Our Secret Sauce: What Makes the Guides at ToursByLocals So Special?

Today we’re talking about one of our very favourite topics: the guides at ToursByLocals. As a business, we’ve been around over 15 years now, and building this network of amazing, one-of-a-kind, bright, fun, knowledgeable, and vibrant local experts is our proudest achievement.

We want you, as a traveller, to book a tour and be so impressed by the person who delivers it that you return again, and again, and...well you get the point. And one of the questions we hear most frequently from happy repeat travellers is “how do you find these people?”

So we thought we’d share a little bit about our process today. Because finding and onboarding the right guides is a process, one that we’ve refined over the years. Historically, only one in ten applications submitted have made it onto the platform, because we are deliberately picky.

A guide on ToursByLocals starts out in one of three ways: they’re actively recruited by our staff; they’re referred to us by someone we already work with and trust, or they take the initiative to apply on their own. Regardless of how their journey starts, it carries along the same path: if that guide’s application demonstrates the sort of background we’re looking for, we’ll invite them for a two-stage interview, via video. These interviews are designed to assess four general things: the guide’s approach to customer service; the depth of the guide’s general knowledge/skills; the guide's English language proficiency; and what “special” things that individual brings to the table.

This last part is extremely important. We even have a name for it: the “ToursByLocals factor”. Because your experience on a private tour isn’t only about what you see and do. It’s also about who you’re with, and what stories, context and “sparkle” that individual adds to your experience on tour. We look for people with a little something special; maybe it’s a guide in Normandy whose family has lived in the area for generations, with personal connection to WWII history. Maybe it’s a guide from Mexico City with a chef’s background, who loves to take visitors on tours that layer in cultural meaning to the city’s delicious street food. Or perhaps it’s a guide in Naples who has a PhD in archeology, and has been a part of the excavation at Pompeii, who can share firsthand stories of what the digs looked like.

If a guide is invited to join ToursByLocals, they move from the recruiting team to the onboarding team, who help each individual through the process of setting up their profile pages and unique tour itineraries, and teach them how to use their account tools to engage in conversations with travellers like you, create customized tours, and earn phenomenal reviews. (Side note: you can send a message and start a conversation with any guide on ToursByLocals by clicking on the "message" button on their profile.)

In creating ToursByLocals, it was our goal to make truly special local experiences available to any traveller in search of them. And the guide on our platform deliver these in spades. And one things we've learned: they’re not just experts about their destinations, they’re experts about people. Guides may be in the tour business to share their knowledge, but even more so to meet people from all over the world; they’re kind and social folks and an absolute delight to be around. We know you’ll agree.