The taxonomy of guided tours
A very good guide, a struggle session with a ticket vending machine, and Mumbai's Dharavi slum
Introduction
When I hear the term “guided tour,” my first instinct is to run for cover. I can count on one hand the ones I’ve enjoyed. I don’t remember the last time I went on one without substantial external pressure. Yet a couple of weeks ago, I found myself on one such tour in the middle of Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. And I was pleasantly surprised. This experience prompted me to think more systematically about guided tours and the different flavors in which they come.
Guided tours can range from something as simple as someone providing information about the paintings you encounter in a museum, to week-long visits in faraway countries. Even though this spectrum is wide, most guided tours seem to serve one of three primary functions. The tour guide can provide you with either (1) information, (2) logistics, or (3) security. (Most real-life tours, of course, combine some or all these functions in varying proportions.)
The tour guide as information provider
Imagine the typical guided church visit in a mid-sized European town. A visibly unenthusiastic long-time employee rattles off information about when the church burned down for the first time (Why does every church seem to suffer this fate at least once?), who rebuilt it, and importantly, how many kilograms its bell weighs. The best-case scenario is that the employee speaks inaudibly enough so as not to interfere too much with your visit. To be clear, there are people whose commentary about burned-down churches I would gladly listen to for hours. But for obvious reasons, they tend not to be on the payroll of the average church.
Before visiting Mumbai, I visited a famous stone building in Delhi. As I was buying my ticket, a local man approached me with the offer to guide me through the building for a small fee. Despite the unsolicited assurance by a nearby guard that this man was a “very good guide,” I gently declined his offer. I wondered what special insights a local man may have had about a historical site that ChatGPT and other online sources don’t. (According to ChatGPT, the building was damaged over the centuries. The culprit this time, however, was not a fire but an earthquake.) I see limited value in this type of tour. The marginal information gain I expect to get from the average tour guide (over alternative sources) seems minimal— if positive at all.
The local man was unlikely to be a leading authority on Indo-Islamic architecture, but he surely possessed another skill I could have used after my visit. The much-needed skill was getting a rickshaw back to the metro station.
This leads us to the second type of guided tour: the one where the primary purpose of the tour guide is to take care of logistics.
The tour guide as logistics manager
Much of the stress of traveling stems from worrying about logistics. Here are two examples from my recent travels.
After my first solo day of exploring stone structures in Delhi, I wanted to head back to my hotel. I naively thought I would use one of the largest ridesharing applications for this. I tried to pay for the trip online. I couldn’t because I didn’t have a UPI—an Indian instant payment system similar to services like Google Pay. I naively tried to create an account, only to realize it required an Indian bank account. My only option would have been to pay the cab driver in cash. I had no cash either, as the local ATM I tried didn’t accept my card. But I did have my friend’s phone number (and an Indian SIM card he had activated for me). Three minutes later, I was heading back to my hotel in a cab he booked for me.
During my recent trip to San Francisco, I faced the Herculean task of buying a train ticket to go from the airport to the city center. The ticket vending machine had a user interface from another century. After accidentally changing the language to Vietnamese a couple of times, I tried swiping my card and selecting the debit card option on the screen. Having failed three times, I was ready to give up. Then a good Samaritan, wearing the uniform of a train employee, showed up and suggested that I try inserting my card instead of swiping it. And just to be safe, he said, I should also select the credit card option on the screen (even though I used a debit card). The trick worked, and a minute later I was the happy owner of a travel card.
In these stories, the tour guide fulfills the functions of my good friend and the train employee. He knows how to buy a train ticket and get a cab. He knows the best way to get from A to B. Importantly, he knows the local language. Frequently, he has a vehicle and a driver’s license. He knows which driving rules can be safely ignored, and which ones should be followed religiously. In logistically challenging locations, this type of service can be worthwhile despite the substantial time wasted on lengthy bathroom breaks, shopping stops, and other non-essential activities.
The tour guide as bodyguard and risk assessor
The third type of guided tour is when you pay not for historical information or logistics—but for safe passage. In fact, this was my motivation when I signed up for the walking tour in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. Dharavi, home to roughly 1 million people living in an area slightly smaller than New York’s Central Park, is said to be safe for tourists. But safe means different things to different people, and I didn’t feel like exploring the different shades of safe on my first trip to India.
Visiting such a place with a local tour guide has two advantages over visiting it alone.
The first advantage is that the guide is better at avoiding dangerous situations. Part of this might simply be due to an immutable characteristic of the guide, namely that he looks local. When the visitor looks non-local, her association with a local lends some legitimacy to her visit, making her safer. Furthermore, the guide understands the local cultural code, which is another skill that helps with prevention. The guide knows when it’s safe to take a quick photo, and when it’s not, who you can establish eye contact with, for how long, and whether it’s advisable to interact with locals. The lone visitor is less likely to be attuned to these norms.
The second advantage of the tour guide is that he can assess and mitigate risks much better than the visitor. For example, as we entered the slum, an old man shouted something at our group. His tone and demeanor suggested to me that he didn’t want us there. But I couldn’t know for sure, because I don’t speak Hindi or Marathi. Our guide, Pranav (not his real name), was undisturbed by the encounter and quickly moved us on without saying much to the old man. Half an hour later, we had a similar incident: a man in a small truck started honking and yelling at us. This time, Pranav had a short chat with the driver, and the driver left. Maybe they were just casual acquaintances having a friendly chat, or perhaps we were blocking the driver’s way. Alternatively, he could have been threatening us or offering us a ride. I have no idea. But that’s exactly the point: Pranav quickly assessed the situation on our behalf and mitigated the risk for us (if there was anything to mitigate).
If I went back alone a hundred times, probably nothing would happen 95 times. The remaining 5 times, however, could be tricky without someone like Pranav. In this sense, a tour guide is like a helmet. Most of the time, you don’t really need it, but it reduces your chances of a truly bad outcome the few times things go wrong.
Conclusion
Retrospectively, many of my bad experiences with guided tours were due to mismatched expectations. I wanted one type of guided tour and received a different one. Take my Scottish Highlands trip from years ago: I expected a deep dive into Scottish history, combined with beautiful scenery. Instead, we mostly lingered around shops and parking lots. I misunderstood the deal. The purpose of the trip was not culture and history. It was logistics. A candidly written brochure would put the purpose like this: “A bus drives you to 3 locations and you get to spend a short time at each. In return, you pay the company some money and let the driver-guide torture you with some awful commentary.” The deal might still be attractive to some. But more importantly, one’s participation in the tour would reflect an informed decision rather than naive hope in the veracity of pleasant-sounding claims.