1. The Rewards
1.1 Freedom
Whether you want to travel 12 months or two weeks a year, whether your ideal is tropical climates or icy mountaintops, luxury hotels or backpacks and hiking boots, tour guiding is one route to traveling where and when you like. You set your own timetable and pursue your own itinerary. It takes creativity, planning, and sometimes endless patience, but you are essentially the master of your own destiny and travel plans.
1.2 Challenge and excitement
No matter how many times you visit a favorite destination or how many new wonders you discover, there will always be something new to learn and enjoy. Foreign languages, different cultures and traditions, new friends — there is challenge and excitement packed into every day.
At home, travel and tour guiding associations provide a place to network and update skills and knowledge. They can also be a place to share stories and get excited again after the “Trip from Hell.” Appendix 1 contains a list of organizations which may have local chapters in your city. Check listings in the Yellow Pages, or contact the chamber of commerce if you live in a major city, to see what your area offers.
1.3 Creative opportunity
Designing and/or running the perfect tour is an artistic endeavor as much as a business venture. The extra touches only you can add make your tour stand out from your clients’ other travel memories. Out of ten architecturally unusual hotels, the one that will be talked about years later is the one you pointed out that has a dash of intrigue and mystery in its history. Imagine the quick intake of breath as you describe how Howard Hughes and his retinue once rented a floor and stayed for six months in the very hotel you are driving past (the Westin Bayshore in Vancouver, British Columbia). Actually, it was six months less a day — Hughes would have had to pay residency taxes if he stayed six months, so he left.
1.4 Sharing the joy of a destination
Tour guides and directors share a common joy and exuberance for travel. They glow with excitement when they talk about favorite places in their hometown or abroad. Even after years of leading the same tour, many say they cannot wait for the guiding season to get into full swing. Well-loved destinations stay fresh because each new group brings a unique perspective.
1.5 Meeting people
If you love meeting people, the guiding industry may be an almost perfect vocation. Not only will you meet people at the various destinations you visit, but group travel, especially long-distance travel, also encourages long-term friendships. Tour guests who feel welcome and well cared for will often return for another excursion, sometimes bringing along another friend or family member. Sometimes people keep in touch for years after.
1.6 Tax write-offs
You do not need a fancy office to be a tour guide or director. A space for organizing your paperwork and a love of travel are the only two essentials. Later in this book we will suggest how you can make your office more efficient and convenient. But whether you work out of a closet in the basement or rent the entire top floor of an office building, there are many expenses you can write off. Talk to your accountant for specific details.
2. Day To Day — The Reality
2.1 Long hours
A smoothly running tour requires long hours and dedication from the tour director. Guests do not want to know about any unexpected glitches. They have paid you to take care of it and they expect it to appear effortless. As one tour director put it, “No matter what headaches we have, they expect and deserve to be cruising easy.”
To preserve this image, you will be up early and usually late to bed. You must be ahead of the first early bird and behind the last straggler for everything — flights, day trips, bus departures, or the final curtain of the opera. One cruise tour director we spoke with said it was not unusual to be up at 5:30 in the morning and not in bed until 1:30 a.m. for long stretches of time. It is certainly not uncommon to put in well over 80 hours a week for long periods during the touring season.
Even if it is just you, your tour participants, and Mother Nature for a ten-day wilderness or adventure tour, there will always be tents that will not go up, fires that will not light, and uncooperative weather. Add these unexpected but unavoidable glitches to the normal necessities such as campsite care, cooking in the bush, medical problems from blisters to bee stings, and generally encouraging footsore, weary urbanites, and you will find your days stretching into long, tiring ones. When everyone else is asleep or enjoying an afternoon of unstructured time, you will often be catching up on paperwork, planning for the next day, or solving problems.
2.2 You are never off duty
You are expected to be accessible to every member of the tour at all hours of the day and night. If someone has a problem with accommodation, needs information about the next day’s itinerary, feels ill, or is simply lonely, guess who they will come looking for? If you think it is anyone but you, guess again.
2.3 Be prepared for complaints
It does not happen often, but eventually you will have a person on your tour who is disgruntled with life and looking for someone to blame. The tour director makes a handy target. You will be the focus of any complaints — whether or not they are legitimate. You must have solutions for bad weather, the “awful” color of the hotel room, and the inability to get a decent hamburger in the middle of a desert just as readily as you deal with problems such as lost luggage and illness.
Most people understand some things are beyond the control of even the most experienced director. Airlines experience mechanical failures, clouds or fog hide magnificent views, and entertainers do get sick like everyone else. Keeping people informed in a calm, unruffled manner will go a long way to smoothing the path to a solution.
2.4 You are not going to get rich
Becoming a tour professional is far from a get-rich-quick career. Even though you are getting paid to travel, you likely will not be getting paid much, especially when you factor in the long hours. For many people, the nonmonetary rewards far outweigh financial compensation. If, on the other hand, you are going into tour guiding for a fast buck, there are dozens of other professions you should consider first.
2.5 Home is where the laundry is
Unless you are working as a step-on or site guide, you will be living out of a suitcase. While cruising and rail tours allow you some stability, you must be prepared to spend few nights in your own bed during the touring season. Usually you will stagger home after a tour, run all the dirty clothes through the wash, then repack them into your suitcase or packsack, ready to head out again.
3
Getting The Job
1. Assessing Yourself
Tour guides and directors are an irrepressibly enthusiastic bunch. They are walking encyclopedias filled with tantalizing tidbits of information and amazing stories of places and people, and they love to share those stories. Whether they are elbowing through the cacophony of sounds and smells in a teeming Hong Kong market or watching for benevolent ghosts in a medieval British castle, tour guides and directors love the people, mystique, and history of the places they go. They love their work. This is a life path, not a job.
1.1 Characteristics of success
It is sometimes