There are few things quite so embarrassing as being publicly asked a question you don’t know the answer to – especially if you are a tour leader.
Tour guides have it especially bad because 1) we are claiming to be knowledgeable 2) People are paying us to entertain/inform them and 3) It is expected that we field questions constantly during a tour!
There are a couple of ways to respond when you are caught in the moment and in today’s Be a Better Guide Community Q&A, we look at whether or not you should ‘fabricate’ answers to the questions you don’t know.
Is this something tour guides can get away with? Is making up answers the best way to avoid losing credibility? Find out today in this week’s tour guide training!
You’re here wondering, “Am I allowed to make up facts as a tour guide if I’m stumped by questions?”
And the answer is, “No, of course not. Bad guy, bad, bad. Stay, stay.” Okay. Sorry for yelling. But many tour guides believe that making something up is better than saying, “I don’t know,” and I think this is way wrong because it is literally your main job to educate people and to give them accurate information of what they’re interested in.
Plus, it’s the digital age people. I mean like encyclopedia sales and trivia nights in bars, lying to your guests has been ruined by the internet. Think about this way, someone could hold down the Siri button literally while they’re asking you a question on tour and then compare your answer to the combined human knowledge of all time which is now been indexed and searchable in milliseconds.
The real question is what do you say when you’re stumped by a tough question? Well, here are three ready-made answers for you that I use all the time: “I’m not sure about that. Could I look into it and get back to you?” “I don’t know offhand and I don’t want to give you a wrong answer. Let’s look it up together.”
“Wow, great question. I don’t know the answer, but here’s what I do know,” and then say something you know.
The truth will set you free my friends. Not only does this reduce the chance of you being burned by a guest after the fact, say on TripAdvisor or something like that, it also greatly reduces the risk that you’ll be called out on the tour by an expert or somebody who happens to know more than you who’s in your group.
For today’s Tweetable, we’re going to quote the late great Abraham Lincoln, “No tour guide has a good enough memory to be a successful liar.” Share that Tweetable if you’re inspired or like and share this video. In the comments, let me know if you’ve ever been caught in a lie and what you did about it. That’s all for this week’s Q&A. Thanks for being here and I’ll see you next time.
