GLOBAL GUIDE GROUP FAQ

Global Guide Group has an ever-growing list of destinations. These have two sides: 1. A public side, that everyone can see. 2. A members-only section, that requires your membership dues to be up-to-date to access. Once logged in to the site with an active membership, Members can navigate to the public section of any destination they like, and click the 'Let's Go!' button at the bottom to navigate to the members-only side of the site. Here you will find helpful information for booking & planning, our inspiring itinerary suggestions, and most importantly: profiles for all of our guides that serve a particular destination. You can have a read through the guide profiles, and send an email directly to the guide through the contact form on their profile to request a quote. The guide will then write you back with their ideas and a price, and you can settle up directly with the guide (on the day of your tour, or with a deposit ahead of time, each guide will have a slightly different approach) according to their policy.

GGG is monetised solely from membership dues from our travellers. There is no commission for private tour guides, and no fee for them to be listed on the website. We do this to make sure we get the absolute best guides there are, and to make sure you get the best price.

Tl;dr answer: Somewhere between a couple hundred for a tour, and a thousand per day for a tour is a pretty good range to keep in mind. It can and does vary enormously for all the reasons listed below. We have a huge spectrum of different people in different places, and all with different levels of skill, experience, and types of tours offered, so it's pretty difficult to generalise. Obviously, we've picked them and put them on the site, and we think they all have something special to offer. But a 25 year veteran who travels with clients, and tours in 12 different cities and can take you in any museum and talk about and connect any aspect of history or culture with all the other places s/he operates is going to come at a different price point then someone who really manages one destination plus little day trips. We don't tell our guides what to charge, because we think that as soon as prices are standardised like on many of the platforms, it becomes a price war and a race to the bottom with quality ultimately being sacrificed because the best guides just leave. If you're an absolutely best-in-class lawyer or other professional, you're not going to want to have anything to do with price wars, right? You charge what you're worth. And we love absolutely top-class guides, so we let everyone manage their prices as befits their way of running their business. And the other factor of course is the destination itself. Paris is just an expensive place to live. Wonderful, but expensive. And a lot of people want to visit Paris (more than 50 million most years), and that puts a lot of pressure on bookings, logistics, and the price of housing and accommodation. Commensurately, private tours there and other huge & desirable capital city destinations often cost significantly more than they will somewhere with much lower living costs.

Some can and will be happy to help for an additional fee. Bear in mind that travel planning is generally quite a spendy service, so consider that this will almost always be an additional cost. You'll have a sense for why this is if you've ever counted up all the hours you've spent finding transport, researching hotels and districts and managing all of the tickets and payments and so on. Some of our guides just focus just on the specifics of the days you spend together. We have a wonderful mix of people on GGG, and they all have different skillsets and — quite frankly — levels of time & interest in managing the more logistical aspects of travel. A great many guides simply live and breathe their material, and that is what they obsess over and focus on, and we think that they are absolutely spectacular that way.

Well. It depends. Obviously, the best guides will certainly get booked out faster and then be unavailable, especially during the high season. On the other hand, if you're headed to southern Italy in February, not only will everything be 70% off in the shops, but your guide may be quite happy to see you if you give them a couple of days' notice. If you're trying to go to a busy destination (any big European capital is a busy destination), or to a place famous for a seasonal event (Japan is famous for cherry-blossom season and gets very busy, Amsterdam during tulip season, same thing), you'll probably want to give at least six months notice to the best guides. But: cancellations do happen. Sometimes people get ill, or storms happen and cancel flights. It's always worth firing off a quick and concise email to a guide. And even if the guide you had in mind is booked out, they may have an especially trusted colleague that they can connect you with, if you are ok with that. Afterall, if it's the middle of July in Vienna, it's going to be bussssssyyyy. This is one of the wonderful things about our approach to tourism. We're not trying to monetise this step, and that leaves you open to having a door opened for you that you might not have found on your own, instead of having a sense of protectionist false scarcity block it for you.

We've got some little prompts set up in the contact forms to help you, but: Bear in mind that guides get thousands of emails. Some of these end up dead ends, some of them end up 40-long email threads that they are answering while on a packed train from one place to the next in the middle of the mayhem in the high season when fifteen people have contacted them about the same weekend dates because there was a flight deal on then... Let's try and make it easier for everyone, and if at all possible, try and list the following information: 1. Your name, destination, and dates. 2. How many people you'll be, and whether there are children, or people with mobility issues. 3. What time you arrive, and where you are arriving from. If you're coming domestically, there might be more options. If you're coming from overseas, even with a flatbed flight, you'll probably be exhausted. 4. If you know the name of your hotel, this is enormously helpful so the guide can immediately start to plan approximately how to arrange an itinerary for you (this is probably the biggest bottle-neck to bookings with high-end custom private tours, believe it or not). If you don't know all of that information, don't worry. Send what you have.