A tour guide takes visitors on guided tours at historical or culturally relevant sites that are unfamiliar to them. Guides share interesting information and entertaining insight into the places to provide tourists with a more in-depth experience. Following the lead of a tour guide in a foreign place usually guarantees that you will not get lost, and you will find the best spot to see and have a great meal, or a fun night out.
Guides sometimes obtain vocational training in travel or tourism, but they are not required to have a degree to hold this position. Language skills are great to have, and experience in the service industry, such as hotels or travel trades, can also be useful.
You will be walking around a lot as a guide, so make sure you are at least more fit than the average tourist if you take on this job. You should not shy away from speaking in public. Unless you advertise yourself as a Zen guide, you will be expected to keep the info and fun titbits coming all day long.
There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a tour guide. For example, did you know that they make an average of $16.28 an hour? That's $33,854 a year!
When it comes to the most important skills required to be a tour guide, we found that a lot of resumes listed 17.6% of tour guides included local history, while 14.8% of resumes included customer service, and 12.8% of resumes included safety rules. Hard skills like these are helpful to have when it comes to performing essential job responsibilities.
If you're interested in becoming a tour guide, one of the first things to consider is how much education you need. We've determined that 70.0% of tour guides have a bachelor's degree. In terms of higher education levels, we found that 5.3% of tour guides have master's degrees. Even though most tour guides have a college degree, it's possible to become one with only a high school degree or GED.
Choosing the right major is always an important step when researching how to become a tour guide. When we researched the most common majors for a tour guide, we found that they most commonly earn bachelor's degree degrees or high school diploma degrees. Other degrees that we often see on tour guide resumes include associate degree degrees or master's degree degrees.
You may find that experience in other jobs will help you become a tour guide. In fact, many tour guide jobs require experience in a role such as internship. Meanwhile, many tour guides also have previous career experience in roles such as sales associate or volunteer.