What do you do if your travel agency wants to maximize its partnership with tour guides?

Follow these:- -Develop strong relationships by communicating regularly with tour guides. -Offer incentives or bonuses for exceptional service and customer feedback. -Provide exclusive access to new tours or destinations. -Collaborate on marketing efforts to promote both the agency and the guides. -Seek feedback to continually improve the partnership experience.

Selection is the most crucial as guides ability to approach with connection with clients providing insightful, engaging with experience or personal interest to give best service to our clients or travellers.

> Offer workshops or training programs to improve tour guides' knowledge and delivery. > This elevates the customer experience and positions your agency as a provider of high-quality tours. > Create clear channels for communication between guides and the agency. > Encourage feedback from both guides and clients to ensure tours are constantly evolving and meeting expectations. > Competitive pay, commission structures, and benefits like travel insurance will attract and retain top tour guide talent. > This ensures a reliable and enthusiastic workforce that reflects well on your agency.

In my personal experience, on both sides of this situation (as a guide and as a travel agent) the guide-company matching is vital for how everything else will develop. Before beginning the selection process take a moment to reflect on what experience you want to provide to your guests, and what qualities should a guide have in order to fulfill that. After you've shortlisted your candidates, ask them if they'd be willing to go on a trial run. Guiding is very personal and the guide can make all the difference in how things go for your guest. Make sure that you've chosen the guides you feel align with your tour and company.

For me, the best way to maximize partnership with tour guides is to thoroughly understand them. Recognize that each guide is unique, with individual goals, motivations, and skills. By taking the time to truly get to know them on a personal and professional level, you can tailor your approach to effectively leverage their strengths and support their success. Doing so, will enhance collaboration, drive performance, and maximize benefits for the company, the guides, and most importantly, the clients.

Offer training sessions, workshops, or resources to help tour guides enhance their skills and knowledge. This could include destination-specific training, customer service training, or guidance on using technology and communication tools effectively.

After selection giving them training covering our company policies values and clients expectations from us is most important as it reflects our brand from the service they give to our clients.

Once you've chosen your guides, make sure you take the time to go over the tours with them. They could've been guiding similar tours in the past, but there's a distinctive touch to every tour done by different companies. Go with them to the sites and do trial runs of the tours. There's no such thing as "overtraining" when it comes to this. You also have to find a good balance between training/standardizing and allowing the guides to put their personal touch to the tours.

So you have selected a professional-looking person as a guide the next thing will be training as mentioned earlier the guide is your representative a single mistake can turn your positive review into a negative one. so train your guide through all the information like your company guidelines, processes, rules and regulations. To make your customers satisfied your guide should have all the knowledge of the trip they will take, about your company and some personal skills also. How to welcome a customer, how to solve small problems on the spot, make them comfortable, and many more skills and training are needed to make your customer satisfied.

Ensure that tour guides receive fair and competitive compensation for their services. Consider implementing incentive programs or bonuses based on performance or customer feedback to motivate them to provide excellent service.

To provide the best service communication is another important thing, with clear discussion of expectation and client feedback on tours with tour guide will always have updates on tours and can provide, or be prepared for best service to any changes occurred or any special request done from clients during any tour.

Keeping effective communication with the guides is paramount when operating regular tours with them. Operative conditions change daily and the only way that everyone can be on the same page is by communicating regularly and effectively. Quick personal example: This past winter we were operating several snowshoe tours in the Niseko area. Conditions were changing daily and it was important that we had updated conditions in the office on how it was looking out there. We were able to update our availability according to the guides' reports, and I was able to make better calls on which tours we should be running thanks to their regular inputs.

Effective communication is a key component in your business especially because you as a travel agent/consultant you are offering a service from which you not only need to ensure the trip is executed as per your clients' preferences but also that the experiences are memorable .

Communication is the key and your growth is the lock, for opening this lock you have to create good channels to get connected with your guide. Providing any information related to the customer and learning about the current scenario happening there. You are not on the field or in front of the customer, let me tell you through an example- your customer and guide are travelling as per the plan your customer asks for a water bottle and the guide in reply says the bottle costs 30RS. I'm sure the customer will not like it. There could be many reasons the customer will get angry, maybe the water bottle is included in the package but because of miss communication problem happened and it will not be solved till the guide calls you and confirms.

While to maintain fruitful with tour guides or tour leaders we company should always recognise and reward them so they give best experience to our travellers as they will represent our company reputation and they are the one who will be dealing with them on behalf of our agency.

To keep our relationship strong with tour guides, agency should give them recognition and rewards when they do a great job. This could be things like bonuses or just saying thanks publicly. When we show appreciation, it makes them feel good and motivates them to keep giving travelers awesome experiences.

You are working hard on a project to make it successful and in the end, you made a good result but that effort is just ignored by everyone, what will be your first thought? for me it will be, I have worked very hard compromised my family time and fun party with friends for this stupid project. I will not do this type of hard work again. Maybe most of you will have the same feeling. It's important to reward and recognise someone who did excellent work and provided a good result for you and if you fail to reward your company will suffer. To increase the morale, and the value, makes them think that yes someone is there for them, they can do the work with faith, and loyalty and try to progress themselves. if they will progress you will also.

Feedback, I think it will make the stairs of success easy. How? it's an example time - your customer completed a trip your guide served him/her well. But your customer has a negative point for your company and your guide knows what went wrong. if you take feedback from the customer you get a good review with a negative line but you can't know what went wrong. if you take feedback only from the guide he/she will tell the point that went wrong and you will think that the customer hasn't noticed it. if you don't take feedback from anyone you think sitting on a chair that everything is perfect and that's where you have declined your services. Take feedback from both sides to know both sides of the story, it's important.

Take the downtime to brainstorm with the guides about new tours, circuits, and ideas. Take the time to test those ideas and see what happens! During this winter, we came up with a new circuit that the guests ended up loving and turned into the signature tour. This tour came after a brainstorming and development session we did during one of our downtimes. Guides are out there all the time, so they know what's going on in the streets, what guests are liking, what things could change, etc.