Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

These days, it seems like there are only a handful of speakers who can draw a big crowd at travel shows: Arthur and Pauline Frommer, Patricia Schultz (of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die fame), Samantha Brown, and me. And we’re hired as headliners to help get people to attend travel shows at big cities around the USA. People pay $12 to stoke their travel dreams by browsing through hundreds of booths representing everything from Yosemite to Yap. And they go to the various theaters to hear from travel experts or celebrities. There’s usually folk dancing, cooking demos, zip lines, rock-climbing walls, and Segway trials to boot.

While I could spend many more weekends on the road at these events, I limit my bookings to four a year. I just finished trips to Chicago and San Jose, and I’ll be in Los Angeles and Washington DC in February. Learn more at Adventure Expo.com.

(Photos by Trish Feaster, http://thetravelphile.com/)

It occurred to me that if you’ve just been watching our Facebook coverage for our annual tour guide summit, you’d think all we did was party. Well, the guides have all gone home now, and we’re back at our desks — sorting through all of the great ideas generated by the tour-itinerary roundtables that were the actual work of the summit.

Each day for over a week, all of our conference rooms here were booked with guides from various countries meeting with the appropriate members of our Tour Operations team. They spent long hours debating the fine points of their itineraries and sharing lessons they learned from last year’s experience and experiments. None of our itineraries are broken, but they can all evolve as we grow with our traveling public and fine-tune the structure of what we hope are trips of a lifetime.

In 2013, we took 16,000 travelers on over 600 tours. They came with high expectations (about half of them were alums coming back for second, third, and fourth Rick Steves tours). And, judging from our feedback, we met or exceeded nearly all of those expectations. We break from this huddle energized and enthused…confident that we have the perfect itineraries to match the travel dreams of our tour members.

Thanks to our guides for coming all the way from their homes — most of them in Europe — to Seattle in the dead of winter. Thanks to my amazing staff here at Europe Through the Back Door for designing and hosting this successful summit week. And thanks to all of the travelers who keep us so busy by joining us on our tours. We love this work. And we love traveling with you!

With over a hundred European guides filling my home last weekend, we threw an impromptu multicultural talent show. With this last clip, we’ve bundled a little Hungarian folk dance, our Swedish guides singing a little ditty for downing the local firewater, and our French guides pining for the Champs-Elysées.

Amid all the gaiety, several guides surprised me with their piano-playing skills, and I played a little as well. In the middle of this montage, there’s a quick clip of me at the piano playing “Suite Bergamasque” by Claude Debussy — a reminder that had my Dad not imported German pianos like this one when I was a schoolchild, I would likely never have even gone to Europe… and my life would probably have been much less interesting.

(Thanks to tour guide Trish Feaster for shooting these video clips. For Trish’s blog, see The Travelphile.com.)

If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.

For about twenty years’ worth of tour reunion festivities, I’ve hosted a big party with our guides in my house. Each year, the gang gets bigger, and the party gets more fun. This year, we nearly opted for a bigger venue, but I’m really glad we jammed everyone in. There’s something special about inviting all of my guides (who I count as friends and who are a critical part of our Europe Through the Back Door team) into my own home.

At our impromptu talent show, I’m generally impressed by how our European guides have a much deeper repertoire of songs to sing then we Americans. (We’re generally limited to “Home on the Range” and “Yankee Doodle.”) But this year, a gang of our American guides regaled our European friends with an amazing little medley of tunes illustrating from where the lion’s share of American culture emanates these days…television. Here’s just a bit of that amazing performance.

If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.