Adventure travel needs to be eye-opening, inspiring and exhilarating. In many cases you can only experience everything that a destination has to offer together with an adventure travel guide. Unfortunately, just as all the travel guide types out there, not all are really good. It is important that you think about some things as you look for the very best adventure travel guide. Check them out so that you can find someone that is going to help you have that memorable experience you surely want to have.
The Best Adventure Travel Guides Love Their Job
This is, most likely, the most important thing to look at. The best guide will always really love his/her job. There is a travel passion that is instantly visible. Such people are friendly, personable and enthusiastic. You get positive energy just by talking to them and you will surely need it, especially during the longer, physically demanding trips. If you see that the guide is not like that, your experience will not be as great as it could be.
High Knowledge
Every single really good adventure travel guide will have a lot of knowledge accumulated about the destination. They will be able to tell you about culture and history, highlighting many impressive interest points while answering all the questions you have.
It is generally a good idea to talk to the guide and ask some tough questions. Based on the answers received you can normally assess the knowledge level of the adventure guide. Make sure that you also talk about the exact activities you will enjoy. For instance, if you go kayaking, the guide should easily talk to you about the kayak, destinations, potential trouble and rapids that can appear. The idea is that the best guides are those that are interested in learning everything about the destination they cover, often incorporating all the latest things found out in client tours.
Good Connections
People in the travel industry are just like in all others in the sense that the best professionals are always going to be really well-connected. These professionals will easily guide you towards locations that have very good deals, will know how to avoid the larger crowds and will give you access to an experience that is truly unique because of all the connections they had (together with knowledge, of course). Be sure that you deal with those that will help you to create the itinerary before leaving so that you can assess how connected the adventure travel guide is.
Caring About Clients
Unfortunately, most guides do not really care about the clients and will offer low quality services because of this. Since we are talking about adventure travel it is quite important that the guide cares about the well-being, safety and enjoyment of the client.
The way in which the guide asks information about you can easily assess if this is the case. Discuss with the considered guide and see if he/she is genuinely interested in what you want and will work to offer exactly that. Making a connection during this discussion is usually a sign that the adventure is going to be quite great.
An Adventure Sense
This one is pretty obvious but in many cases tourists forget about it. The greatest adventure guides love adventure and will love exploring everything again with you. An adventure guide that is good at the job will be active, will talk to you about the various activities they do and will consider the job as a simple way of life. The individual tour is seen as a brand new adventure so they will not be tired to try something new with new groups of people.
Final Thoughts
On the whole, choosing a really good adventure travel guide revolves around 2 things:
- The initial conversation you have with the guide – Consider what was mentioned above.
- Experience – This is something you can learn about with the use of the internet in most cases.
Being a little careful and only committing to hiring a guide after research and a conversation helps you to have a much better overall experience.
