Tour guides
Have you found that you have always had experienced, quality tour guides with Tauck? Are they always experienced, well traveled and versed in the region you have visited? Any disappointments?
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Have you found that you have always had experienced, quality tour guides with Tauck? Are they always experienced, well traveled and versed in the region you have visited? Any disappointments?
Comments
Most of the time, yes. Out of about 15 trips, I've had a couple of duds.
Are you asking about the Tour Director - the Tauck employee who stays with the group or the local guides hired for specific sights?
Re Tour Directors - yes the majority we've had were experienced and had been with the company for quite some time. We've had a couple on river cruises who were new to that specific river and learning from the others on the cruises. Like anything, there are ones who particularly stand out at favorites of ours and others who were fine.
Local Guides have been more variable - some were excellent. Very knowledgeable and interesting. There have been a couple of clinkers like our guide in Madrid who was weirdly focused on some odd things and a few whose accents could be hard to follow. They all have had more tolerance for just standing in one place than I have.
Only had one dud in almost 40 tours. He had worked for Tauck for a long time and was lazy and ‘past it’ New Tauckers on our tour said they would never use Tauck again. I met someone who had the guy five years before and he was the same. Everyone complained and yet he was still working for them
Thank you all. Praying we get an energetic and experienced guide. Of course, life can give you a lemon sometimes🙂!
In the past, I have always had excellent tour guides, especially natives of the European cities we visited. In Budapest, we had a wonderful middle age woman who had been through it all with her family (grandfather, father, et. al.), i.e the Nazi occupation with her grandfather, the Communist era with her father, etc.). I was a Soviet (Russian) East European international affairs major in college and to experience things like this with folks who had been through all of this in person and through their family memories was truly amazing fo me then. :-)
Of our 13 Tauck tours, we have been fortunate in having superb tour directors on all of our tours. No duds at all. The local guides have equally been outstanding.
We have been extremely fortunate on all of our Tauck trips as we haven't encountered a dud yet!
We had a real loser on the tour of Ireland. Other than that, the Tauck tour directors have been good - some better than others but all good.
I wonder if he's still with the company.
With 18 Tauck tours we have only had one bad director. She was moving from being on a river cruise to a land tour and didn't seem to understand what is needed. She handed out maps that showed us staying in different hotels than we were and didn't seem to understand that this mattered to us to understand where we were and how to get to the sights.
Some people who had only been on river cruises asked if this was normal for a land tour. We reassured them that this was not the norm.
Tauck called me after the poor review and in the end gave us a credit towards a future trip.
We have done 13 tours with Tauck and all but one of our tour directors were fantastic. On the tour where this wasn't the case, it started out badly with the TD being 30 minutes late for the welcome dinner. She didn't do introductions, assuming we had already done this during her absence. There were several veteran guests on the tour and we assured those new to Tauck that this was not their standard. We provided Tauck with details about the issues with the TD, as I am sure many others did as well, and received a credit for a future tour.
Yes, the TD job differs from land tour to river cruise. On the cruises they need to work as a team otherwise you end up with confusion and conflicting information which happened to us on one cruise. Ex, CD telling people to wait in the lounge and the TDs outside wondering why people weren't getting on the coaches. We've also had a TD used to river cruises who didn't put signs with names on our coach seats resulting in friendly arguments of who was supposed to sit where. Nice person who probably functioned better with a team.
Do you mean signs on individual seats Claudia? Not many TD’s do that these days, it’s usually just a list of where to sit at the entrance to the coach.
Four out of 5 land tours we've taken had post it notes that moved as we did and there was a sheet with them all listed.
I've had 2 TDs not put the stickies with names above the seats (not the same ones I consider duds), but instead just have a chart at the front of the bus. Both tours were relatively recent, so maybe it's a new thing with Tauck. Personally, I prefer the names at the seats, not only to avoid the row counting and someone always winding up in the wrong seat, but more importantly, to learn everyone's name much more easily.
I taken 13 tours and none of them used sticky notes name tags on the seats. They all used the row - by - row seating chart posted on the outside of the bus, visible as you enter. I always done small group tours so there are always lots of empty rows to move around on the bus.
I can understand why some of the TDs do the sticky note method. When it's posted on the door there's always people who forget to check and get it or who miscount the seats.
The most memorable TD for posting cards above the seats for us was the recently mentioned TD Rob White. As the person said, we had cards above our seats with the number of tours taken with stickers on them. Of course any card or post it above seats takes extra work. Like I said, I’ve rarely seen it happen.
I’ve recently discovered that the TD’s have info on everyone. The tours and Tour Directors people have had in the past. The TD’s also make notes about the customers. We think Tauck have is down for two less tours than we are sure we have taken, and last year, a TD mentioned the number of tours we had taken and for the first time it was correct. not thatvwe thought it mattered until this year when Tauck offered us a good deal because we had taken over thirty tours with them. If they had had it correct, we could have saved $1000.
We've taken 17 Tauck tours - a mix of river and land. We have 2 more scheduled for the fall. We are pretty low-maintenance and non-demanding travelers. Overall, we have had great or very good TDs. The couple of doozies we had fortunately were on fantastic tours so aside from the TD they were great trips.
Our tour last fall used both the posted seating chart and the sticky notes. I am not good with names, so the sticky notes make it so much easier to learn the guests' names.
And for the first time ever, yesterday I received the little wallet with 10 euro for our upcoming Autumn on the Rhine.
On two trips the trip count that the TD had included two we had booked for a future date.
When we booked our last tour, the agent has us down for less tours than the last time we booked on several occasions they have admitted their counts are not accurate if you have traveled with Tauck for a long time.
Like Alan said I've had TD's include future tours in the count.
British TD Rob White cards with our names taped in front of our seats are special, never had a TD do that before.
One the earlier tours we took, the TD would put a paper with our names on it above each seat pair. However, recently, there's just a seating chart at the door of the bus.
Wife and I just did Ire. 14-day tour. The TD always posted above the seats on the bus your names..
I think that we've always had names posted above the seats. I find it very helpful to see the names of the people you are seated near. It helps me to remember people's names as the tour progresses. I generally remember where people are from more than their actual names.
I second the comment that the tour directors know much about our travel history. On the England, Scotland and Wales trip a few years ago, our director (Suzy Grey) was able to tell us that the tour director on our first Spain and Portugal trip ( Joe Pereira) had died that Spring.
Yes, they keep a dossier on all of us. They know more about us than you think and I’m ok with that.
In my 18 tours with Tauck, I've had only one TD that was less than very good, and most have been great. The one TD that fell short was, I felt, "past her prime." She actually fell asleep on the bus one time when reading her spiel -- but she was very nice. And most of my tours (and all of my recent ones, including the one I returned from tonight) have had the names on stickies or cards above the seats.
What I meant about TD Rob White was that he decorated the cards with stickers, a different sticker every day related to the places we visited.
I've had other TD's that placed the cards with the names above the seats but Rob's were the only decorated ones.
Two out of the three cruise directors on river cruises were great. One was really terrible as was one of her subordinates.
On my Riverboat cruise from Budapest to Amsterdam one of the tour guide was knowledgeable but dry as unbuttered toast. One of the tour guides was funny as heck. So what my solution was I switched channels on my VOX and listened in to the funny one, Easy Peary !
We had phenomenal TG on all our 7 trips with Tauck. Our recent one, Michelle P., was exceptional as well. The only fly in the ointment being the fact that we still haven’t received our tour’s group picture from her. It was taken twice, at different sites. One of those sites was a beautiful Blenheim Palace. Even after my email to her on July 20th, nothing changed. Every year we look forward to meeting new people on our trips and group pictures are important to us.