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A tour guide is a tour guide. He can work in museums and travel agencies, conduct tours of exhibitions and expositions, city attractions, architectural structures or landscape gardening ensembles, nature reserves, zoos, botanical gardens.
When is Tour Guide Day celebrated?
World Tourist Guide Day is celebrated every year February 21. The holiday is not official and is not considered a day off.
history of the holiday
In 1985, the first International Convention of Guides took place, on which the World Federation of Tourist Guide Associations (WFTGA) was founded. It is this organization that came up with the idea of creating a holiday, the purpose of which is to tell about the importance and significance of the work of guides and raise public awareness about it. World Tour Guide Day has been celebrated since 1990.
Holiday traditions
On Tour Guide Day, employees of museums and travel agencies, as well as other institutions where excursions are held, such as zoos and botanical gardens, are congratulated. On this day, the guides do not rest, on the contrary, they hold various events and quizzes. Museums often offer free tours.
Also, Guide Day is an excellent date for holding professional conferences, seminars, round tables, where specialists can exchange experiences and discuss problems and prospects. Of course, on this day the guides are rewarded with certificates, diplomas, prizes.
Profession guide
Those who wish to choose this particular profession can take a closer look at the specialties “tourism”, “guidance and museology”. But in general, any person with a historical, art history, cultural, philological, geographical and biological education can become a guide, depending on where he wants to work and what excursions to conduct: in a historical, local history, art or literary museum, conduct city tours or travel to archaeological sites. In modern interactive museums of science, for example, knowledge of physics is completely useful.
You should also pay attention to the courses of guides and guide-interpreters. Tour guides who work not in the museum, but on their own, must be accredited
In addition to excellent knowledge of sights, the guide must be able to find a common language with people, be sociable, artistic, knowledge of psychology and pedagogy will be useful.
Tour guide and guide
Often these words are used as synonyms. These are indeed very close specialties, but they have slight differences. A guide is usually understood as a museum employee. He leads excursions on a specific tourist route or object. Most often, the tour does not exceed a few hours. If there are no other functions, his responsibility ends with the end of the tour.
The guide is usually an employee of a travel company who conducts several excursions and accompanies the group throughout the tour. He can transfer narrowly focused excursions to colleagues from museums. Usually guides specialize in a certain region or route.
Related Holidays
Museum guides, in addition to World Guide Day, celebrate May 18 as International Museum Day. The idea of this holiday arose in 1977 at a meeting of the International Council of Museums.
History of excursion business in Our Country
The emergence of the excursion business in Our Country is attributed to the end of the XNUMXth – beginning of the XNUMXth centuries. During this period, school trips appeared. The statutes of educational institutions recommended organizing excursions in nature, visiting manufactories and other enterprises.
In 1899, a “Commission for the organization of general educational excursions” appeared at the Pedagogical Society in St. Petersburg.
The beginning of the XNUMXth century was the period of formation of the theory of museum business in Our Country. There are excursion organizations, courses for the preparation of excursions.
This work continued in the USSR. In the 1920s open instructor excursion stations. Legislative acts regulating the work of excursion establishments appeared in the 1970s. In the 1990s The travel industry was in deep crisis. Now the interest in it among the population has increased.