Taking Tour Groups Around Your Area

"Well, what if I wanted to start out locally, and I wanted to stay near home? Could I get the local experience before I do the international traveling? Absolutely. Now sometimes it depends on where you live. If you are near a big tourist city, there's going to be more opportunity than if you are out in more of a rural area. But even the rural area will have some opportunities...a wide variety of opportunities. And what's nice about local jobs is that you go home at night. They are usually flexible. You can be available or not. Great for students! Great for mothers! Great for people that are trying to get the experience, that want something that's fun and not a normal job. Lots of different types of employers. You might work for a sight-seeing company. Often, you see the big buses, or double deckers now. Or some real strange trollies, or some real strange kind of vehicles now. And often times, the driver will also do the narration, so you may have to have a special license. But I don't think you are interested in driving a bus, but you can also work as a step-on guide. And a step-on guide is someone that knows the narration, knows the city, and when a group comes into town that has their own bus, they have their own driver, you step on the coach and do the narration. And tell the driver which direction to go, where to turn and such. And you do like a four or five hour tour. And then you're home at night. Great way to start getting experience and networking for international and domestic tours if you're interested. But we also have receptive services in a lot of the areas. This is the "meet and greet;" meeting groups at the airport, sending them to the hotel, maybe doing a hospitality desk at the hotel. My favorite local positions, and again this would be in a popular tourist area or resort area, is working for the incentive houses and the destination management companies. And that's kind of detailed, I'll talk about that more in detail later. But again, you might be taking a group to Universal for the day. You might be meeting them at the airport. You might be taking them to play golf. You might be taking them to Catalina. You might be taking them on a hike or a bicycle trip or a beach walk. I've hired people to do all of those things. It's a lot of fun. And that's the incentive market; destination management, we call it. We also have the dosettes. If you live in an area where they have missions or they have museums or historical sites. Wonderful places to work as a dosette which is a volunteer guide. And you usually learn the history, you get experience guiding and it can be a lot of fun. So, lots of local positions and possibilities."