Hospitality Career Enjoy Nature and Travelling By Being A Travel Guide
Some people are adventurous and outgoing; too adventurous, in fact that they tend to find someone to share the adventures with. More than sharing their adventures, they want to educate people on the places that they have been to. This is the usual last frontier that traveling people face. By offering their services as travel guides, they are not only able to repeatedly travel to places that they have fallen in love to but they can also share their experiences and adventures to other people.
People also resort to travel guide occupations not only to be able to share their adventure but also to meet people. Meeting all sorts of people is always an exhilarating experience, especially to foreigners with an eye for curiosity. These people are like children that never tire to look the beauty and know the history of the places and monuments that they encounter in their travels. In fact, travel guide professionals must have a good deal of knowledge in history to be able to answer the inquiries. He must also be ready to do animations, improvisations and representations in topics or subjects that are very hard to understand for the foreigners.
Aside from this, it is also a sort of nationalistic pride that fires the travel guide professionals to their work. They do their best to promote the tourism and beauty of their country. In doing so, they feel contented that they are able to do service to their country in their own little way as travel guide professionals.
Common Tasks Of Travel Guide Professionals
Travel guide professionals plan and organize expeditions, tours and cruises that are usually long distance travels. They usually book the tour or cruise details such as accommodation, transportation, equipment and even availability of medical aid. The arrangement usually takes place after he is able to reach a specific required quota in the number of customers.
If necessary, the travel guide professional is responsible for securing the visa, passport and health certificate needs of his tour participants. These permits and important; they are necessary to afford convenience in travel for tour participants. Usually, assistance from the travel guide professional is enough for the tour participants. But nowadays, because of the seemingly never-ending travel requirements, travel guides form partnerships with agencies for securing such important documents.
Throughout the tour, the travel guide professional must attend to the needs of his tour participants, while also giving advice and tips on the best sightseeing or shopping areas available. Some travel guide professionals usually have pre-formed partnerships with shopping establishments or sightseeing areas regarding his tour participants.
In each stop of the travel, he will have to discuss the significance of the area, why they have traveled on those parts and what part in history took place there. Throughout the tour, the travel guide professional already did a research on the best possible travel routes and the destination sites. Also, while on tour, he will evaluate the services received during the duration of the tour, the results of which will be reported to the organizers of the tour beside him.
Tours are usually not free from problems. The travel guide professional must be ready to resolve any problem in accommodation, service or itineraries, and to verify the amounts or fees as well as quality of the equipment to be used prior to the expedition and tour. These types of problems, nonetheless, are manageable for a professional travel guide. More alarming and pressing problems are usually in the form of mishaps or accidents during the tour that can do harm on the health or may even cost the lives of the travelers. In this case, the tour guide must be ready to administer first aid to injured patrons and be able to get medical aid or ambulance for the seriously hurt, immediately.
The travel guide professional must also be adept in various skills. He must be knowledgeable of existing hunting or fishing laws enforced in the area and capable of explaining it to his tour participants. When required, he must be ready to instruct his tour participants in climbing and mountaineering techniques, wilderness survival and be able to demonstrate the use of equipment used in fishing, hunting and climbing.
Characteristics Common To Travel Guide Professionals.
Travel guide professionals must be realistic since his occupation usually includes practicality and ability to manage hands-on problems and solutions. They often deal with real-time situations that need fast decision-making attitudes. Since the occupation requires one to work continuously outside, the travel guide professional must be street smart and knowledgeable in current issues and trends. He does not do a lot of paperwork and usually exposes himself or herself to the outside world.
A travel guide professional must be artistic as he is realistic. Artistic in a way as to allow self-expression and does his work without a clear set of rules to follow. He needs to be creative in presenting the various tour stops to his participants. He must try different strategies to avoid letting his participants to be bored with the tour.
A travel guide professional must also be sociable and willing to interact with all sorts of people, of various race and nationalities. Primarily, the occupation of travel guide professionals aims to share interests and experiences to other people and so great people skills are required.
Although it is not necessary, travel guide professionals will be at the advantage compared to other individuals if they are knowledgeable in one or two foreign languages. The English language, although being universal is not very helpful in times of explaining the significance of a particular event in history to a foreigner with a different tongue. Speaking to foreigners in their native language will make them at ease and comfortable throughout the trip.
Travel guide professionals must also have thorough knowledge in geography and also in public safety and security. Knowledge in these areas will make the travel guide professional more effective in ensuring the safety of his tour participants. Knowledge in geography will also arm him with better decisions especially in times of weather change. The comfort of the tour participants is the prime objective of the travel guide professional.
Freelance writer for over eleven years.
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Italy (Eyewitness Travel Guides)
- ISBN13: 9780756660574
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Italy offers an extraordinary kaleidoscope of regions and experiences for all visitors. Packed with photographs, illustrations and maps the Eyewitness Travel to Italy has mapped out all of the remarkable flavors of Italy. Use this guide to help you decide where to stay, eat, relax, and shop. Every page in the Eyewitness Travel to Italy has pinpointed the highlights of each fascinating region.
