How to Guide a Tour Guide if You’re Not a ‘Tour Person’

Our tips to how to guide a tour guide if you’re not a ‘tour person’ cover everything from letting the guide know how you prefer to experience places and how you like to do tours before you actually hire the guide, and taking charge from the get-go – it’s your day, so you want to do things your way, which may not be the guide’s way.

When we were younger we always travelled independently and rarely did tours – unless it was a guided tour of a museum or art gallery or archaeological site, or a behind-the-scenes or after-hours type tour of a must-do sight that can only be experienced with an official tour guide, such as the after-hours tour of the Sistine Chapel, which was special.

It wasn’t until we fell into travel writing and photography and had to test out tours for the guidebooks and stories we were researching, writing and shooting that Lara realised she loved a good tour and I came to the realisation that I was not really a tour person – unless it was an expert-led tour with, say, a sommelier in Venice, or an artist in Paris, or an architect in Sydney…

We must have experienced many thousands of tours over the years. And while there have been tours I’ve really enjoyed – and places we think must be experienced with a guide to get the most out of them (hiring a guide for Angkor Wat and Angkor Archaeological Park is essential as far as we’re concerned) – we’ve also been on excruciatingly painful tours with guides who drove us crazy.

As a result, over the years we developed tactics for handling guides on tours we need to test out – for instance, when I need to wander off to take photographs, Lara takes the lead in keeping the guide occupied and away from me – and Lara developed insights from years of creating itineraries, planning trips, and hiring guides.

This is our advice based on two decades as professional travellers on how to guide a tour guide if you’re not a tour person and don’t love doing tours.

How to Guide a Tour Guide if You’re Not a ‘Tour Person’

These tips to guiding a tour guide if you’re not a tour person and don’t like doing tours is based on our many years experience. But before sharing those nights, let’s clarify the differences between the types of tours – group tours and private tours – and when it’s appropriate to guide your tour guide and when it’s not.

Group Tours and Private Tours

If you’ve booked a spot on a group tour online, on a site such as Get Your Guide or you’ve booked a private tour in response to a specific tour description in an ad or story in a magazine, our tips to guiding a tour guide do not apply and if that’s not obvious, let me explain why.

Group Tours

If you’re joining a group tour, whether it’s a large group tour or small group tour, you’re actually buying what’s called a ‘product’ in the tourism industry, which a group of other people have also bought from a description on a website, in a magazine, newspaper or brochure, or in an email.

If you’re going to start to try to change that tour with your requests to do things a little differently, you’ll be affecting other tour participants – who are essentially ‘consumers’ of a product who want to experience what they paid for – so either they’re going to want their money back or, embarrassingly, you might be asked to leave if you disrupt the tour.

Attempting to guide a tour guide leading a group tour is not a good idea.

Private Tours

When you book a private tour, you’re also paying for a product, a tour that the guide may have conceived and developed or that the tour company that they work for has created and planned. The guide or tour product manager in the office has taken time to research, develop, plan, and organise the tour that you’ve booked.

The guide or someone back at the office of the tour company has most likely taken some trouble to arrange specific components, booking times to visit particular stops on the tour itinerary, organising to meet particular people and brief them, and have probably arranged transport and drivers.

If it’s a food tour, the tour guide or tour company might have organised to visit street food cooks, might have reserved a table at a restaurant, arranged a dish or three to be cooked for you, or booked time in the busy schedule of a professional chef to take a moment to meet and chat with you.

A private tour isn’t the kind of tour where you should attempt to guide a tour guide or change anything on the fly.

Bespoke Tours and Private Guides

Where our advice to how to guide a tour guide does apply is to bespoke tours, also called customised tours, and when you’ve hired a private guide to take you to a particular place. I’m thinking of historical sights or archaeological sites, such as Angkor Archaeological Park, or perhaps to do a particular activity, such as bird-watching in Costa Rica, say, or an African wildlife safari in Kenya.

Bespoke Tours

Trip planners and tour guides offering bespoke itineraries and bespoke tours or customised itineraries or custom tours crafted in response to your request for a particular sort of experience or kind of holiday with a theme perhaps or specific components are able to be more flexible obviously. But there’s still a time and place, and that’s at the beginning of the process.

Private Guides

Hiring a private guide is where you have all the flexibility in the world. But that guide is not going to be happy if you’re going to start to ask them to things a little differently, for the itinerary to be changed or for the pace of the tour to be quickened or slowed down when you’re mid-way through a tour. You need to do that at the start of the day.

So here are our tips to guiding a tour guide when you’ve hired a private guide.

