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World day of tourist guides:inside Styria

On the occasion of the World Day of Tourist Guides:inside the Styrian guides offer exciting and interesting tours on Saturday, March 4, 2023.
The tours are free of charge for everyone. Voluntary donations are made to the organization “Steirer helfen Steirern”. Registration deadline: is Friday, March 3, 2023, midnight.

You can find all the detailed information and the possibility to register at the following link:
World Day of Tourist Guides 2022 Styria – Overview – WKO.at

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Training to become a certified bike tour guide

The market for guided bike groups is booming!
During the pandemic, many bus operators purchased a bicycle trailer. Many guests own an e-bike and want to get to know the country and its people.
However, there are too few bike tour guides who know about e-bike groups, cultural enjoyment cycling, theory and technology.
On March 24-26, we offer a course in Vienna to train as a certified bike tour guide*in.
In this hands-on course, we’ll teach you the essentials of being a bike tour guide. You’ll also get lots of tips for everyday bike guiding, like useful apps, what should go in your gear bag, how to properly set up a bike, and how to make small repairs.
In addition, we work out the structure of day tours based on the most important Austrian river bike paths (Enns, Inn, Drau, Ybbs and Mur).

We are looking forward to your registration!
More info on our website: https://guide-training.com/produkt/zertifizierter-radreiseleiter

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WORLD DAY OF THE FEMALE LEADERS in Vienna on 19.2

The 34th World Guided Tour Day will take place in cooperation with the Austrian Gallery Belvedere on two days and three different locations.

Free guided tours and lectures including free admission to the famous Vienna Belvedere on February 19, 2023!
In the Upper Belvedere, the guided tour “Weird Birds” in the Picture Gallery offers an entertaining search for remarkable characters; as a complement, there will be a guided tour in the famous Marble Hall. At the Lower Belvedere, a guided tour illuminates the 300-year art history of the Belvedere.
The online registration, as well as further information, can be found at:

https://www.guides-in-vienna.at/welttag/

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World Day of Tourist Guides on February 21

On the occasion of the “International Tourist Guide Day” of the “World Federation of Tourist Guide Assosiations”(WFTGA), which takes place every year on February 21, the Austrian tourist guides organize a colorful program of mostly free guided tours in the various provinces.
More detailed information is yet to be published for each federal state individually. As soon as programs and dates are determined, you can easily find all the information on the austriaguide website under World Day – austriaguide on the Austria map.

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Theater Performance Contemporary Witnesses in Linz

As Austria Guides, we have a certain responsibility with regard to remembrance culture and, in addition to informative tours of Hartheim Castle and Mauthausen Concentration Camp, we also give tours in Vienna, about Jewish culture.
Currently, a particularly exciting performance is taking place at the Circus of Knowledge at the Johannes Kepler University, where the question is being addressed of how memory culture functions when there are no more contemporary witnesses.
The next appointment is on 11.02.2023 from 16:00 to 17:30.
4 pm: Ten witnesses sajnen mir gewesn | Circus of Knowledge (jku.at)

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We are looking for reinforcement for our office team!

Assistance to the management / secretariat
in Vienna and Remote

We are a young/young-at-heart startup team with flat hierarchies and varied areas of activity. As a service provider for tourist services, we mainly manage river cruise ships along the Danube. We are also active as a tour provider, educational institute with training and education in tourism, event management with technology of live streaming, as well as tourism consulting. Your employment will be with DonauGuides GmbH.

At the moment we have 2-3 virtual assistants in the team besides me as the boss and my (business) partner. We want to combine these into one part-time position. The new part-time position will oversee the back office of all of the above. So mainly communication with customers, project assistance and assistance to the management, maintenance of offers, websites, social media channels.
We are very smart and digitally positioned (Basecamp project management software and a lot of automation in the accounting area). Accordingly, this is a position in an up-and-coming StartUp with a flat hierarchy and many fields of activity. Of course you get a Macbook and Iphone.

Who are we looking for?

Part-time employee for 20-25h per month
Secretariat/back office for tourist service provider
Assistance at events
On site in the office in Vienna and home office

Your tasks:

Email and telephone response
Classification of freelancers
Invoicing and billing
Quotation
Assistance to the management
Office organization
Adding content to web pages
Support of social media platforms
Documentation / summary / processing of seminars and trainings at customers’ sites
Send newsletters with online tools like Mail Chimp
Dealing with online stores such as Regiondo, Woocommerce
Accuracy and diligence in everyday office life
Self-organization

Your prerequisites:

Very good knowledge of German (actually native language, at least C1)
Very good English skills (at least C1)
Above-mentioned language skills in writing (spell-checked!) and orally
Ability to quickly familiarize oneself with tasks and conduct research
Very good handling of email, all office and web applications
Handling of accounting software (SeVdesk, Lexoffice, BMD, Zistemo)
Knowledge of correct invoicing
Enjoy and have knowledge of major social media platforms (uploading and creating posts).
Working with Zoom and Teams
Willingness to work in the Apple world or learn the ropes quickly

Payment according to collective agreement, as well as according to qualification and experience.