Rating: 
(out of 43 reviews)
List Price: $ 30.00
Price: $ 18.42
Review by Mark for Italy (Eyewitness Travel Guides)
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This is one of the best travel books I’ve read. Every page has well laid out and well labeled full color pictures to augment the text. Once you look at this it’s hard to go back to a dry, sterile book that’s all text with a handful of color pages in the middle. The information here is clear and easy to read. There is cross-referencing everywhere, for example a page that’s describing a major attraction will tell you where to go in the book to find hotels in that area. There are listings and descriptions for hotels and restaurants in each area, and general travel tips. The introduction to each area of Italy also has an overview of the history and architecture.
Review by M. Natraj for Italy (Eyewitness Travel Guides)
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I’ve been a long-time Lonely Planet fan, believing that text was fine. Why would I need pictures, since I was going to see the places in person anyway? I have since changed my mind completely!
We just returned from a 10-day trip to Italy (mostly Florence and Rome), and I have to say that I absolutely LOVED having this book along. When we went shopping for a guidebook, my husband picked this up and I went straight for the Lonely Planet. I resisted the Eyewitness guide, and we ended up splurging and just buying both. This ended up giving us an entire trip to compare them.
It’s true that it didn’t list a ton of places to see in each, but we didn’t really feel the book was too lacking. If we had known our itinerary when we went book shopping, we probably would have picked up Florence/Tuscany and Rome instead of the complete Italy, but this did help us choose our final destinations. One thing we really liked in the listings was the “Star Sight” marks. With the Lonely Planet books, the hardest part is trying to pick out which of the sights are really worth seeing and which are only so-so. In the Eyewitness book, not only did we have the Stars to guide us, but we also had the pictures to give us an idea if something was going to match our tastes or not.
By far, the best thing about this book was the information about the sights. I got so much more out of the trip by learning about the places we visited while we were there. From the food to the architecture to the history, it was so much more interesting. The clinching comparison between our two guides was the Roman Forum. The Eyewitness book had a sketch showing the layout of the forum with variou areas labelled with a brief description. A more detailed explanation of the various sites appeared on the following page. In contrast, our Lonely Planet tried despearately to explain the locations in prose (“to your left upon entering from this street…” and “across from that stands the remains of…”), and in the end, the only description they gave of each structure/area was its name! I really enjoyed having some background on what the places were and why they were significant.
The only downside of the book is in planning the logistics. There’s not a lot of information on how to get from city to city (or airport to city), and the admission prices to museums and attractions are surprisingly absent. However, with the blossoming of online travel sites, a lot of this information is easily available from other sources.
The city maps were a little confusing when crossing from one map to the next (I don’t think there’s any overlap), but I appreciated having the sights labelled even when they weren’t described in the listings. As we walked past a large church or government building, it was nice to be able to see what it was. The color coding of points of interest was good for walking, since we could tailor our route to pass by more interesting spots.
We didn’t use the hotel listings, since I researched our hotels online, but we did take advantage of a few restaurant suggestions. There aren’t a lot of budget listings, but the ones we tried were fantastic! Off the beaten path, we never would have found them otherwise, and we appreciated having budget sit-down options. The budget listings in our other guide tended to list lunch spots and self-service eateries.
In general, I really think this book helped “make” our trip. The whole time, it was like having a guide with us, pointing things out and explaining what was going on.
Review by Chad Biggerstaff for Italy (Eyewitness Travel Guides)
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I found this book useful for helping me target in on the areas I’d be most interested in visiting. Perusing the overview maps and many little photos of the attractions quickly gives you an idea what to expect in each region. It’s a great starting point for planning your vacation to Italy. It has all the contact info you need to further track down or get specific information on hotels/attractions.
Once you look thru the book and have an idea on the specific regions you want to visit I’d suggest getting a book just targeted in on that region as you’ll get more detailed information on the hotels/restaurants/attractions in that area that way. This book as to not be thousands of pages just briefly describes attractions and as for hotels/restaurants it mostly just gives you a star rating. If you want to do leg work yourself though it may be all you need as it does provide web links and phone numbers where you can get more details on each.
Review by BellaBull for Italy (Eyewitness Travel Guides)
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Overall this book fell a bit short of my expectations.
The pictures are nice because it puts a face to the description, but even for a book covering an entire country it felt a little anemic.
Even large cities like Roma, Florence, etc. covered only major items, not even a few unique/unusual suggestions.
This book is alright as a decent start and it’s certainly visually appealing but I find other books to be more thorough & useful. Forget the pictures and just get a better book (Frommers, Lets Go, Cadogan, & Unofficial Guides are all solid) and add in a little internet research to see what the lesser known areas look like.
Review by L. Pisarczyk for Italy (Eyewitness Travel Guides)
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After looking at several other travel books, I kept going back to this one. It is full of color and interesting facts. Great ideas of places to stay and comprehensive information on currency and traveling tips. The book makes me more excited about my trip each time I read it.