The Guided Tour Gamble

I haven’t been on a guided tour in years. I can’t actually remember if I’ve ever been on a guided tour. My husband and I were recently visiting an amazing venue out of state and took advantage of a guided tour of the property. The guide was knowledgeable about the building and provided some great historical insight. It was a fascinating older building with an eclectic, self-proclaimed collector of “stuff” as its original owner. He spent an extraordinary amount of time and money to see to it that he had anything his heart desired and if he couldn’t buy it, he had artisans on staff to recreate it. The place sprawled on forever and was visually overstimulating. Later, we even went exploring through the building on our own until security stopped to ask us what we were doing. The current owner now almost 100 years later has done a great job of restoring the place to its original glory plus adding modern necessities like plumbing, lighting, fire extinguishers, elevators, and more.

It was cool to hear about the different artifacts around the building, how the property came to be a hotel, how one owner between the original one and the current one sold tons of artifacts to keep the lights on, and how a non-profit organization was set up to reclaim and restore those artifacts on the hotel’s behalf. I couldn’t take enough pictures to do this place justice when presenting it as an option for an event it would be perfect for.

It would have been great to get through more of the property on our tour. The docent said we could cover as much of the building as we could walk in the time allotted. I should have known the minute I surveyed the other tour-goers that we should have rescheduled.

We were literally on a tour with the walking dead. This one had a severe limp and moved at a shuffle at best. That one looked like she didn’t want to be here. This one was asking irrelevant questions about random things that got the docent off on a rant for 15-minutes each. These two carried on an entire separate conversation the whole time and dragged behind the group as a result. And this guy, he was just a large, lumbering man who blocked the walkway everywhere we went. Sadly, I missed half of what the docent said because she and I were often separated by this mish-mash of attendees. To keep the group moving through the property the best that she could, as soon as the docent found something to show us, she’d just start talking before we were all together.

I think a guided tour is a great opportunity to learn something new and see amazing sights under the right circumstances. If you are scheduling a guided tour for a group you are working with, consider a private tour so you can control who goes with you. Another option may also be a semi-guided tour where a guide leads the group around a building but within each room group members are free to read the gallery notes or listen to the headset-lady talk in their ear as they type the number into their device that is associated with something that interests them.

Maybe, to avoid the gamble altogether, a fully self-guided tour ends up being the best option for your group after all. They may not learn everything there is to know about the property, but with the right tools at their disposal and an agile pair of legs, they might be able to cover more ground this way than with a guide and a couple of walker wonders any day of the week.

Have you taken a guided tour and lived to tell about it? Share your story with us here or send me an email, I’d love to hear how it went!

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