunch stop. The lunch can be included or at the guest’s (pax is sometimes a term used for a guest) expense.

Tip: avoid cattle cars

Some tour companies treat their guests more like cattle than humans. You may see this when a company does not worry about repeat business or word of mouth advertising, such as when they are subcontracted by a cruise line. They are solely geared towards getting the guest on Bus 5 and then from point A to point B to point C and back to point A without losing anyone. It is unlikely you will gain any useful experience with such a company. Use these jobs as stepping stones into the industry only if you can’t get employment anywhere else.

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Multi-Day Tours

Multi-day tours are, you guessed it, tours that go over multiple days. They will almost always include accommodation and transportation. On tours like this, the management responsibilities of a tour guide really come into play.

The tour guide (often called a tour manager on multi-day tours) is responsible for everything from checking into hotels, verifying dinner reservations, looking after luggage, and more. There are no typical tours, each one is unique and brings its own challenges (remember it’s never a problem, just a challenge!) that must be met with a calm, pleasant manner.

Sometimes, on a multi-day tour, both a tour manager and a tour guide will be assigned. A tour manager looks after the administration and management of the group. A tour guide gives the actual tours. The tour manager is always the one in charge, sometimes employing a tour guide for only limited parts of the tour (for example, to give tours through areas where an expert or local guide will improve the experience).

Example

A tour manager on a multi-day tour through Greece would employ a local guide at the Acropolis in Athens because there is a law in Greece saying you have to have a guide licensed by the state. Until recently, that license required you to be a Greek citizen and undergo two and a half years of training through The Ministry of Tourism – the equivalent of a university degree and well beyond the scope of training of many people that wish to work in the tour industry in Greece.

Many tour companies in Greece employ foreigners of the same nationality as their clients to run their tours as tour managers and then employ local tour guides to do the big tours at sites of national interest.

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Multi-day tours can be made up of affinity or speculative groups of people. An affinity group are people who share the same interest. Generally, they know each other prior to the start of the tour and the tour is made up of solely its members. A speculative group is one where the members do not know each other prior to the start of the tour, their only connection is that they found the tour package inviting.

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Doing multi-day tours around Europe, one of the moments I live for as a Tour Manager are those days when you get time off from your clients in an exotic location.

The moments are even better when you get to share them with friends. If you’re in a tourist area, you’re likely to run into other crew – and by that I mean other Tour Managers, Tour Drivers, and Mobile Cooks – more often than you think. Stay in the industry long enough and you’ll find you work with many of them and they quickly become good friends.

This actually occurs more often than one would think, particularly if you work for the big tour agencies, as timetables tend to influence travel itineraries and push tours together for key parts of the itineraries.

I remember one time I was in Corfu, Greece and my clients had three rest days. One of my fellow Tour Managers was also in town staying at a different location and had one rest day. That meant we were free to do what we wanted! Along with my Tour Cook and my friend’s Tour Driver, we hired a car and explored the island for the day.

It was wonderful. We checked out the beaches, ate lunch at one of Corfu’s most famous beaches, and had cocktails overlooking the water as the sun went down. Not only it was it a great day hanging out with friends, relaxing, and sharing stories of our clients and the unusual situations you encounter on tour, but it also added to our knowledge of the island to use for later groups.

Oh – and the fact it was all tax deductible just made it that little bit sweeter!

—Dana, Tour Manager

2. The Different Faces of a Tour Guide

The reason that so many people look at tour guiding as a glamorous fun lifestyle is that tour guides are great at compartmentalizing activities. The guest sees someone who is with them all day telling them amazing things, who stops to eat with them at a fabulous dinner, and then goes out for drinks afterwards.

But they don’t stop and think about who is telling the restaurant that they will be there 10 minutes late, who organized the gluten free meal when they arrived, who organized a reserved table at the bar afterwards, and who has also already asked the hotel to set wake up calls for each guest the next day.

The more professional and competent we are at our jobs, the less our clients will ever think about what we do. To really understand the duties and responsibilities of a tour manager, we need to dissect a typical job and see what it really involves. Do not think that this list is extensive, every job you ever do in this industry will be a little bit different from the last, but this should give you a good start.

