Best interview questions for your hiring process
Tour Guide Interview questions
A Tour Guide shows people (often tourists) around a place or area of interest. This could be a landmark building, a nature reserve, or the historical centre of a city. Yet other Tour Guides specialise in a certain sport or activity, such as paragliding or canoeing, and guide and teach visitors when trying this sport or activity.
Typical Tour Guide characteristics and skills to look for in a candidate during an interview include:
- Exceptional passion and enthusiasm for their place or area of interest and the genuine desire (and ability) to introduce visitors to this topic in a fun, engaging, and informative way.
- Great interpersonal, communication, and presentation skills to easily and quickly make visitors feel comfortable and feel engaged with the topic.
- Strong sense of responsibility as during the tour they will be the main point of contact within the group and the person responsible for overseeing everyone’s safety.
Interviewing a Tour Guide
Do you have a few potential candidates lined up whom you want to interview for the role? That’s great news! So now it’s time for you to start preparing for the interview. But to improve the possibility of filtering out the best candidate for the job, you need to ensure you ask the right questions.
Luckily, we’ve done the hard work for you. Below, you will find a list of role-specific Tour Guide interview questions and answers (with PDF download). These interview questions target and test the necessary skills and experience required for this role.
Please note:
These Tour Guide interview questions are suggestions for the earlier stages of the interview process. They are therefore a little more general, but will help you sift through the initial batch of candidates.
How to open the job interview
There’s a good chance your candidate will be nervous at the beginning of the interview. That’s normal and happens to most of us. That’s why we always advise starting the interview with a few easy opening questions.
These questions help put your candidate at ease and allows them to settle into the interview a bit.
Best interview questions for your hiring process
See our Tour Guide job description hereFor the interview
A positive opener to start
What do you love most about being a Tour Guide?
Why are you so passionate about your specific area of interest?
What has your career path been so far?
Behavioral Questions
Tell me about a time when you had to cancel a tour. How did you handle the situation?
Tell me about a time you had to give a new tour for the first time. How did you prepare, what went well (and what didn’t), and what did you learn from it?
Holding a new tour for the first time is often both an exciting and a scary moment. Will the group like it? Will everything go as planned? See how the candidate prepares for such a situation and, equally important, how they learn from it to try to improve it for the next time.
Tell me about a time you had to deal with an emergency situation. What happened, and how did you handle it?
Tour Guides have to be able to deal with emergency situations, for example when a member of the tour group gets sick, injured, or lost. Find out how the candidate handles such a situation. They should be able to follow protocols, resolve the issue, and keep an eye on the rest of the guests in the group in the meantime.
Soft Skills
How do you ensure you stick to the planned itinerary and timeline as good as possible?
Time management and planning are important skills to have as a Tour Guide. They have to be able to plan an itinerary beforehand and stick to this itinerary as closely as possible. Find out what steps the candidate takes to ensure this.
Walk me through the process of preparing for a tour. What steps do you take to set yourself up for success?
Again, planning is essential in this role. The Tour Guide should always plan ahead and come prepared to ensure they set themselves up for success.
What techniques do you use (or measures do you take) to ensure you don’t lose anyone in your tour group?
This question gives you insight into what kind of processes they follow to ensure that nobody accidentally gets left behind. It shows you how good they are at monitoring and group management.
Hard Skills
Do you have any health and safety or related certificates?
A question to see what certificates and experience the candidate brings to the table. Depending on the type of excursion or tour they will be delivering, some certification (e.g. first-aid certification) may even be mandatory/government sanctioned.
What group sizes and age groups have you guided in the past?
This question shows you a bit more about the practical experience they have as a Tour Guide. Can they manage a group of 30 individuals, or are they more experienced in guiding small groups? And how about dealing with younger children?
What do you take with you on every tour?
A simple, practical question to give you an idea of the standard tools or equipment they might take with them on a tour to ensure they are prepared.
Operational / Situational Questions
Imagine you get this job. What would you do to prepare for your first tour?
This question gives you an insight into how the candidate prepares and plans for a tour. It shows how structured and organised they are. Here, you might also find out if the candidate has ever done a tour with your company before and what they would do to improve the guest experience.
Imagine you had to convince me of why it is worth offering guided tours on this topic/area of interest. Give me an elevator pitch explaining why we should let you give these guided tours.
The candidate has to be extremely passionate about the topic and be able to explain in detail why this topic is so important/interesting/worth knowing more about.
Someone in your group comes to you in a panic. Someone has robbed their wallet! What do you do?
Emergency management is a significant part of their role as a Tour Guide. Find out how the candidate deals with a situation like this.
Just as you finish your tour, you realise one person from your group is missing. What do you do?
Of course, this should never happen in the first place. So ideally, your candidate will start by explaining what preventative measures they have in place to ensure this doesn’t happen. Then, they should explain what steps they would take in case it would for some reason still happen.
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Sometimes a tour may have to be cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances (e.g., due to bad weather conditions or when the guide is sick). This question tests the candidate’s problem-solving skills and how they will deal with this kind of situation.