Becoming A Tour Guide: How It Works

If you have a passion for your own city and want to show off the best of its history, culture, food, and architectural scene, much as everything else you love and deem necessary to reveal about your city, there is no better way to do it than becoming a tour guide. Not only will you get a chance to tell the story of your city, but will also earn extra income! If you have a tour guiding business, featuring your tours on GPSmyCity brings you more customers.

Registering as a tour guide

You should start by registering a tour guide account. Prior tour-guiding experience is not required. In some cities, you may be required to obtain a tour guide license - please check with your local government about the requirement. Other than that, if you have an open-minded, friendly personality and good communication skills, you stand a good chance of becoming a great tour guide!

Creating your own tour

Once you create a tour guide account, you can proceed to entering your tours covering the sightseeing, food, nightlife, street art or any other topic imaginable so as to highlight the best of what your much loved city has to offer. These tours can fall into two categories:

Type 1: Free Tour. Guests do not pay anything upfront and your income depends solely on tips. The free tours are becoming increasingly popular these days. Most guests leave a tip if they are satisfied with your service. The tip amount varies, depending on the country or region, but is usually in the range of $10-20 per person. By not asking upfront payment you are likely to receive more bookings than you would otherwise. So, ultimately, offering a free tour does NOT mean not getting paid for it. Often times, you can earn even more.

Type 2: Fee-based Tour. You set a fixed price for your tour. The price may be per tour, per person, per day or per hour.

Receiving customer leads

Your tour(s) will be promoted on the GPSmyCity website and mobile apps. Interested traveler will contact you by completing a “Contact This Guide” form on the GPSmyCity website or app, and the traveler information (name, email, phone number, country of origin, group size, etc.), along with any questions or requests from the client, will be forwarded to you by email. Each such email is considered one customer lead regardless of whether it includes a single traveler or a group of people.

Upon receiving the guest information from GPSmyCity, you can contact the traveler directly to answer their questions, arrange booking/payment, etc. We believe that tour guides have the best chance to make a booking if they can communicate directly to a client, therefore we will send you the traveler information and not act as a middleman in the process.

Meeting guests

Once the booking is confirmed (and the advance payment received), your next task is to meet your guests and have the tour on the scheduled date. That will be the time to showcase the city you are so proud of and tell its story to the world.

Service Cost

Promoting your free tours on GPSmyCity is completely FREE of charge, so don't hesitate to register a tour guide account now and start promoting your tours – it does not cost you a penny!

Tour guide is charged on a Pay Per Lead (PPL) basis for paid tours only. Each time a traveler completes the “Contact This Guide” form, whether the client is traveling alone or in a group, it is considered a single customer lead. After you receive the lead by email and accept it, a small fee will be deducted from your account balance. For a cost of US$100 you receive 25 customer leads, at $4 per lead.

Exclusive customer lead. If a traveler completes the “Contact This Guide” form on the page of one of your tours, this traveler's information will be sent to you only. We will not send this traveler's information to any other guides offering similar tours.

Ability to accept or reject a lead. You may reject a customer lead sent to you for whatever reason and not be charged for it. You pay only for the customer leads you accept.

Here are some of the advantages of our Pay Per Lead (PPL) advertising offering:

High Quality Customer Leads. If a traveler wants to get in touch with you by handing over his/her email address and phone number, you can be pretty sure that this traveler is seriously interested in your tour.
Easy to Measure Return on Investment. Since you receive traveler's information (name, email and phone number) and communicate to them directly, it is easy to measure your success rate later on. At the end of each month or quarter, you can go through the list of customer leads to see which ones have resulted in bookings and how much revenue they have brought you. It is really easy to see whether or not our advertising service works for you.

No Risk Free Trial. For a limited time, after you register a tour guide account, you will get $40 advertising credit which allows you to receive 10 customer leads for your paid tours free of charge. If you are not satisfied with the results, you have no obligation to continue.

Getting Started

If you wish to get started, please follow this link “Register A FREE Tour Guide Account”.

GPSMYCITY Inc

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