Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Guided tours can be a drag on your precious leisure hours, your already stretched budget, and your limited physical and mental energy. Or a guided tour can be a meaningful way to broaden your horizons.
You have options when you vacation. Rather than go on a guided tours, you might tour on our own or you might find something else to do entirely. So you may wonder, will a guided tour be worth my time, money, and energy?
Admission: I am a tour guide and I am a tour guide trainer.
And this is why I don’t take guided tours
Many of the guided tours I have taken are led by…
- a dotard tour guide that rambles on without a sense of direction physically and verbally. What am I going to remember from a guided tour that has no logical flow?
- a flashy tour guide who pretends to be the circus ringmaster. How enjoyable is a charismatic guide if you can’t get a word in edgewise to ask for the directions to the bathroom?
- a tour guide expert who is a dry as their dinosaur bones. Why use a high level expert if the audience doesn’t have the background knowledge?
- a newbie tour guide who should be taking the tour rather than leading it. How helpful is youthful energy if information is faulty?
Once the guided tour has started, you’re stuck.
Getting out of a guided tour once it starts may not be possible. You may not know the way back. Or you may not even be able to go back without your guide.
If you don’t like how to the tour is going, complaining during the tour isn’t going to make anything better. Having a bad guided tour can make even an amazing place seem boring and waste of time and money.
# of facts given by the tour guide are greater than the # of sh!ts given by the audience
As visitors we want to understand more about this place, that’s why we go on a tour. But what we really want to know is why it’s important to know it. Why is this place meaningful for someone like me?
Guided tours need to recognize the audience as much as understand the place. We audience members want to care without being forced to care or expected to care. And we’re not looking for random half-remembered tidbits to tell at a party.
Missed training for tour guides = missed opportunities for guests on guided tours
This will come as a surprise for Europeans and Americans alike: In the USA there is no requirement for tour guides to have any training. In many other countries (most countries in Europe, for example), for a person to claim they are a tour guide, they must have over 40 hours of professional training.
This doesn’t mean that all licensed tour guides are awesome. But training certainly gives tour guides a toolbox of ways to engage us audience members. When a tour guide includes giving time for guests to take selfies or to touch an item from the place, to taste of smell the food raises the guided tour up a notch. We guests also want something to mentally chew on like a new idea and the prompting to talk about what we think.
Guided Tours hit the Sweet Spot
Guided Tours shouldn’t be about learning facts and dates like schoolwork. Alternately, guided tours are not pure entertainment like a concert or stand up comedy. Guided tours that are worth it, hit a sweet spot somewhere in between.
A guided tour …
- a good guided tour gives clear logistical information before the tour including what is going to happen so the guest can choose to come along
- a good guided tour is led by trained tour guides
- a good guided tour has more for the audience to do than passively listen and look
- a good guided tour shares information that is meaningful for guests
We may be on our leisure time, but we doesn’t mean we have time, money or energy to waste on bad experiences.
So, Have I ever been on a guided tour that was worth it?
YES! The photo gallery below are just a few of the tour guides who hit that sweet spot at their guided tours.
Share your thoughts in the comments…
Do you take tours when you travel? How have your experiences been?
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