Great Tour Guides Equal a Great Trip

By Jill Schensul

NorthJersey.com

It was 8:30 in the morning on Day 12 of our cruise, which meant this was the dozenth time I'd been sitting in a motor coach for a tour of yet another interesting Eastern European town.

Today it was … let's see, if it's Day 12 this must be … Vidin, Bulgaria. From the port city we had an hour's drive to Belogradchik, a place with supposedly crazy red rock formations — yet another UNESCO world heritage site. Outside, the scenes of this still emerging part of Eastern Europe were passing by at just-too-fast-to-take-a-photo speed: the awful concrete apartments, the abandoned factories, the rusted heaps and the shiny Mercedes, the horse-pulled wagons with the whole family on the hay, and the man on the bicycle with the cute little cap and wool blazer. Aside from the Cyrillic lettering on the signs, it was same scenes, different country.

Yet before we'd even reached our morning's highlight of Belogradchik, I'd given my heart to Bulgaria.

It wasn't the city and countryside scenes that had passed by my windows. It was our extraordinary tour guide, Albena, whose insight, wit and warmth had inspired me to write: "I love these people."

It might have been her explanation of the massive, deserted factory hulking out in the middle of a field: "This is a monster of communist stupidity. They made tires and treads: 20,000 people worked there — 800 of them were managers. It was a waste of time and production."

Albena can't wait for the Soviet-era architectural heritage to go away. "In 30 years it will disappear, because that's the lifetime of concrete."

About life during and after the communists: "Before it was like a greenhouse, everyone got the same amount of sunshine, water, no matter what. Nobody cared if you were an orchid or a snowdrop. Now there's more opportunity for everyone to be different, which is the way we start out when we're born."

And when we passed a man herding his sheep by the side of the road — "Bulgarians are fond of their domestic animals" — she told the story of how, as an only child, she decided that she'd adopt a newborn lamb as her sibling.

She apologized about not having the euro yet, but promised it would be here in two years, another benefit of joining the European Union in 2007: "We have entered everything that deserves to be entered. We are happy that we are back in the family of the world."

Amazing how one person with a microphone and a sign with your group number on it can influence your entire experience of a place. "A portal into a culture," as someone observed.

A good guide brings a place to life. Brings insight and enthusiasm to it, a personal take that will provide dimension and color to what might otherwise seem insignificant or plain.

On the other hand, a bad tour guide – you know, the Stepford Guide – can put your visit on the Most Memorable Vacation Disappointments list.

I was reminded of how much influence a guide can have on a sightseeing experience recently on my trip to Eastern Europe. Our cruise price included tours in all the ports we visited – 15 in all. So we got to meet that many local guides for each land tour. Guides who varied in quality (though all were really very good). And though we were a relatively small ship with 130 passengers, we were divided up into smaller groups for the tours, so there, too, were variations in quality.

Feeling lucky, traveler?

Obviously, hooking up with a good guide can be something of a gamble. Especially because there is no universal set of standards for tour guides. In the United States, some major tourist cities — Washington, D.C., New York City, Charleston, Savannah and Philadelphia – require tour guides to be licensed, as do France and Austria in Europe.

But most countries shy away from restrictions and standardization, since much of what a successful guide requires is hard to quantify. How do you grade "personality" and "storytelling" and "fascinating"? A recent lawsuit in Philadelphia also questions the right of a government to issue licenses for the right to impart information. A public-interest law firm said the city's guide-licensing law, passed in 2008, is a violation of the guides' First Amendment right to free speech.

Even in our own national parks there's variation. Rangers — generally considered to be among the best and most knowledgeable guides in the world — are at a premium in summer, and parks routinely rely on volunteers to serve as tour guides, since due to budget constraints, they often can't hire enough rangers to accommodate the large crowds. That means getting a good guide often becomes a "crap shoot" at best, says one park service representative.

Hooking up with park rangers and other guides who are specialists in their field – botanists for a garden tour, antiques experts etc. – can increase your odds of a good experience. If you're taking a group tour package or going on a cruise, you have to rely on the organizers to come up with tour guides who meet their standards.

"It's not a problem, but it's a constant search," said John Stachnik, chairman of the U.S. Tour Operators' Association. Companies that offer group tours to U.S. travelers rely on "ground handlers" (tour operators) at the destinations they visit to hire and train the guides, deal with day-to-day problems, and hear staff and passenger feedback right away. "Our job [the tour or cruise line] is to find the right inbound operator, ask them how they train their guides, and make sure they'll be up to our standards. When we say, 'We need four guides, give us your best ones,' we count on them to give us their best."

There are times, of course, where you can't have everything. He recalls a USTOA convention in Poland about 15 years ago that included day tours with two guides. One was a gregarious 27-year-old fellow somewhat short on actual knowledge of the destination. The other was an older woman who came up through the communist regime, had the information — an abundance of it — but not the personality. The two guides conducted tours every day during the conference. "Each morning we'd have to think, do I want the fun guide or do I want to learn something?"

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