Today we talk about how to make tours more interactive.

Keeping the attention of your group is one of your biggest challenges as a tour guide, tour leader or tour director. On any given tour the leader is doing the majority of the speaking, so it is especially important to think of creative ways to get your audience to participate.

You should never treat your tour like a lecture and even the most powerful and interesting tour guides on the planet will always benefit by having some interactivity and group participation. In this week’s tour guide training, I share some of my favorite tour experiences and the creative ways in which they engaged those of us on tour.

These insights come from a tour leader in the Netherlands, a nature walk on the Galapagos, and a beetle-chewing, seventy-year-old in a cultural centre in rural Vietnam. And don’t worry – there are pictures of all three!

As you know, I love the idea of tour guides coming together from every corner of the globe and sharing their best practices. After watching the video, share your most memorable tour experiences in the comments below, so we can all get better at creating, fun interactive tours!

-Kelsey T

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Share this video if you know someone looking for inspiration and subscribe to join the community! Leave a comment here to share your best techniques for creating interactive tours!

Transcript:

Hi there and welcome to Tour Guide TV. I’m your host, Kelsey Tonner, from beabetterguide.com. Now, I hope you didn’t say toast off the top there, did you? Why would you put toast in a toaster?

Got you!

You may be heard that having interactivity on your tour is a good thing or maybe you’ve just done the same tour over and over, and you’re looking to spice it up a little bit.

Either way, today we’re going to take a look at how you can be more engaging and engaged with your audience. Asking questions is a great technique to keep people on your toes and also give you a break from speaking.

If you are asking questions, make sure that they’re answerable and that if someone does have the courage to raise their hand, you thank them for it like a high five or thanks for participating, something like that.

And lastly, if you’re asking a tougher question, use the phrase, “Does anybody ‘happen’ to know?” so that way it doesn’t come off as condescending or rude if nobody doesn’t.

One time when I was on a tour in the Netherlands, I saw the guide pre-write out questions on little slips of paper and hand them around to the group.

At that point, when he said, “Oh, does anybody have any questions” kind of as a joke, people could raise their hands and read out the questions that they had on the pieces of paper.

This is also great if you have family trips and you want to get kids involved. Asking for a volunteer is a great way to captivate a group. Now, a volunteer can really do anything.

They could hold a map. They could demonstrate something or maybe you could ask them to do something silly. A great example of this was on a tour in Galapagos Island.

I was there with my girlfriend and she was called up to the front of the group to help demonstrate and act out the mating display of the Blue-Footed Booby, which is that blue-footed bird that’s unique to the Galapagos.

So instead of listening to a dry description, we are now all laughing and trying to imitate this bird. It was a great example of awesome interaction by a tour guide. Try and think of a way that your whole group can get hands-on with part of your tour.

Cooking classes are great for this, but even if you’re say a fillet fishing guide and you want to demonstrate a special technique for filleting a fish, you have to make sure that everybody has a chance to give that a try or maybe break them up into small groups.

If you’re giving a tour of a fire hall, is there something hands-on they could do like try on firefighting gear, maybe slide down that sweet fire pole, or maybe participate in a demonstration with the fire hose?

Really try and get creative with what will work for you. I once participated in a tour in a small museum in Vietnam where they had the traditional fishing nets, ploughs, and rice baskets that they used on the Mekong River.

So instead of just a dry museum, we actually got to get hands-on and a sweet, little Vietnamese woman showed us how to use the fishing net.

At one point, she even strapped me into the ox plough and I got to be the ox for the morning. How cool is that! So they’re just three examples of some tour guides getting creative and leveraging audience participation to create a more memorable experience.

Now, over to you guys. How do you drive interaction on your tour and get people to participate? Let me know in the comments below.

If you know someone looking for inspiration, share this video, subscribe to join the community, and otherwise, I’ll see you next time.