How tour guides can make or break a visit

Tour guides are an integral part of the visitor experience in many destinations and often make the difference between a good experience and an outstanding one or, sadly, what potentially could have been a good experience and one that instead lives on in the memory for all the wrong reasons.  I have recently returned from a holiday in the US where I had the misfortune to experience three examples of tour guiding that, for various reasons, showed that there is still a long way to go in terms of delivering an excellent experience that really meets the tourists’ needs.


The first example was at a small historic house in Annapolis, Maryland. The house, like so many in the US, is run by a charitable organisation that has deep roots within the community. And as a result, it is reliant partly on young ‘docents’ from the local college and partly on retired citizens for whom the property and their engagement with it is an integral part of their life. Our misfortune was to be show round by a (very) elderly lady who admitted that it was her first tour in a year as she had been incapacitated for several months because of a hip replacement.  Fair dos to her – she was keen and knowledgable, and eager to please, but the tour itself was an unconstructed stream of consciousness that was long on her personal opinion (e.g. “I like this clock”) and short on context.  A little refresher training on how to present a coherent tour that is pertinent to the audience’s interests (my wife and I were the only people on the tour and she had quickly ascertained we were from the UK) would have enabled us to get much, much more from the visit. As it stood, when we left we felt we had briefly become part of Cameron’s much vaunted (and now forgotten) ‘Big Society’, transferring our care for the elderly across the Atlantic to Maryland.


Two days later we booked on to a so-called ‘eco-kayak tour’ of the inland waters between Chincoteague and Assateague Islands on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay.  Although the water was calm and the sounds we went through rarely more than 1m deep, I was astonished that there was no safety briefing from the operator before we even stepped into the kayaks. We were issued with life jackets and as we were putting them on a young guy sauntered over to us and announced, in an amazing southern drawl “Hi. I’m Skippy, and I’m your guide”.

Of course, anyone of my generation (born 1960) automatically thinks of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, the popular tv programme from the 60s and 70s. So I was always going to find it hard taking him seriously from the outset. But about 2 minutes into the trip, whilst my wife and I were still getting to grips with paddling a double kayak (I’ve canoed a lot in the past, she never has), he admitted that he wasn’t a proper guide, but was filling in for someone who hadn’t turned up. In fact, he told us, he was a professional cage fighter based in Ohio and was just in Assateague for a few days visiting family. So we had paid well in excess of $100 to rent a kayak for a couple of hours and spend it, not getting an informed insight into the ecology of the wetlands and backwaters, but instead trying to decipher the drawl of someone who had obviously been kicked in the head one too many times.  His lack of biological understanding became evident when, on seeing a Tern, Skippy tried to convince us that the Tern family are basically a cross between an Albatross and a sparrow! I must admit, I’ve not checked this out with David Attenborough or anyone else from the BBC Wildlife Unit, but I’m pretty sure that if this was the case, ‘Life on Earth’ would have made this clear. So we went from random information overkill to nonsense information overkill.

Hoping for a more satisfactory experience we headed south to Williamsburg and the myriad of heritage sites along the James River. We decided to visit Historic Jamestowne, a site managed by the US National Parks Service, global leaders in interpretation and an organisation dedicated to delivering customer satisfaction. We booked onto the 10.00 tour and waited for a smartly clad, uniformed ranger to show us round the archaeological remains. Instead we were greeted by a youngish lady dressed in early 17th century clothing who spoke to the group in a cod-Shakespearean English accent straight out of am-dram acting. On and on and on she droned, asking us where we’d travelled from, what we did for a living and translating this information into a narrative that implied we were all there to help build the settlement. It was AWFUL. First-person costumed interpretation is difficult to pull off at the best of times, but although the presentation appeared to be being lapped up by the Americans in the group, it reminded me of every 1940s movie set in Merrie England. Unfortunately we could only gain admission to the site museum as part of the group so we couldn’t make a break for the border too early. When we did, we vowed that we would do no more tours that holiday.

Why have I been rabbiting on about this? Well, we spent around $150 between us on admission tickets for these three experiences, and apart from catching the sun during the kayak trip and getting bitten to buggery by mosquitos and other bugs on the Jamestown tour, we’ve got nothing to show for that investment. Apart from a couple of impressions that we can use at dinner parties to entertain friends. Oh, and we’ve already told anyone who will listen which historic properties in Annapolis and Williamsburg NOT to visit, and which company NOT to use for an ‘ecotour’ around Assateague. It was the end of the season, perhaps site operators were getting lazy or complacent. But there is no excuse not to deliver the highest standards of tour guiding to every party. Otherwise, all you get is bad press!

World Travel Market - seminar on visitor payback

World Travel Market is one of those events that I look forward to with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. The former feeling because I am never sure whether or not my feet will stand the pace of wandering around the Excel Centre for 2 days, and whether my memory is still good enough to allow me to put a name to every familiar face I see there. Excitement because it is one of the foremost opportunities every year for my colleagues and I at Leeds Met and at ICRT to spread the word about Responsible Tourism.