Tip: you are it

To your guest you are it: you’re the company and the local expert. You are whatever they want or need you to be.

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Many Different Roles

The Party Hardy Guide

This is the public view of being the guide and the one projected by the industry, training schools, and get quick rich schemes. It will consume up to 80% of your waking time while on the tour, but may represent only 60% of your responsibilities. In most cases, this is the only face that the guest will see, which means it is the function you will be judged on and tipped on – if all goes well.

The obvious portion of this part of your responsibilities is your interaction with the members of your tour. You must always be in control – in control of yourself and in control of the management of your group. Being in control does not mean being authoritarian, it just means that the group follows what you suggest.

Over the course of the day, you will be called upon to use this control to lead your group from place to place, impart words of wisdom, and then move on. You may have to find lost and late people.

In the evening, you’ll also have to show your group the best places to enjoy a drink together and then stay with them, at least for a little while, as they start to unwind and enjoy themselves. You need to be able to have fun yourself, too – the guests will want to see that.

The public’s view of a guide’s functions are fairly common, so we won’t go into any more detail here – let’s just say that the party hardy category encompasses all the surface activities that people see you doing while on tour.

The Personal Assistant

The title personal assistant can cover a range of topics and responsibilities. Think of all the items that you have to concern yourself with when you are going on a trip. When you’re out of town, even deciding when and where to stop for lunch may be a task!

On a tour, the tour manager is the personal assistant for the entire group. In the course of a day, they will take care of maybe a dozen small matters that the guests won’t even notice. Yesterday they reminded you that luggage would be picked up at 7:00 a.m. with breakfast at 7:15, and sure enough, the bell boy was ready for the luggage and that is the last you thought of it.

However, behind the scenes, the tour manager was at the bell boy desk at 6:45 making sure the staff remembered the bag pickups, then at breakfast s/he greeted everyone at the door to ask if everything was okay with the room. After breakfast while you were getting your carry-on bag for the day’s trip, the tour manager was counting off bags as they were loaded on the bus to make sure none were left behind, then while you were getting comfortable on the bus, they were in the hotel verifying all the hotel check outs were complete and bills finalized.

Remember when they disappeared for a few minutes after introducing the guide from the museum? Well they were off paying for the entry tickets. It did not take long because they had called ahead and let them know exactly when you would arrive – which also explains why the guide was there waiting for you. There are even some companies that will arrange to have the room keys meet them on route to the hotel, so they can be distributed before arrival.

Did the strict vegan always find that there was a meal specifically for him? That took coordination as well!

Tip: alternate plans

You should always have an alternate plan that can be drawn upon in case of unforeseen events or emergencies. Do not describe it as a backup plan though! That will make it seem less desirable.

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The Administrator

The detail and complexity of the tour manager’s duties before the tour starts will vary greatly from job to job. Factors such as the home company's policy and size will affect which pre-departure activities are done by the company itself and how much is left to the manager.

Let us use as an example a five night trip staying in three cities with a group of 50 people (sounds scary when you put it like that, doesn’t it!). The hotels would have been blocked prior to the tour being offered for sale and the rooms confirmed when it was determined that the tour was a go.

Tip: Block

Block, also called an allotment is a term similar to reservation, and is used to describe a hotel putting aside rooms ahead of time for use by the tour company. E.g. Please block out five rooms. The tour company needs this because they don’t want to sell a tour and then find out that the hotel is all booked. At a certain time the rooms are either reserved or (if the company could not sell a full tour) released back for sale.

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Before the tour starts, a room list is developed showing room options if there are any and which guests are staying together in which rooms. The tour manager is generally responsible for following up and confirming the information once the tour starts and updating any information that may have changed. Meals during the course of the tour are another concern for the TM. Meals on the guest’s own account are not an issue, but in most other cases prior coordination is required. This includes number of guests and special dietary requirements which could be due to either religious or personal reasons. Common dietary requirements can