ADVANTAGES IN HIRING A PROFESSIONAL LICENSED GUIDE
1- QUALITY' OF SERVICE- Hiring a professional licensed tourist guide is a guarantee of quality and competence. Guiding groups is not a hobby or an occasional occupation in which you can improvise, but a real profession requiring an official qualifying exam that is written, oral and practical, at the end of an 800-hour training course. The tourist guide gets a license for a specific guiding territory as established and regulated by law. Anyone trying to practice abusively this profession is liable to get salty fines from the local authorities in order to better protect the tourist.
2- KNOWLEDGE OF THE TERRITORY- A licensed tourist guide knows her/his guiding territory better than anyone else. Viability, parking areas, classic itineraries, but also picturesque little lanes, panoramic routes, hidden corners off the beaten paths, the anecdotes, the curiosities and the stories you hardly find on books, typical products, places where you can go for tastings or where you can admire the production process. A guide can give good advice about further places to go and visit and how to get there, she/he can suggest wineries, cooking-classes or other activities, locations for weddings, parties or special events, etc. Moreover the guide is a tourism professional that keeps reading, studying and updating, and you will benefit from this too.
3- OPTIMIZE TIME AT YOUR DISPOSAL- To skip lines where possible, to arrange bookings and buy tickets in advance and at the best and most suitable rate for you, all things a guide can do in the right way, in order to make the most of the time with you, possibly even allowing you to save some money, and making sure you do not miss the attractions you are most interested in.
4- FLEXIBILITY AND ADAPTATION - A guide is used to cope with very different people for their nationality, interests, personal knowledge and age. She/he can deal with big groups of adults, teenagers or children, as well as with a family, a small group of friends, a couple, or even just one single person. Therefore she/he learns how to adapt and how to tailor the explanations and the tour according to the public, and of course she/he learns how to handle eventual unexpected situations in the best way possible.
5- SERIOUSNESS IN PAYMENTS- The guide is a freelancer with VAT number and as such she/he is paid and issues an invoice for her/his service.
Always beware of the so called “free tours”. Nobody works for free, would you? First of all they are not free at all, as at the end of the tour you are explicitly asked to leave a "tip" for the service you received. The difference is that in this case this is not a real "tip", but a form of payment under the table and tax evasion: no receipt/invoice is ever issued for these tours, and these people do not pay taxes for the services they do. Furthermore, in most cases, they are not even licensed guides at all, so in the end you would pay somebody who is not qualified and competent, and even make them gain unfair competitive advantages over legitimate licensed guides.
