Tours are a service to the travelers which they expect to be interesting and a learning opportunity. For the travelers to be satisfied with them, the tour guides, the bus and the places they visit should be an excellent experience. The one factor tour operators can control and help improve are the tour guides. To make them their best version, you can train them, inform them and establish protocols with them on three phases, pre tour, during the tour and post tour.
Train your tour guides
Training your tour guides is really important, because it is the only way to educate them with the company values and form of work. However, it is also important to train them on how the tours should be, where they should go, what is important that they cover in the explanation, how to handle difficult travelers and give them more tools to create tours worth a lot of reviews, such as storytelling.
Another relevant aspect to teach them is all the emergency protocols that the company has for any predicament that might arise. It could also be very good for them to know what to do during a medical crisis, like CPR or anaphylactic shock. Also, train them with all the communication protocols so the tours can work well and perhaps even offer them extra information that they may not have about the history of the places they will visit.
Establish protocols with tour guides
To have a better order and knowledge on how the tour is going in real time, you can establish protocols to have an active and effective communication with the tour guide. This means, you can request for them to text any time they make a stop or arrive somewhere, also text pictures of the bus, receive confirmation on the number of travelers that arrived from the reservation, if there is internet on the bus, afterwards ask how the tour went, etc.
Nevertheless, it is also necessary to have emergency protocols established with the tour guides, for example, what to do if there’s an earthquake, what to do if a traveler gets aggressive, what to do if a crime is taking place where the tour is, what to do if a traveler gets lost, how to proceed if a traveler gets injured or hurt, and so forth.
Inform tour guides before the tours
There are certain pieces of information that are absolutely vital that the tour guide has before the tour. These will help everything run smoothly and avoid confusion or mistakes as much as possible. Keep in mind, it is also very important for the tour guide to be extra early to the meeting point so he can make sure everything is set in place to begin.
Tell the tour guide before the tour: how many people are gonna be on the tour, what nationalities are there, when is the bus gonna be there, who is the bus driver, phone number of the bus driver, everything included in the tour, itinerary of the tour, names on the reservations, special need or allergies from the travelers, and so on.
After the tour, guides should give tour operators a short report on how it went, if there were any incidents or problems, something that perhaps should improve, if the bus and bus driver were good, how the sites they visited were. This could help the tour operators to keep improving protocols and the tours themselves and to know the current quality of the tours.
When tours run efficiently and are liked by the travelers, tour operators are more likely to receive positive reviews, which helps the company itself but also the tour guide. TourReview can help measure which tours are doing better than the others and help build monthly or weekly reports of the effectiveness in every tour.
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