One of the truly exciting things about working over-the road-tours as an tour director is the opportunity to team up with local guides in a way that enriches one another’s storytelling and interpretation. Thoughtfully deciding who will share what piece of the story and how pieces form a complex whole mean that your travelers get an experience that is richer, more nuanced and more coherent. To nurture strong partnerships between interpretive colleagues, these three pro-tips can help you weave beautiful stories together.
1) Divide and Triumph
There is nothing worse as a tour-taker than to have the guide on the motorcoach tell wonderful stories and then arrive in a town only to have the local guide tell the same stories. You don't want to steal your colleague's best material! One strategy is for the on-board guide to provide context to the stories the local will tell and link the local experience to other stops on tour, and for the local guide to dive deep into the hidden insights and nuances that make your place personal and special.
2) Compare and Share (and Triumph!) Lets assume both guides are amazing researchers end up with some of the same stories. If you can find the time for a sit down, compare notes and decide who will tell which morsel of goodness and your visitors will think you're both amazing. Additionally, tour directors can share with the local guide what the visitors will have experienced before and after the local excursion, and local guides can share what the focus of their excursion or experience will be. This will help both guides focus on research material the other is unlikely to be looking into. Both tour directors and local guides can alert one another when visitors ask questions or reveal interests that can be addressed on excursion or elsewhere in the tour experience. If they have the chance to shadow one another or compare interpretive outlines, places of overlap can be addressed, and complexities identified.
3) Triumph Inside and Outside.
Identify ways of integrating the insider and outsider perspectives. Usually the local guide will be the insider and the incoming tour guide will have the 'outside' perspective, but it's not always that way. The Tour Director might be an Austrian working in Austria while the Viennese local guide is a British citizen married to an Austrian. But the point here is to consider how you might both offer different perspectives on the same space. As tour operators hire more local guides to tell their own stories, tour directors should look for opportunities to become facilitators helping visitors uncover connections and explore complexities that may be relevant in ways that local residents might not spot immediately.
This all means taking the time to learn from and listen to one another to identify how local guides and tour directors can each bring their storytelling authority to explore the complexity of tour themes rather than leaving cities, sites, and excursions as a collection of unconnected interpretive morsels and entertaining vignettes.
How we blend our skills to tell the richest, most nuanced stories is answered on a case-by-case basis and can differ person to person. When this sort of partnership becomes part of the interpretive strategy of the tour, the visitors are the ones who benefit. They have an experience full of new ideas and stories which in turn lends itself to the potential for nuanced explorations of complex topics. Additionally, it makes both tour director and local specialist look like storytelling heroes, each delivering commentary that is by turn hilarious and poignant, thought provoking and revelatory, and that is so coherent of an experience that the visitors will keep thinking long after tour is over, and they’ve returned home.
Awesome post! So helpful!