This year’s RT awards were as powerful as ever in terms of raising awareness of the great stuff that is being done around the world to help communities benefit more from tourism, and to help tourism businesses work more smartly in terms of delivering the highest standards of customer experience without trivialising the cultures their guests are visiting, or damaging irrecoverably the landscapes they are passing through. So all thanks to Professor Harold Goodwin, Justin Francis and the WTMRTD team for their hard work promoting, judging and presenting the awards.

But for me, the real work gets done in the breakout sessions that we offer, exploring different themes associated with Responsible Tourism. This is the fourth year that I have had the privilege of chairing one of the sessions. Last year we looked at managing visitors in World Heritage Sites, and this year we explored the concept of visitor payback initiatives – how to move beyond levying an admission charge but instead raising funds from tourists and tourism businesses and investing these resources in initiatives that really benefit the host destination and the resident community.

My three speakers were excellent and sadly, we ran out of time for a longer debate on some of the challenging issues they raised. But I know I’ll be thinking about what they all said and introducing key points into forthcoming lectures so that my students – undergraduate and postgrad – begin to appreciate what we as an industry can do to progress still further the spirit and the aims of the Cape Town Declaration.

Kath Bateman from Caledonia – a specialist language and dance tour operator based in Edinburgh and operating mainly in Cuba – spoke passionately about all the little things she does in terms of putting together packages that are true partnerships with the host community.  Employing, for instance, one dance tutor for every holidaymaker rather than one for the whole group. Limiting group sizes to 15 so that the impact on the host community is not overwhelming and so that the internal group dynamics don’t fragment too much. Utilising homestays rather than government-run hotels, so that the additional income goes straight into the pockets of the community. All small steps but when taken together, having a real benefit in the destination.

Hetty Byrne from the Forest of Bowland AONB spoke about a range of initiatives they are engaged in to promote a more sustainable and responsible approach to tourism in this hidden corner of Lancashire. Partnership again was a word that came up, both in terms of publc:private sector relationships but also between local tourism SMEs. She talked about two businesses who promoted an attractive walking route between the two locations, so that guests staying in one place could spend a day rambling through the AONB before ending up in a guest house offering a similar standard of experience. It might not deliver a major increase in business to either partner, but even if it stimulates a handful of extra bednights each season, that is income that otherwise would not have been earned. Incrementalism was another theme of Hetty’s talk – she mentioned a local inn that asked for a voluntary 20p donation on every bill, with the money to go towards improving access to the countryside for people with mobility problems. Some eighteen months later, thousands of pounds had been raised to purchase an electric buggy suitable for people with impaired mobility and to treat some of the routes around the inn so that they were fully accessible. Twenty pence on a bill of £20 or £30 is marginal to the customer, but added up those individual 20 pences have made a major difference in the destination.

The final speaker, Ruth Kirk from Nurture Lakeland, picked up on the theme of visitor giving and talked about some of the strategies for extracting funds from tourists. Voluntary donations are an obvious one, but she also mentioned how other businesses are also acting as conduits for funds that are collected and used to provide match-funding for major conservation projects such as footpath repair initiatives. One of the cruise operators running ferries on Ullswater asks for a small donation as part of the ticket income and some accommodation providers do the same. In the 18 years that the Lake District has had some form of visitor payback initiative, more than £2 million has been raised to invest in conservation projects.

In the short but spirited Q&A session at the end, perhaps the most challenging question was one that forced to address once again an issue we hadn’t really answered during the presentations. The title of the session had asked “Do tourists pay enough for accessing our heritage”? An audience member from Australia posed the simple question “Do they”. We had talked about strategies used by the public, private and voluntary sector to try to increase tourist contributions, but was it ‘enough’. The most straightforward and honest response came from Kath who said that tourists can never pay ‘enough’, because there is always something that needs to be done. Whether in Cuba, where she operates and where living standards remain lower than one would like, or in the North West of England where there is a legacy of erosion on the hillsides to treat as well as a major programme of investment needed to avoid future damage.

So rather than asking are tourists paying enough, perhaps we should be asking, “are enough tourists paying?”  In other words, should we be rolling out these initiatives that we know work for some people and extending their reach so that everyone is involved. Rather than a voluntary donation on top of your room charge, that could mean a bed tax. Rather than an optional top-up on your bar or restaurant bill, that could involve a local sales tax with revenues ring-fenced for re-investment in projects that benefit the host community.  But this would almost certainly require legislation at a time when government is seeking to remove as much red tape as possible because it is seen to stifle growth. So whilst some of us understand the  importance of understanding and responding to the polluter pays principle, both from an industry and consumer side, I’m not sure that the rest of the world is ready to play ball. Yet.

And in terms of my memory. Apologies to Rosie, for forgetting where I know you from (now I remember – a night out on the Senegambia strip and some very good whisky and cigars).