TRAVEL Book CLub Review: The Good Guide

By: Shayna Shabatura
Zach Ley
GEOG 363
Book ReviewThe Good Guide: A Sourcebook for Interpreters, Docents, and Tour Guides
Published by family-owned Ironwood Press in 1985 and written by the credible and experienced authors Alison L. Grinder and E. Sue McCoy, this is a sourcebook for interpreters, volunteers, and staff tour guides as well as educators and professionals working specifically in a museum. They use the term museum to represent many facilities that use tour guides such as the typical science, art, and history museums but also zoos, parks, planetariums, historic and cultural sites, gardens, and more. Museums typically offer several ways for the visitor to be educated including written materials, audiovisual programs, interactive exhibits, and classes. Probably the most rewarding with the best educational outcome, however, is a guided tour.
Consisting of 8 in-depth chapters, this book is essentially a tool that can be used to train and enhance a tour and/or a tour guide by introducing new, specific techniques, strategies, and recommendations that help you build on your previous experiences and skills in order to provide the best possible outcome with your tour group. It teaches you what to expect in situations, how to react to other situations, and probably their most important focus of learning strategies. The goal Grinder and McCoy focus on is to not abandon previous methods of learning but to enhance it and stimulate people to learn even more well after the tour has ended. With information and advice available mainly to professional museum educators, this easy, insightful read is divided into two major sections and puts the authors’ extensive knowledge out in the open which had not been done before.
They cover a wide range of relevant topics including giving tours to different age groups such as how children differ from adults especially regarding how they learn, cooperating with the different types of travelers, ways to prepare for them including people who are restless or do not have any interest, how to professionally and effectively handle specific types of situations, and much more. Other things covered are how to continue being a better guide including strategies on keeping your tours fresh and exciting such as using different commentaries or forms and using variety with each of your tours because according to the authors, change is a good thing. Overall, this book uses several details about strategies and goals of being an effective tour guide.
With the help of this book, you learn an extensive amount of new knowledge about teaching knowledge to others on a tour ranging from the beginning stages of preparation to nearing the end of the experience during delivery. Grinder and McCoy use specific and insightful examples from their experience in this industry to help get their points across which makes this book considerably relatable and potentially effective even though it is over 25 years old. “When tour guides link good teaching and communication skills with the ability to provide interesting and meaningful information, tours will become effective learning experiences.”

Travel Book Club Review: “The Tourist Guide”

By: T&T GEOG 363 Cayleen Merrifield
Eric Cohen’s journal “The Tourist Guide” was very interesting to read.  It gave the reader a lot of important information about being a tour guide, and broke it down so that it was easy to understand.  He broke it into two different categories, one was the leadership sphere and the other was the mediatory sphere.  Cohen then broke it down even further to better explain what each sphere consisted of.

            For the leadership sphere Cohen split it into two components.  There is the instrumental component, which has three main elements to it.  And the social component which has four elements that make it up.  The instrumental component mainly talks about direction and how it is the guide’s job to be able to lead their party to the “objects of interest” and to also have knowledge of the sites they are seeing.  Another thing he talked about in this component was how guides are also given access to areas that are normally off limits to the public and also how guides are to have control for the safety and security of their party.  The two elements that are talked about in the social component that I thought were important was how to manage tension and also how to keep morale up. These are two important skills that a tour guide needs to learn.

            The mediatory sphere also has two main components that make it up and they are interactional and communicative.  Interactional talked mainly about how it is a guide’s job to be the middleman from hotels and restaurants to making sure that they see what they want to see and distract them from the sites that would be less pleasant.  How to communicate to your party is also a very important factor for a tour guide.  In the communicative section Cohen talked about how it is the guide’s job to select what information they are going to give to their group.  He also said that while it is ok to present something as “authentic” only when it is blatantly obvious that it is a staged attraction, this is called “keying”, it is important not to take it too far and “fabricate” the information.

            I think that by reading this journal alone could help someone be able to understand what it is to be a tour guide.  The information that this journal gives can benefit anyone who wants to be a tour guide and it is easy to understand.  Eric Cohen did a great job in highlighting the main components of what a tour guide needs to do to be successful.