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Europe Through the Back Door headquarters is finally quiet today after the busiest tour alumni party/tour guide summit we’ve ever hosted. For over twenty years, we’ve invited our guides and their tour members to town for a grand tour reunion. This year’s “massing of the scrapbooks” was the best and busiest yet. Last Saturday, over 1,200 tour alums (of the 8,000 travelers who joined our tours in 2009) gathered here for four parties. They were joined by 80 or so of our guides (60 of whom we flew in from all corners of Europe).
At each reunion party, I had the pleasure of introducing a smattering of guides to the gang to share greetings from their culture. When I introduced Cristina from Portugal and happily announced that for 2010 we were breaking Portugal away from our Spain tour, she noted that for 800 years her country has fought to maintain its independence from Spain (and has the longest unchanged border in Europe), so this itinerary change was only right. As she spoke, it occurred to me that our guidebooks and tours have dealt with similar border challenges that the countries themselves have. (Ireland and Britain were once the same book, and eventually the Irish gained their guidebook independence, too.)
I introduced Alfio from Sicily. Noting that Italy no longer has a shrinking population, he added an aside that his baby boy is “obsessed with breast-feeding.” He and his wife are being awakened nearly every hour through the night, and just before he left home, their little boy spoke his first word — tetta.
As usual, at the parties we acknowledged tour members who’ve taken the most tours. While plenty have enjoyed ten or twelve of our tours, no one gets near Larry from Springfield. He’s survived 17 of our tours and stood up to announce he just signed up for our “Village France” tour in 2010. Thanks Larry!
That same Saturday, we hosted 21 “Test Drive a Tour Guide” classes in our town’s three biggest venues. Each was filled with a mix of tour alums and potential first-time travelers interested in our various tour itineraries. (About half the people we took around Europe in 2009 were repeat customers. I think one of the most powerful marketing tools for this big sales event was to have alums and prospective first-time travelers in the same theater together to hear the guides describe the various tours. The energy and enthusiasm was palpable…and contagious.) I capped the day with an evening talk entitled “An Irreverent History of the ETBD Tour Program.” Watch a video of last year’s version of An Irreverent History.
My tour operations staff and I kicked off the week-long summit with an all-day general meeting on Friday. I started the day with a three-hour lecture on the heritage, ethics, and fundamentals of being a Rick Steves tour guide. I stressed our determination that our travelers get the absolute most value out of each experience on the itinerary and out of each guide. The bottom line: Employment is shaky for guides in general, but solid for our gang…and to keep it that way, we’re raising the bar on what our guides provide our travelers.
In the days since Saturday, we’ve been huddling in extensive review and brainstorming sessions in which guides for each region gather and debate the fine points of their tour itineraries — sharing the lessons they learned and discoveries they made in the last year of guiding.
Each night was a party or dinner in a different venue in Edmonds. Getting 60 or 80 guides together in a bar or Mexican restaurant is a rare treat — all exuberant about their work, so fun to talk with, and happy to weave together countless friendships…and all right here in this beautiful corner of the USA. And it was a blast to see the fun they were having experiencing our country. When I welcomed Arnaud Servignat, our very sophisticated Parisian guide, with a nice margarita, the salt on the lip of the glass startled him. (I have the most trouble pronouncing Arnaud’s last name…I keep pronouncing his name like the grape: Cabernet “Servignat.”) Sharing stories of tough travelers, Irish guide Stephen recalled how he once guided an Australian who opened twist-top beer bottles with his eye socket.
For some Sunday-afternoon fun, we rented two school buses with local guides and gave our guides a bit of their own medicine: a guided tour…of Seattle. I can imagine the Seattle guide must have had a memorable experience herself, with forty European guides on her bus. Peter from Hungary noted that rolling boisterously down the freeway into Seattle felt like the scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when the inmates commandeered the bus and escaped their asylum.
Guides also enjoyed simply being in Seattle. A few, such as Lyuba from Bulgaria, had never been in the USA before, and they were as wide-eyed about our culture as their tour members are about theirs.
Of course, free time was also spent at the mall. A highlight: the Apple Store. The word spread quickly: “Same price as in Europe…but in dollars!” (meaning that a gadget you’d pay €300 for over there would cost $300 here — a 40 percent savings). I asked Arnaud to compare the service here with the service he’s accustomed to in Paris. He said, “Here, it exists.” Patrick from Brittany added, “There was more staff than clients, and they were jumping on you. They fixed my hard drive in two hours, with smiles. In France, it would be ten days and double the price.”
Our tour guides get extra work with us as guidebook researchers. Along with our editorial staff, I spent Tuesday morning with the 20 guides who help update our guidebooks. And I enjoyed a breakfast at our local diner with our new guides. As the ten guides sorted through the menu, Gokalp (from Turkey) said, “In all the movies, you call waitresses ‘honey.’ Is it okay to do that?” When the waitress was taking the orders, and asked what kind of eggs, Nina from Italy asked, “Do we choose that?” When the waitress followed up with, “Your toast?”, Nina asked, “Do we choose that, too?” When the various plates finally arrived, Lyuba from Bulgaria exclaimed, “Wow, it’s a very serious breakfast!”
Seeing three young Turkish guides at the breakfast table was a reminder that Turkey is now our second most popular tour destination. These young Turkish guides filled the far east end of our table with bright eyes and exuberance…much like Turkey aspires to fill the east end of the European Union.
In the weeks leading up to our summit, I spent several long days with our tour operations staff reviewing our concerns and vision for each of our 30 or so tour itineraries. This week, while our staff and the guides were hammering out these ideas and the countless details of their respective tour itineraries, I was in our radio studio taping a world of radio interviews. Over the course of four six-hour recording sessions, we got 30 or 40 separate interviews (each streamed in the rough on our website and with live call-ins from around the country). Producer Tim Tattan now has raw material for about four months of radio shows in the can — and a lot of work ahead of him. Getting our foreign experts actually in the studio for all those interviews was a huge boon for our national radio show.
For a couple of days, we had our TV crew running around capturing the excitement of the event on camera, which we’ll edit and eventually put up on our website for those who couldn’t make it to Seattle for the occasion but wanted to.
My staff designed and pulled off this complex and exhilarating week as smoothly as could be. And today we say goodbye, as our guides fly back to points all over Europe — from Stockholm to Sofia, from Lisbon to Thessaloniki, from Glasgow to Izmir.
My brain is fried, my voice is hoarse, and my tour guide heart is soaring. Now we catch our breath, knowing we are primed and ready to lead a 2010 tour season brimming with rich experiences, vivid lessons, memories to last a lifetime, and busloads of good travelers.