Inbound Tour Guides

Aspiring tour guides should obtain six months to a year of experience working as a volunteer at a tour site. Once hired, new tour guides obtain further experience by participating in on-the-job training.

Tour guides should be excellent communicators and enjoy working with large groups of people. Occasional encounters with difficult or demanding tour group members are a reality, so patience is more than a virtue for this job, it's a necessity.

As a tour guide, you should also be fun-loving and able to help group members enjoy themselves. Another important trait is the ability to deal with unforeseen difficulties and situations. Leadership and a take-charge attitude are also necessary in this job, where guides are relied on to answer questions, deal with problems, and generally take care of travelers' needs. Finally, tour guides need to be willing and able to work long hours. During a tour, guides are never really off duty, and this can mean phone calls in the middle of the night to resolve any problem a guest is having.

For general skills, you should get as much public speaking experience as possible. Acting can help and actors often supplement their income working as tour guides. Sales work can help as well since you have to be very good at engaging your audience. Tour guide jobs are usually very specific to the location so learning as much as you can about a site where you want to work can be essential. A site may be a wildlife park, an amusement park, a film studio, a brewery, or museum.