Is it hard to be a tour guide?

Generally speaking, tour guides are very hardworking, traveling all year round, and have a relatively low social status. They are considered to be accomplices in defrauding tourists. In fact, what a tour guide really earns is hard-earned money. They have to memorize tour guides, take care of guests, have the ability to deal with emergencies, and be versatile. These are all things a tour guide should have. More importantly, you must have responsibility and love for the work of a tour guide, because when you go out, customers will entrust everything to the tour guide, so the responsibility is very heavy!

Foreign-speaking tour guides may be better, because tips are recognized abroad, but Chinese people have never had this habit, and of course their income is less. Here, the tip is justified. It is completely given by the guest after seeing the hard work of the tour guide. There is nothing wrong with it. Chinese people should increase their awareness in this regard! The profession of tour guide is also prone to encounter bottlenecks. Tour guides believe that leading the same scenic spots day after day, year after year, giving the same explanations, and liaising tourists with meals, accommodation, transportation and other mechanized work, coupled with tourists' incomprehension of the work of tour guides, make them misunderstand the work of tour guides. Feeling increasingly tired from work.

The first step is to become a qualified tour guide.

The reporter learned from travel agencies and other employment companies that tour guides have always been the largest and most in-demand talent in the tourism industry. However, judging from the situation reported by job seekers, tour guide positions are very difficult to find. What's the reason? The reporter found that the real situation is that the supply of tour guides in the entire tourism market exceeds demand. However, there are not many experienced full-time tour guides with tour guide qualification certificates. Tour guides who have been leading tours for a long time, are well-informed, and have good feedback from tourists are even rarer. .

In addition to some formally trained and registered full-time tour guides, most of the current tour guide team are employees and students from other industries. Some of these part-time tour guides also hold tour guide qualification certificates, but due to lack of experience, the quality of their services cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, during peak tourist seasons, there will be a large shortage of tour guides.

So, if you are still on the periphery of the tour guide job, you can hurry up and get the tour guide certificate, and seize the recruitment peaks several times a year to fully exercise your abilities and accumulate good language expression skills. , knowledge connotation and industry experience, and strive to enter a regular travel agency to work as a full-time tour guide. If you are already a qualified tour guide, you should work hard on your internal skills, fully grasp every opportunity to lead a team, and be excellent. In addition, you can also participate in some tour guide competitions to improve your abilities and industry reputation.

The second step is to become a skilled tour guide.

There is a shortage of excellent tour guides, and an even greater shortage of skilled tour guides. Talents who are currently working as tour guides can learn a skill and improve their professional competitiveness. For example, overseas tourism and domestic tourism are becoming more and more popular, but talents for developing various overseas tourism routes and quality domestic tourism routes are very scarce. Especially with the development of outbound tourism, those with international knowledge perspective and foreign-related tourism cultural heritage are very rare. , management talents with humanized service concepts that are in line with international practices and management experience in the international tourism industry are extremely rare. If you are working as a tour guide, you may wish to learn more knowledge about tourist route development and strengthen practice, so as to lay the foundation for your career improvement.

Another example is that nowadays there are very few tour guides who understand Japanese, Spanish, Russian, Korean and other minor languages. When foreign tourists come to China to travel, many of them need tour guides who speak minor languages ??to lead their tours and learn another foreign language. , can add a lot of color to your career. It is reported that the international departments of some large travel agencies have a demand for foreign language tour guides who can train as much as they can underwrite. Some foreign travel agencies have also quietly begun to compete for foreign language tour guides.

For another example, currently 60% of travel agencies are in urgent need of planning and scheduling talents. As a tour guide, if you also know how to develop new routes, negotiate accommodation, itinerary arrangements, cost accounting, etc., you are expected to become a travel agency. core talents.

The third step is to become an all-round senior tourism talent.

Tour guide work is just the tip of the iceberg of the huge tourism industry, and there are many work directions that extend from it.

Shanghai's successful bid to host the 2010 World Expo will give rise to a huge "service industry chain". This is a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity for tourism workers, and it is also a challenge. Experts predict that the future tourism market will be dominated by all-round talents with multiple abilities.

In terms of domestic enterprises, the current requirements of travel agencies for tour guides have been upgraded from the simple full-accompany and local accompaniment in the past to the ability to design travel routes and provide both full-accompany and local accompaniment. This has created a higher level for tour guides. The entry threshold also makes the profession of tour guide more irreplaceable.

As for foreign travel companies, travel companies from the United Kingdom, Japan and other countries have been involved in the domestic tourism industry, launching various unique tourism products to seize the market. At the same time, they are also competing for outstanding domestic tourism talents. If they have many years Intermediate and senior experts and management talents with tourism market planning background, with positions such as senior tourism planner, tourism consulting department manager, planning project director, etc. There are also very few high-level tourism professionals who can cope with various complex economic situations, understand the operating rules of the WTO, and have strategic vision. These opportunities provide industry talents with good career advancement opportunities, and of course include generous salaries. Even headhunters who were not interested in travel agencies in the past are focusing more on tourism talents. According to a media report, a manager-level figure who has worked in a state-owned travel agency for more than 10 years has just been hired as the marketing director of a foreign-owned travel agency.

The industry’s higher requirements for tour guides, coupled with the increasing number of career opportunities, give practitioners unlimited development possibilities. Tour guides have rich contacts and can actively improve themselves through training, learning and other means to build themselves into professionals that are in short supply in the market. This is the best way to break through career bottlenecks.

Nowadays, there are many people who want to be tour guides, but their application purposes are very different. Because their purposes are different, the results are very different. It is necessary to ask the candidates a question. Do you really want to be a tour guide? If so, no matter what your purpose is, you have the foundation and prerequisites for success. Otherwise, you will not only waste time and money, but more importantly: you will suffer the personal consequences of failure. A serious blow to your growth and confidence. This does not mean that your personal intelligence is not enough, but that your attitude is not enough. Because you do not have a clear goal, then you cannot have a strong will to overcome all the difficulties you face before the exam. This is a very important topic. If you really want to be a tour guide, you should consider whether the difficulties a tour guide may face are something you are willing to face and accept. You can ask the current tour guide The salary of tour guides and tour guides mainly depends on commission!

For English tour guides, if an external group comes, the base will assign the group to the tour guide, and generally those good groups (that is, they seem to have higher spending power) Groups with high qualifications) will be assigned to senior tour guides first, and tour groups will be assigned to new tour guides.

If you bring a good big group, with many foreigners who are generous and buy a lot of things, you can sometimes earn 70,000 to 80,000 in a week;

If you are a new tour guide , you may earn less at the beginning, but sometimes you get lucky, and those groups that don’t look very good will have one or two people who are willing to spend money, and you can also make a fortune.

To put it bluntly, if you really want to make money as a tour guide, you definitely cannot rely on the salary from a travel agency; the kickbacks are ridiculously high

PS. The appreciation of the RMB will have a certain impact on the purchasing power of foreigners, but the impact will not be too great. After all, the wage levels and price levels in China and foreign countries are very different