Tips to Guiding a Tour Guide if You’re Not a Tour Person

Here’s our advice to guiding a tour guide if you’re not usually a fan of tours.

Be Up Front from the Start

If you’re very particular about how you like to travel and be guided, you need to say so from the first point of contract, which is typically an email. Put everything in writing at the beginning, and the more detail the better to reduce the back and forth, so you’re not wasting a busy guide’s time.

Don’t forget, you’ll be paying the guide for the tour and their service on the day, you’re probably not paying them to waste hours reading and replying to multiple emails. If that’s what you want, then you need to hire a trip planner or travel consultant before you start contacting tour guides.

But also keep in mind: trips planners and travel consultants are running small businesses, most probably micro businesses, and are trying to make a living. They’ve budgeted a certain number of hours to communicate with you, answer your questions, and plan your itinerary. If you’re going to take up more time than they’ve allocated, they’ll need to charge you for that time.

Book a Call or FaceTime

After you’ve exchanged emails and booked your guide, if you have any doubt about whether the guide understands how you want to do things, book a short phone call or some ‘face time’ on a video call using a face-to-face app such as FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Google Chat, WhatsApp, Zoom etc.

You need to make sure you’re on the same page, so there are no surprises later on, especially if your language is a second language for the guide. They might need help from Google Translate. Getting things in writing first is an excellent idea so you can use that email to clarify and confirm things on a video chat and when you meet in person. But it’s hard to beat face-to-face communications.

This also gives the guide a chance to assess whether you’re the kind of person they want to guide. Not all guides are flexible. They might be able to recommend a guide who is better suited to your style of travel.

Be Specific About How You Like to Tour

Be very clear with the guide about how you like to travel and experience places.

The Pace You Move

Talk to the guide about the pace you want to move at – do you like to go slow, stroll at a leisurely pace and periodically stop to sit down and absorb the atmosphere of a place? Or do you prefer to walk at a brisk pace and to move fast through sights, because you want to see it all?

Sound and Music

Discuss from the start with the guide how much talk you can handle when you’re touring sights. We once had an Angkor tour guide who talked incessantly. We were on a magazine assignment and his non-stop chatter every time we arrived at a new temple didn’t leave me much time to take photos or for Lara to write notes.

Let the tour guide know if you don’t want to be lectured to the whole time. For example, if you don’t want to hear a monologue about the entire history of the Khmer Empire on the way to the temple, because you want to take in the scenery en route, or you want to absorb early morning atmosphere.

Something we find annoying when hiring a guide and driver is noise in the car, whether it’s constant phone calls, loud conversations or blaring music. High-end tour guides are usually better trained, will keep their phones on vibrate, speak to each other in hushed tones, and will ask before turning on music. Others won’t.

Brief the guide before you leave the hotel. Don’t wait until you reach the destination. Allow the guide some time to prepare and mentally adjust their plan or brief the driver in advance.

What You Want to Know

Let your guide know what you want to know and how you like it to be delivered. Let them know if you don’t want to be told things you can read in a book, that you prefer the guide’s viewpoint, local insights, expert opinion, and/or personal insights.

Or, conversely, if you’re a busy person with a hectic schedule and you don’t have time to read anything before you head on holidays, and you want to know it all, let the guide know. If you want the guide to provide some background information and history before you arrive, ask questions en route.

What You Want to Do

If you want the guide to focus on don’t miss-sights and star attractions, pointing out highlights and describing their significance, be clear about that. Likewise, if you prefer to steer clear of the crowds, get off the beaten track, see lesser-visited points of interest, and hear untold stories, tell the guide from the get-go.

For example, most tourists to Angkor Archaeological Park want to visit Ta Prohm or “the Angelina Jolie temple” for its appearance in Tomb Raider – at the same time as they want to avoid crowds. That’s a challenging feat at one of the most popular temples, although it is possible, but involves a bit of planning.

Take Charge

You’re hiring the guide and paying for your tour so the day should be about you and how you want to experience a sight or place not necessarily how the guide wants to show you an attraction or site – unless their way really is the best. It may or may not be, so you need to ask as many questions as you give directions.

Be Respectful and Sensitive

Do be respectful and sensitive to the guide when you’re giving those directions. After all, showing you their city or town and its attractions, and sharing its history and importance is personal – and with many sights, particularly a sacred place such as Angkor Wat, a source of pride.

Being a guide is a profession, guiding is a skill that they’ve developed over many years, and the knowledge that the guide wants to share with you may have been accumulated over a long time. Take care in how you communicate, so that you don’t insult your guide.

We hope you find our tips to how to guide a tour guide if you’re not a ‘tour person’ helpful. If you have more tips to share, let us know in the comments below.