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| The new £20 note with a young JMW Turner |
In my main job as a tourist guide, I have noticed that people increasingly are hiring an individual tourist guide to show them around rather than joining an organised group tour. Having your own guide does (or should) offer people more flexibility to decide, often at the last minute, to alter and rearrange their plans, which they cannot do on an organised tour.
There is a difference between flexible and disorganised. Guides should be able to adapt to changing circumstances, which might mean that people altering their plans at the last minute. People often underestimate how big a city London is and just how tiring sightseeing can be, so they often trim their itineraries. Only rarely do they choose to do more.
When I started working as a tourist guide, I realised that I had to be something of a dictator, albeit a benevolent one. People do not in the end thank you if they miss seeing something they had paid for because you delayed too long, either waiting for a latecomer or having an extra but not strictly necessary photo stop. You often need to be ruthless to be successful.
I do not know what the companies charge for a private tour but I do know what the guide fees are: around £350 for a full day and £200 for a half day, more if you work in a foreign language which, much to my shame. I do not. Actually, English is so much the language of tourism that my stubborn inability to speak foreign languages does not hold me back much.
A colleague said that guides in other countries are expected to speak at least one other foreign language if they want to qualify. Although I had a certain sympathy with this attitude, the fact is that my monlinguisticality (a word I have evidently just invented) is not that important to my career. In short, most of my clients speak English, as I do to them.
They also like the individuality of having a personal guide. My partner, who also works in tourism, said that, when she started, she was told that she would probably be the only local person that most of her passengers meet. The implication was that she would have to make a god impression because her whole nationality would be judged on her sole personality.
There also come into contact with hotel staff, drivers and other miscellaneous people but many of these have come here to find a job and the tourist business offers the good opportunities to work casually and often for cash. While their guide might be ultra-qualified, these miscellaneous extras will speak passable English but do so as a second language.
The human element should never be forgotten by guides. Sometimes I think that we are blinded by our qualifications and forget that we are working with other human beings in a commercial environment. To make a living we should never forget that we need others to cough up cash to provide us with an income. Some of that wealth has to trickle down towards us.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com
