Our guides
– First, our guides are selected for their knowledge AND their passion. We do not want the tired bored guides that you can sometimes experience. Discover Walks guides are people with passionate personalities. People who wake up every morning happy and who are excited to do every tour. They are tested (written and oral), mentored (taught by an older guide) and followed (give a tour with their instructor to help them).
– Most of our guides are then assigned to our Free (tips only) tours. It is there that they really learn true Discover Walks guiding skills. Their income is solely from tips and they learn to interact with everyone on the tour, connect with their guests, look them in the eye, and make the tour exciting, fun and informative. The Guide’s income is greatly influenced by the level of satisfaction of every guest on every tour. So they get very good at this quickly.
– Guides that show exceptional abilities are also given our small group paid tours and our private and custom guests as well.
Our itineraries
– All of our set tours have been planned to cover both the main icons of the city as well as many off-the-beaten-track experiences. They are planned to have fun, information and inspiring moments. That said, each of our guides gives the tour differently every time. There are no canned speeches and no memorized jokes. Each Guide adjusts every tour to who is with them and what is happening. (For example, when the President of France and his wife were out for a walk in a park in Paris and happened to cross one of our tours, our Guide was agile enough to ask the President if he could pose for a photo with the tour, and he did.)
– All of our Private tours can be adjusted by the guests and our Best Day Ever Custom Tour is completely designed to the needs and desires of the guests. This customization makes every Best Day Ever tour truly live up to its name.
Our customer service
– While each of our tours is a special event for both our Guides as well as our guests, our large size allows us even more flexibility. We have Guides who specialize in one part of the city, we have guides who are great with large groups or corporate events. You will find that Discover Walks has the guiding skills you need.
– Our office staff, who plan all the customized tours, handle any special requests or problems (cancellations etc.), have all been guides and are required to do at least one tour each month to make sure they can relate to what is actually occurring on the tours and to keep up their guest pleasing skills (nothing like meeting customers face-to-face to help train people on how to treat people nicely).
– We have very liberal cancellation policies as we know when people travel, changes can occur.