What Does a Tour Guide Do?

"Leading international tours sounds really great. What do you really do? That's another big mystery. There's so many misunderstandings on what we actually do. People think I'm a guide. People think that I'm bilingual. People think that I know about everything in the world. That if you are going to take a group to China, you have to know all the facts...the figures. That's not true. My job as a tour director is to manage the tour group; to make sure they get what's in the brochure and more; to make sure that everyone shows up...the suppliers that we work with locally, our in bound tour operator, our guides, our transportation, our tour members. I coordinate so that everything works as it should in the brochure, which sounds easy, but we have challenges which can happen along the way. My job as a tour director is not as a tour guide. When I'm in a country (and this is on international tours) I pick up a local guide. Donna, if you go to Australia, do you want to hear about Australia from me? You don't want to hear me talk about Australia. I read it out of a book. I haven't experienced it. Don't you want to hear from somebody in Australia that's from Australia? If you go to China, you want somebody from China to tell you about the history, the geography, the population, to talk about the culture. That's what the tour guide's position is. They take care of that. My job is to manage the tour group. I'm doing an intermodule tour. I'm dealing with airlines, hotels, languages, money differences, long distance motor coaches, attractions, sometimes holidays, weather problems, cancel "this, cancel "that," sometimes ill passengers. I've even had a couple of passengers pass away. So we are also handling that. The training...in my training, I talk about all of that so that you know how to do it. We also have our documentation that we have to take care of. But I'm managing the group. I'm not the tour guide like most people think. And I'm not bilingual. I have my local guide that takes care of that. So my job as a tour director, a tour manager, is to manage the tour group."