You are still interested? Cool, then you fit in with us!
Application form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/u/1/d/e/1FAIpQLSeRay_BY92WQ-HaSYeHIJBF59ZGxzSFM6BbzDE16A5bzg98qw/viewform?usp=sf_link

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Discussion about the future for tour guides / tourist guides

Our webinar on 8/31/2020 went off successfully with over 600 live attendees from 57 countries.

Key outcomes of the presentations and discussions were:

Be open to new technologies and opportunities through digitization
Develop new fields, e.g. tour ideas for locals
Increased cooperation between guides

Thank you very much for the numerous participation and the strong interest in the topic “Future for tour guides/foreign guides”.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to Alushca Ritchie from the World Association and Maren Richter from the German Tourist Guide Association for their reports on activities of the associations in the past months and their commitment especially in these difficult times of the pandemic.

Special thanks also go to our panelists and tourism experts Burghart Lell (Avalon Waterways) and Dieter Hardt-Stremayr (Graz Tourism) for their presentations and assessment of the situation as well as the future of our industry.

All participants of the webinar will find the presentations and the recording of the discussion in our members area, the access data for this were already sent with the registration.

If you were unable to attend and would like to view the webinar recording, you can access our members area free of charge by clicking on the following link:

https://members.tourismus-training.com/members-area/challenges-and-chances/?lang=en

Feel free to forward this link to colleagues.

It is important to us that we guides worldwide stay in contact, exchange ideas and inform each other. Motivating each other is especially important in these times. The participation and the “rewatch” of this webinar are again free of charge for you. Even if we do not calculate our own working time, we still incur costs for online technology (Zoom). If you would like to support us with a donation, we are grateful for any amount.

We look forward to next virtual meetings!
All the best and stay healthy.

Sebastian & Martha & Constantin
Team Guide Training

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Challenges and opportunities

2020 was a difficult year for tour guides worldwide. In many countries, guides are only allowed to lead under strict conditions. But do the guests even book a tour at the moment? Is a second wave coming with renewed restrictions, travel warnings and lockdowns?
We want to analyze the situation with association leaders of tourist guide associations and discuss the situation together with you.
International experts from the cruise and city tourism industries will give us a preview of 2021 and what is in store for tour guides.

Procedure:

16:00 Welcome and introduction of the speakers
16:10 WFTGA (World Federation of Tourist Guides), Alushca Ritchie (President): World situation of tourist guides.
16:30 BVGD, Maren Richter (Chair): The role of guide associations during the crisis
16:50 Avalon River Cruises, Burghard Lell (Head of Strategy and Corporate Development): The situation of river cruise tourism in 2020 / 2021.
17:10 Linz Tourism, Georg Steiner (Director): The city tourism of today and tomorrow
17:30 Coffee break with dance session
17:40 Speakers’ round table discussion: The future for tourist guides
18:30 Individual discussion of the participants in small groups
18:50 Farewell
19:00 End

free registration

Language:
The whole webinar will be held in English. We offer especially for austriaguides and tour guides a professional live translation by our Viennese app partner www.livevoice.io into German.

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World day of the tourist guides – a few thoughts about it

Last Sunday, February 21, was the World Day of Guides/Guides. We would like to use this occasion to publish a text by Linz Tourism Director Prof. Georg Steiner. In doing so, he thinks about our industry in a very critical but forward-looking way. We are currently working with him on a project about experiences based on narratives:

What are the minimum standards needed to make experiences unique?
What methods, encounters are necessary for this?
What is the role of the guide in this?
How do you initiate discussion processes?

We will be offering a series of seminars on this in the fall with online training.

“Today would be World Guide Day. But Corona has also brought this industry to a virtual standstill. Guided tours have not been possible for a year. What’s next?

