To be an international tour guide, do i have to go to college?

Hi Hope – In order to be a tour guide you do not need to go to college, but I highly recommend it for several reasons: 1. As a tour guide, the more of a people person you are, the better. Knowledge of the locations you are guiding is important, but knowing how to direct and keep the attention of the people you are guiding is almost as important. During my college experience I learned a lot about people – not always in the classroom, but in interacting with others on projects and extra-curricular activities. Meeting and working with others outside your usual circle of friends and family can be very eye-opening if you pay attention along the way. College can help you hone your social skills which will be very useful in being a tour guide. 2. Majoring in anthropology is a great idea as well. You will learn about people and cultures in a way that will help you paint a vivid picture of the locations you want to guide tourists through. Also, an anthropology major is flexible in the long run. Since you said “at some point” you would like to run guided tours, a big-picture approach to your schooling is wise. 3. You don’t need a college degree to be a guide, but most other career opportunities today require a degree and it is becoming even more necessary as years go on. If you don’t get a degree you will automatically be excluded from any work opportunities that require one or be at a disadvantage when competing for jobs with others who have degrees. A college education is virtually mandatory in today’s work culture if you want to earn more than minimum wage. 4. The future of travel and tourism is unknown at this time. Jobs in the industry are being created and eliminated every day. With technology evolving so rapidly, we can’t even imagine what traveling will be like in 30-50 years. A lot of travel jobs have already been lost to apps in the last 10 years – many tourists give themselves self-guided tours for free using apps instead of paying for a person to guide them. Will this trend continue? Will tours be led by robots instead of humans? This uncertainty in the industry again makes me recommend a college degree so you have many options to pick from in your career path.

Also, if the college you attend doesn’t have travel and tourism courses, or if you choose not to get a degree, I recommend looking into community college Travel & Tourism programs. Many schools have stopped offering these programs but some still do and some offer online courses. A few years after I got my 4-year degree in Business I attended a Travel certificate program at a community college to get my foot in the door as a travel agent. It worked, but given industry changes my position was eliminated due to down-sizing and I now work at a great job in another industry. Nonetheless, I love to travel, so I’m still very happy that I was able to work in the travel industry for a while and taking community college classes on top of getting my degree was very inexpensive, enjoyable, educational and helpful in my overall career journey.

Good luck to you!

I agree with Sabrina that college is not necessary to be a tour guide/tour manager, but it certainly prepares you intellectually and socially to do the job well. The travel industry is large and growing, but in general does not pay very well. A degree from a university in Travel & Tourism might be useful to land an executive position for a major company in the industry that does pay well, but that may not get you the travel experiences that are most satisfying in my opinion.

My experience as a tour leader began when I volunteered to lead a group to China when it first opened to tourism in the 1970s. My qualification was that I had been a member of one of the very first delegations there. As a professional photographer I wanted to do more travel photography and saw leading tours as a way to do this profitably. I learned to organize my own tours for photographers (called affinity tours in the business) with one or two per year to China and then expanded to do tours to other countries later on. With the internet it is easier now to find local tour companies in other countries who will make all the lodging and transportation arrangements and all you have to do is market the tour, which can be done with your own Web site and by placing ads in publications such as International Travel News. I offered up to eight tours in a year at one point, so it became a lucrative operation the could have been the basis for more expansion with other photographers leading tours for me. However, I soon became tired of this as full-time occupation and took advantage of other ways to travel for my photos such as shooting for other tour companies and marketing my photos as stock images. In any case, I did establish that it is possible to create an independent business with practically unlimited opportunities to travel. I think this could be done with many other types of affinity groups based on an activity that is of a personal interest, such as art, wines, cooking, archeology, history, hiking, wildlife viewing, et al, that would attract enough paying clients to be viable. Of course, college preparation, including perhaps a foreign exchange experience, would be very useful to accomplish this.

Hope you find this useful and perhaps gives you some ideas on how to pursue your dream. Inspiration followed up with a lot of persistence can lead you to where you want to go.

Here is a helpful link

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes397010.htm

However, it is very important to get to know yourself to know if this is a suitable career area for you to follow.

Getting to know yourself and how your personality traits relate to people involved in various career opportunities is very important in your decision making process. During my many years in Human Resources and College Recruiting, I ran across too many students who had skipped this very important step and ended up in a job situation which for which they were not well suited. Selecting a career area is like buying a pair of shoes. First you have to be properly fitted for the correct size, and then you need to try on and walk in the various shoe options to determine which is fits the best and is most comfortable for you to wear. Following are some important steps which I developed during my career which have been helpful to many .