4 Best Ways To Organize the Ultimate City Tour
Looking for the best ways to organize the ultimate city tour? Guided tours are a guaranteed find in tourist hotspots worldwide and for a good reason. Tourists will pay good money for an opportunity to learn more about their holiday destination and to discover some secrets that their travel books might not have clued them into.
Tourism is a vast and lucrative industry, especially in this post-pandemic era of heightened interest in travel. Guiding tourists around your home city can be a great way to tap into this, but how would you set up a successful tour program?
Ways To Organize the Ultimate City Tour
#1. Research and Logistics
A city tour of any kind needs to naturally play to the city’s strengths. While your guided tour might have its gimmick or conceit, the star of the show is always going to be your chosen city.
With this in mind, you need to give a lot of time and effort to preliminary research to flesh out your tour’s route and content.
We’ll come back to content in more detail shortly, but first, we are concerned with the basics. What are some places you can’t miss on your tour because of how it’s set up? And what about hidden gems that other tours might not touch upon?
The route between these points is also crucial to plan out from an accessibility perspective as much as a convenience perspective. How many steps will guests need to navigate, or will you use transport to get from A to B?
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#2. Resources
Many tours are wildly successful because of the tour guide’s charisma and can get away with being little more than an escorted walk around a city. However, the more thought you put into equipment and resources, the more you might be able to achieve with your tour.
For starters, if you expect your tours to carry many guests, you might benefit from investing in some audio solutions – a microphone and portable speaker or an in-ear system for guests to wear.
Supplementary materials are also incredibly useful in providing informational booklets with content supporting your tour. These booklets should contain bullet points from your trip, additional information, and a route map so wandering tourists don’t get lost.
#3. Structure
The structure and pace of your tour are important to consider ahead of time to provide the most comfortable experience for your guests.
Your route will need to incorporate generous breaks for guests to rest and recuperate – at the potential expense of your tour’s pace.
However, by timing these breaks with arrival at areas of particular interest, you can effectively treat these breaks as opportunities for exploration.
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#4. Content
Lastly, the actual content of your tour will depend a lot on what you want to see. Still, it should take in some of the more interesting historical beats of the city to give context to tourists and other visitors.
Many guides pick their theme for the tour, choosing to zone in on a particular era of history or topic of interest; see the Jack the Ripper tours in London or the ghost tours of York. The more entertaining, the better!
