Becoming a tour guide is a perfect idea for people who have an interest in travel, historical places and events, people, and who want to be free to make their own schedule.
Most tour guides get to travel for free. This is a benefit made possible by the travel agency that they work for. The travel agency gets paid good money by tourists to be taken on well-organized and informative trips. As a result, the tour agencies send tour guides as representatives of their company, and that means all of their travel expenses are taken care of.
In order to take advantage of the free travel opportunities offered by the travel companies, the prospective tour guide has to in return have something to offer the company. The guide has to be knowledgeable about the places he or she will work in, they should be enthusiastic about the locations and information so as to convey a better experience to the customer, and they should have very good people skills. Going on a guided tour with a boring guide, who is hard to get along with, can make for a terrible trip.
It is therefore the guide’s duty to the company that they work for to offer both knowledge and a positive travel experience to the tourists in their care.
If you have what it takes to be a tour guide, you are in luck, because there are several great benefits to this kind of work. First, you get to make your own schedule most of the time. There are steady tour guide positions available at historic buildings and museums, where the guide is a permanent employee, but most of the tour guides out there are contractors who work on a per job basis. Especially when first starting out, it is likely that you will be working as a freelance tour guide, able to pick and choose when and where you will work.
There are several skills that a prospective tour guide needs to have, and you can compare training courses to find the best one for you.
Seeing the world
Another benefit is the opportunity to see the world. As mentioned before, there are jobs where the tour guide will stay in the same place all the time, but most of them get sent to a huge variety of interesting and fun locations.
