How Tour Guides Are Trained

Video Transcript

"Why do I need training? I’ve traveled a lot and I love people, and I love travel. And the companies get lots of resumes that say I love people and I love travel so I would be a great tour director and that helps, but you know what Donna? If you, you’ve been to Africa, let’s say on vacation and I haven’t been to Africa, I can lead a tour to Africa better than you can, because I know tour procedures, I’m a trained tour director, I know tour procedures and that’s how I am hired, the companies can send me anywhere in the world and they know I know tour procedures. And I know the right questions to ask, I know how to handle the airports, the hotels, the motor coaches, the inbound tour operators, the local guides. I know how to deal with all of that and how it’s supposed to, how to take good care of my, my tour members, how to handle challenges in those places too and believe me I’ve had a lot of challenges in places like that. So you need to know how to lead the tour, it’s much more than that. When I train my tour, tour members, or when I train my students they can go to put on their resume, they can tell the tour operators, I know procedures for international and domestic tours, I know safety and procedures for hotels and for airlines, I know tour briefings. They will often ask you what do you cover in your briefings, and if it’s somebody that is not experienced they don’t know what to cover in the briefings, you know they’ll say okay here’s a challenge, what are you going to do if this happens. And if you don’t know how tours are run with inbound tour operators, outbound tour operators, receptors services, DMC’s, you don’t know how all that’s run you’re going to have a problem trying to answer that question correctly, because we are not a host. You need to know documentation, you need to know the legalities, you need to know who the employers are, who are the major employers, what do they look for, what are they marketed to, there’s some markets you’d be great in, there’s some markets you wouldn’t even want to work in. When I do my training I share all of the names, I have companies that have contacted me looking for professionally trained tour directors which I post in my online class so when they go to the tour operators, they can say I’m a professionally trained tour director, this is what I know, they can list out their skills and immediately they have the attention of the tour company as compared to somebody and not anything personal, you’d probably make a great tour director, but that says, I love people and I love travel. They get thousands of resumes that say that, you have to stand out and you have to know what you are doing. "