How to become a good tour guide is a tough question. To answer this question, I think it depends on a lot of things. It’s not only know what problem guides always meet during the tour and how to solve these problems but also your skill.

1. In the tour, there are many attractive destinations, it means that the guides has an interesting commentary to talk to visitors. But there are a lot of information concern with that place (history, architect, location, geography, etc.) so it’s very difficult to know and choose what to stay. I think it’s the first problem.

The guides should know and choose what visitors are interested in and try to keep their attention( by jumping from one topic to another in the same sentence, finding out what is the most interesting information to talk to visitors). In addition to that, the commentary shouldn’t too academic and ‘heavy’ and try to keep the balance right in the commentary. The guides should humorous because a sense of humor is very important but again one should only be humorous where appropriate.

2. The next problem is there are a lot of questions  by visitors and some of them is too difficult that you can’t answer at all. I mean you are not a superman. If you know, let answer with a polite way but if you don’t know, no problem, these things happened. I can comment you that you can say: “I’ll find out for u”, or “I’ll try my best to answer” or “with my knowledge, I think…”, for example.

3. There are many incident happened during the tour such as bad weather, accident, wrong itinerary, someone is ill or lost, and so on. The guides should keep calm, try to sort out problem and make sure that the itinerary is kept to. Guides is a special career, you are a nurse to take care of visitors, a boss to keep the right itinerary, a teacher to give information, an ambassador to introduce your country, an entertainer because your visitors want to be entertained in extend, a psychologist because you are a leader, you should keep calm every when and reliable.

Above all, guides have to love people. Some one is lovely but someone is awful and you should treat them all equals.