4 Tips On Making Tours Interesting For All Generations: Parents, Students And Kids

If you’ve been in the tourism industry long enough, you must have heard this phrase a thousand times over: ‘You can’t please everyone. Only ice-cream can’. As a tour operator, it can be difficult to organize a tour experience that will please everyone on the trip.

For instance, while Madame Tussauds in Amsterdam may be an exciting sight for students, a middle-aged parent might find the waxwork models of famous people a little underwhelming. At some moments you might even consider hiring a good college essay writing service for preparing good entertaining texts.

However, even though it’s difficult to ensure that your tour is an interesting life-changing experience for your customers of all ages, it’s definitely not impossible.

Here are a few tips that could help you achieve this feat:

Hire an amazingly trained tour guide

A tour guide makes the difference between an amazing trip and a dreadful experience. Although tour guides aren’t magicians, they can definitely transform even an awful trip into an experience to remember.

Travelers often come with different needs, wants and expectations. As such, you want a guide that will go over and beyond these expectations to ensure that everyone, including the parent generation, has an amazing trip.

Great tour guides tend to get personal with the tourists on the trip. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to be uncomfortably intimate, but taking notes of people’s names and dietary preferences will definitely go a long way.

The tour guide should equally be able to tell lively, humorous stories that will keep everyone entertained for the duration of the tour. Once you hire a guide that can fulfill these expectations, you have a major part of the job done.

Offer them the best of both worlds

In every tour group, you will most likely have absolutely different people: the ones who want to see famous sights and others who just want to walk around the city and go shopping. For instance, if you have a diverse group of tourists in Berlin, students and kids may want to visit the famous Museum Island, especially if they’re on an educational excursion. On the other hand, parents (who have most likely seen it all) may want to see something different. So how do you ensure that all tourists have a fun trip?

Well, you could offer them the best of both worlds – a trip to famous attractions and a unique local experience. Show them how the locals live, eat and interact, in addition to the tourism-worthy sites. They will definitely appreciate such an approach.

Create a sense of community

For a lot of travelers and tourists, a great way to boost their experience and make the trip interesting is by creating a sense of community. Naturally, humans tend to feel more comfortable and excited when they are among their “own kind”.

Picture a scenario where kids get to laugh, play and have fun with other kids of their age. But it’s not all about the kids though. Adults and even students can equally interact freely with other tourists.

So how do you get total strangers to connect and gravitate towards each other? Well, you can start by creating an avenue for them to log into online portals and connect with their tour group even before the tour starts. On this portal, participants should be able to ask any questions or share their expectations of the tour.

This avenue will go a long way in ensuring that they have a happy, exciting experience that will stay on their lips for a long time to come.

Chip in a mini food tour

Even if everything else goes wrong, you can never go wrong with food. For a lot of tourists, the best part of visiting a travel destination is when they get to taste and learn about the local food. Food tours can also offer your tour friends a genuine and authentic experience.

Such gastronomic types of tours are also a good way of surprising kids. But how exactly do you do this?

Well, you could chip it in as a little surprise package. Half-way through the main tour, the guide could divert the travelers to popular meal spots in town and offer them samples of the local food.

However, you don’t want to spend too much time on this activity as it could eat into the main experience. Since the typical food tour lasts about two to four hours, you could cut this one down to a maximum of thirty minutes.

Final Thoughts

Creating a tour that will appeal to all generations can be a nightmare for any tour operator. However, the tips listed above will help you give your customers a unique, memorable experience regardless of their age.

If you do decide to include a mini food tour as we suggested, you should offer food samples in a takeout pack to ensure that tourists don’t spend too much time in one spot. Good luck!

Author’s Bio

With a Ph.D. in History from Stanford University, Amanda Dudley has spent most of her life teaching and helping students improve their academic performance.

Currently, she works as a part-time essay writer at EssayUSA, where she helps students deliver well-written essays and academic projects