Читать книгу Start & Run a Tour Guiding Business - Barbara Braidwood Susan Boyce & Richard Cropp - Страница 17

One of the most important assets you can have as a tour guide or director is fluency in a second, third, or even sixth language. When you start talking to tour operators, directors, and guides, you will discover that, almost inevitably, the first thing they mention is “second language.”

Even if you can’t visualize yourself sharing a bowl of pasta and chitchat in a small, nonEnglish-speaking Italian village or trekking through the Himalayas with only Tibetan-speaking monks for company, the number of tourists traveling into North America is enormous and growing. Although we often believe everyone speaks English, many of these guests do not. As a result, sometimes the language requirements of an area are not what you would expect at first glance. Certain destinations may be popular with a particular country even though the area itself has few local residents of that nationality. For example, Canada’s West Coast and Rocky Mountains are extremely popular with German tourists; a fact which has sent the demand for German-speaking tour guides skyrocketing.