How to Become a Tour Guide: make money, do what you love, and travel the world–while only working a few hours a day

For the last five years, Alicia Butler has been making a living full-time, leading walking tours of New York City.
She makes her own hours, only works a few hours a day, meets travelers from all over the world, and gets to travel at least two months out of the year. She shares her passion for history, culture, and food with around 30 visitors per day and gets tons of advice from her guests on where to stay, eat, and play when she travels.
Becoming a tour guide is a great way to share your passions (history, culture, food, art, running, biking, boating, yoga, architecture) with both tourists and locals. You get to make your own schedule, carve out time for side projects, and hang out with (mostly) cool visitors. Depending on where you live, you can spend slow tourism seasons traveling (or even get a few months’ staycation!).
This easy-to-read book will tell you step-by-step how to become a tour guide, how to pass the licensing test, how to get the proper training, and how to make money as a guide.
You’ll also learn how to create your first tour, how to land your first tour guiding job, and how to increase your earning potential. Discover all the basics of commanding a group of people and offering five-star customer service. You’ll also get tips and tricks to learn how to memorize all those dates and facts.
Once you’ve become a guide, you might even want to strike out on your own and begin offering your own tours. The second half of this book will teach you everything you need to know to offer your tours to the public. You’ll learn where to find guests, how to create tours that sell, and how to sell your tours in different markets.
If you’ve ever taken a tour and walked away thinking that you have the perfect personality and skill set to become a tour guide, this is the book for you. Even if you worry you don’t have the right skills or personality to become a guide, you’ll learn tips and tricks to help you get over fear of public speaking and social anxiety.