Some Tour Guides Are Better Than Others

Hereabouts, tour guides are plentiful.  There appear to be several challenging qualifications.  They must be able to speak several languages fluently and have to either learn their subjects thoroughly or quickly memorize a script~which is a distant 2nd best. 

[hmmm, typing before your anti~tremor meds kick in--an opportunity that arises once every four waking hours and upon starting each day--can produce interesting lessons.  Today, I learned that "either" can be readily respelled, note: I didn't say misspelled, these are actual correct spellings of another word entirely~as in either, dither, zither, and wither, but not eithen, pithen, etc.)

Ah, but back to second best.  A tour guide who doesn't know his or her subject will not be able to display passion for the subject matter.  The best of the half dozen tour guides we've encountered was informative and thorough, of course; but she was also passionate about the artist she most admired.  It came through when she said his name, when she recounted events in his life and when she talked about people who did him a disservice.  It came through without any drama or overstatement on her part.  We all saw it, and it impressed us.  It was a judgement several of us formed independently during the tour and pointed out later.  The script-memorizer promptly gives the impression that they believe the most important thing is not the questions their touring party members have, nor is it the item along the way that makes the members stop and admire them, rather, it is getting through the script.  Soon the customers stop asking questions, even when the script calls for the leader to solicit them.  

Another missing element with the script-reader is humor.  While such a person can learn an expression or two to use to inject humor, but inevitably they overuse it.  One of our guides used an expression she had learned to inject.  It was "C'mon, did they really _____.  She would insert some unrealistic expectation or aspiration of the subject of the exhibit.  It was a subtle way of expressing the thought that that person was over the top in one respect or another.  She knew when to use it, and she did so--probably ten or twelve times.  The first two or three were not bad, but the rest of them were really just overdone.  The best guides we had were able to express humor in a variety of ways--relating to historical figures, to people they had on tours in the past, and themselves.  It takes a certain amount of mastery of the language to do this, and while all of the guides met the qualification of being able to make themselves understood in English, they simply could not inject humor.  

One final consideration that affected tour guide performance was just having too much on their plate.  One of our tour leaders had to cover the languages.  Ours was a mixed group, so the tour had to be spoken in both languages in turn.  As a result, the guide could only provide half as much attention, response to questions, and more.  Another way of giving a tour guide too much to do is to travel on several different public forms of transport.  Most groups numbered twenty persons or more, so keeping track of all of them can be inconvenient.  It's way note than inconvenient when a late-arriving tour member arrives at the rendezvous point for the next leg of the journey.  We had a guide who was quite good when it came to answering questions, and making conversation about the subject of the tour when sh had time to do it.  But we had two trains and a boat to catch who operated on their schedule, not hers.  She had to round up her group and ensure that all were present so often that she was able to offer little narrative about where we were going, or what we were looking at.  Managers of tours, you are no different from mot businesses.  When you load up your good employees with too much to do, quality suffers.  Keep it in mind.  Can all this information help you the reader?  Probably not, but it was on my mind.