Tour Guides Zoom Meeting

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I’m contemplating arranging a zoom meeting where tour guides will discuss challenges they face in their work. It’s summer, so they are quite busy, taking tourists and new students around in college library tours, monuments, railway stations or deserted downtown business districts.

Tour guides have one big strike against them. Tourists and students Googled the place before they boarded the plane or drove here. They know everything about the Louis Riel Statue in St. Boniface. However, there is certain information that is not online, information that only resides in people who know the history, but are not active online. In that zoom meeting, tour guides will tell us how they keep tour groups motivated so they can listen and stop scrolling their phones.

There is a misconception that if something is not online, it doesn’t exist, and I’m only talking about English platforms like YouTube, Yahoo, Bing and Twitter. I don’t know about other languages especially Asia. China and India have the biggest population on earth so, it is in my best interest to know a little about them. Do they have their own home-grown Yahoo?

Information does not land on Google miraculously. Somebody had access to it and means to send it to the internet. There is millions of ‘information’ that is not online, because owners do not want to share it. Tour guides do. That’s why we must listen attentively, or stay away from tours.

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.

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