4 differences between personal and group tours

Working with a group of 30-40 tourists and communication one-to-one requires from the tour guide different approaches. In the first case, the tour guide directs the crowd: forwards it in the right direction, monitors its general emotional background, and keeps in view all participants. When following an individual event you don’t need to disperse your attention to many people, but instead, you should delve into the interests and needs of every individual. What are the other differences between a personal tour?

An individual offer can be even like this

1. Changing the conditions

Gathering a group, the tour guide defines a topic, route, duration of travel, meeting date, and time. When working with an individual customer, these parameters vary with the exception of the topic: if the tour guide is specialized e.g. on gastronomic tours, it is unlikely that he will lead you to see some fortifications. All the rest is up to the customer. Of course, the changes should be set in advance, for example, when discussing the tour at the site.

Need to remove or add itinerary waypoints? No problem!

A personal tour is not necessarily carried out only for one person. Tourists can come two or five together, the whole family or a group of friends.

2. Respecting the client's interests

A story for the group is a memorized speech, the improvisation here is good only answering the questions. For an individual tour standard explanations are not always suitable. For example, when seeing a historical monument, one is interested in construction material, others in its architectural style features, and still others like legends associated with the building. Therefore, the tour guide should know well the subject of the narrative to illuminate various aspects.

The preferences should be specified during the preliminary negotiations. However, during the tour it is a good practice to monitor the tourist’s reaction: getting distracted, means the story is not interesting to him. But if he chooses a better angle for his photos? Or maybe is thirsty? Do not hesitate to ask the customer about his impressions and desires. In this way, you’ll create an atmosphere of live communication (what, in fact, people wait for a personal tour) and earn a reputation of a careful tour guide.

Many travelers forget to take water, carry a spare bottle for customers

3. Many details

The group tour has always some pauses in the narrative, these occur during organizational issues: walking from one attraction to another, and awaiting the arrival of all the participants. For individual communication, you shouldn’t keep silent, even when moving from one place to another. Yes, your story will be more detailed, but it's just what people expect.

A personal tour allows tourists not only to learn additional details but also to better see interesting parts of buildings or to try some crafts, make a clay pot, paint a scarf, or lay a mosaic. In other words, get more impressions than in a group tour. Provide such an opportunity to tourists!

A walk through the night city is sure to be remembered

You should think about an hourly rate for your services. After all, the event may run over time if the customer wants to examine in detail one of the objects, or relax in the middle of the route.

4. Answering the questions

When working with a group, the tour guide chooses which questions to answer, because there’s not enough time for everyone. Therefore, he cannot speak about details that he doesn’t know well. But communicating "face to face" you cannot ignore the client's interest. Therefore you should not propose events on a topic that you don’t know well.

It’s not that an individual tour is harder or easier than a group one. It's just different, requires flexibility from the tour guide, the ability to make decisions quickly, and being helpful to tourists. If the expert has these qualities, his personal offers will be popular.

Read our previous article 7 types of tourists: what tours can you offer to each of them?
Read our next article 4 steps to a new route: route drawing instruction