Corona will also bring changes here, which I welcome and which we have been working on and experimenting with in Linz for many years.
Tourism will become more small-scale, more individual. Mass phenomena, many people, large groups have been talked about even before Corona. Now we need to think about how “guiding” can become more individual – this applies to the business model as well as to the processes and content of guided tours.This brings me to the second phenomenon that will and must have an impact on guided tours. It’s about the impact of digitization. Whether Alexa, Siri or all the other electronic companions – they now know more than any guide. So, in the future, will it still be a matter of explaining the city to our guests house by house and biographically, so to speak, as a “Wikipedia on two legs” (I borrowed this term from Sebastian Frankenberger)?
For far too long, guided tours have been characterized by the fact that guides and tour operators alike have taken it for granted that every guest is fundamentally interested in history. I would like to question this and call on people to think more about what else could interest and fascinate guests from near and far in a city.
“The people and not the houses are the city”, as the Greek statesman Pericles put it 500 years before Christ.Interestingly, the world day is still called “World Tour Guides Day”. We have long since left tourism behind us. Tourism became tourism and now we are at the next threshold: Who wants to be a tourist anymore? In the perception of many locals, tourists are those people who are little adapted to the respective destination – whether in their clothing, in volume, in cultural manifestations – in mass phenomena and tend to perceive rather superficially the destination as a backdrop shape more and more places/destinations of our world. The more “tourists” come, the more successful – so far, so far so good.
But locally, the acceptance of tourism in this form is declining.

And that is why, on the World Day of “Guides”, I think not only about these phenomena but also about what this could mean in terms of change for the care, for the entertainment of our guests.
More individual, more personal, more authentic, more playful, more hybrid, more poetic and more lively – these are my keywords to describe the future of guided tours.
It will be less about imparting knowledge and more about raising interesting questions.
A guided tour is not a school lesson with many facts and underlaid with didactic aids (keyword: historical recordings shrink-wrapped in slides).
Guests don’t have to become experts and too many details tend to distract from the main message.
It has to be more about narratives, about the why, about those messages that you personally take in as a gain, as a new insight, and what you can still enthusiastically tell others at home.
It will be about more authenticity. The guides are allowed to be perceived as personalities in their own right, with their own unique backgrounds.
And it will be about more experience orientation. Humorous by all means, but not as a clown. Experiences are created through encounters, through touch – with people, with regional products, during cultural experiences. Generating positive resonance – that’s what it’s all about. Guides are one of the most important ‘touchpoints’ of a destination.

I know that I am questioning a lot of tradition with these reflections. But our world is changing more than ever.
Our tours should both inspire our guests and make residents, locals proud of what we tell about our city, how we present our city. And tourism should merge more with the life of a city and act less as an additional stress.
This is possible and you should be guided by this. And the guides are those locals who act as an “interface”, so to speak, between the guests and the city – viewing the city as people, and less as a structural backdrop, as Pericles already noted.

With this in mind, we look forward to Corona allowing encounters again soon. From sightseeing to encountering: According to Corona, this need is greater than ever and will shape guided tours even more in the future.
I would like to thank all the Austria Guides who have taken this path in Linz together with the tourism association in recent years and which we want to continue to develop. On this World Day 2021, I wish all guides that it will soon be possible to serve and inspire guests again.
Linz continues to transform tours and tourism.”

Prof. Georg Steiner
Tourism director in Linz

He welcomes feedback and discourse:

Georg Steiner on Facebook
Georg Steiner on LinkedIn

Or why not visit Linz in the summer for an advanced training course with an interactive adventure city tour by us, a talk with Georg Steiner and a visit to the Wild Childhood exhibition at Lentos, the Museum of Modern Art. We will send out more information about this.

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New course for tourist guide in Austria

There is a new training course of tourism training in Austria. Modular, mostly online, a practical course with an optimal preparation for the qualification exam by experienced lecturers for the theoretical subjects, active guides and former graduates of the last years, as well as outstanding partners in the tourism industry.

Ideally matched as a part-time course.

The crisis is the best time for training and development. Why not go straight into vocational training, which will open up new opportunities for you?

We know that financially it is not easy in the tourism industry at the moment. That’s why we made the course modular, so you don’t pay for parts you can opt out of.

And we offer you flexible installment payments at no extra charge.

Course start
End January 2021

Course end
Summer 2021

Course duration
2 semesters
Total of 500 hours, including 100 hours of self-study and job shadowing/evaluation.

Course location
Theory mostly online via zoom
Livestream of the classroom events
Practical trainings in Linz and Vienna

Timetable
The course is held part-time on Friday afternoons from 2pm-2:30pm and Saturday from 8am-4pm.
Most theory training online, classroom training in Vienna and Linz.

Costs
from €3,498

We have answered many other questions on our website in the FAQ section, e.g. how much you can earn as a tourist guide or what career opportunities you currently have.

www.austriaguide.at/ausbildung

Free online info evening on 10.12.2020, 19-21h

Or stop by our live info night. This Tuesday from 7-2 p.m. online via Zoom. We will present the course to you again in detail and answer all your questions.

You don’t have time on 6.10.20? No problem. You can also download a recording and detailed information material from us free of charge and without obligation.

Nothing scares as much as change,
And nothing offers so many opportunities!

Take advantage of the crisis and do your guide training now

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