Finding the Best Tour Guides on Travel: Four Tips from my Experience

I adore guided tours while on travel—and even when at home. If you’ve followed along on the travels I’ve mused about here, you know how often I recommend guided tours everywhere I go. (I’ve even given a few tips in my post with tips and tricks for travel planning!)

Making a point of doing one or more guided tours in every destination, though, has meant that I’ve had all sorts of experiences with them, whether that’s meant guides giving dubious information to guides not showing up—all the way to guides scolding guests in a humiliating fashion in front of the group.

After a little reflection, I wondered how I could winnow out the methods by which I’ve found the best tour guides I’ve had on my travels. In this thinking, I managed to boil down my experiences in finding the best tour guides to four key tips and tricks.

Check the Official Tourist Office

Every town, even the small ones, has an official tourist office.

From my experience, these tourist offices tend to have high quality, highly vetted tour guides for giving scheduled tours in several languages. If you’d like to go on a walking tour of the town, a neighborhood, or even a particular attraction, start at the local tourist office in your guided-tour research.

These guides—typically not official tourist-office employees—will often give private tours as well if you plan to be in a place when the tourist office doesn’t have a scheduled tour. Every time I’ve visited a place and haven’t found a guided tour available or available in one of my two languages, English or French, I’ve called or e-mailed the tourist office and had them put me in touch with one of their vetted guides for a private tour.

Find Guides with Dedicated Websites

When my research turns up guides via other means than the tourist office, I’ve had the highest quality results when the guide I’ve found has a website for their work—rather than just a social media page or account or a listing on a travel site like AirB&B or TripAdvisor.

Though I’ve had good tours with guides who do not have websites, I’ve had a great experience every time I’ve hired a guide with one. Guides with websites tend to approach their work from a more professional, long-term perspective. They take it seriously, which means they’ve spent time and energy developing their craft.

Aim for an Officially Licensed Tour Guide

Not all countries license their guides, but more do than you’d think.

What do I mean by “license?”

A licensed guide has been certified by a government body or governmentally approved third-party agency. To gain licensing, a guide needs to have a certain level of education and must prove knowledge and expertise of the subject matter via an exam or a dossier of material. Guides hired by tourist offices and museums and sites of interest all must have certification to work there, for example.

Licensing matters because, without a license, you have no idea whether your guide truly has any research-based knowledge in the subject they’re explaining. Unlicensed guides may have a ton of expertise, of course—but an official license gives you official security that they do.

How will you know if the guide you’ve considered is licensed? Well, you can ask—though you likely won’t need to ask. The amount of effort required for getting licensed means that most guides with a license will tout it loudly and proudly on their websites and everywhere they list their services.

Call the Local University for Niche Subjects

If you have a very specific subject of interest and none of the guides you can find speak to it, one fallback option is to call a local university to see if a professor or graduate student would be available or interested in giving you a guided tour.

In going this route, you’ll have to forgive any lack of polish in terms of tour logistics, though. The academic will rarely have any actual training or experience giving guided tours to visitors. To get the best results, you may have to be very explicit in exactly the aspects of the subject that draw your interest, so that the academic will know where to focus their information and where to take you on the tour. However, in touring with a professor or graduate student in the subject, you’ll absolutely get deep expertise in your subject of interest.

Good Guides Create the Best Travel Memories

I still believe strongly that getting to know a place through an expert guide—including historical sites and museums of all types—makes the visit vastly more rewarding and enriching.

Having someone talk me through the backstory of a place and what it contains—highlighting key points and aspects—puts it all in context for me. With a guide, I see and understand the places I visit far better than I ever could if I just wandered through them and hoped to magically “figure it out.”

If you’ve shrugged off the guided-tour idea in the past, I beg you to reconsider!