bike tour guide or leader
 

(This seemed the most appropriate place to ask this, if not then point me to a better sub-section.)

Have any of you tried being a bike touring guide? I got the Adventure Cycling 2016 Tours pamphlet in the mail last night and it had a short bio of one of the tour guides/leaders who said he recently retired and took the leadership class. That got me curious about the potential of combining a bike tour with a job. I imagine how well it works out depends to a great extent upon the people who are participants, but still it seems interesting to me in a few years.

Or maybe I need to build some credentials and volunteer for local charity and fund raiser rides. I'm thinking that if I want to try this for next summer then now is when I probably need to start making contacts.

Anyway, does anyone here have direct experience as a tour group ride leader or support crew? I'm interested in your views and opinions on the subject.

Thank you,
Mike J (aka: treebound)

Maybe @BobG will chime in. He was one of the leaders of the unsupported, x-country ACA tour I did way back in '99. (Our original leader did not work out, and the original replacement, Frank, had a late-summer commitment and could not finish the trip.) I know he's led other tours for them, but I am not sure if he's active.

Frank and Bob were very good leaders. One thing Frank said about leading is that "It's never about you," with "you" being the tour leader. I gave it some thought for the future but have pretty much decided that I probably wouldn't have the patience and temperament to be a good leader, at least for an unsupported tour, if only because I don't like to spend too much energy managing things. On my unsupported ACA tour (I also did one of their fully supported tours) the leader was required to keep track of money and expenditures and make any necessary camping/lodging reservations. I don't balance my own checkbook. Having to do something like that during a tour doesn't sound to appealing to me. I also don't think that problem/dispute mediation/resolution is a strong suit of mine. Our original leader created some unpleasantness and tension within our group. The last thing I would want to do is to take on the job and then end up being "that guy," especially since some people who go on their tours are fulfilling a dream.

I will give my view as someone who paid for a self supported Adventure Cycling Tour and paid for two fully supported tours in Europe with a tour company.

The European tours had guides that repeatedly worked as guides on those specific tours. If you asked a guide a question, he or she almost always had a quick answer (how much farther today, where is the nearest ATM, any good places to buy some coffee, etc.). When they did not have the answer, they would try to get an answer for you pretty quick.

The Adventure Cycling tour I took, the guide had guided many different Adventure Cycling tours, but he worked on a different tour each time. I think he was basically using the guiding position to go on a subsidized vacation as he took different tours each year. He had a binder of important stuff to know - where the campgrounds were, where the grocery stores were, possibly other things like location of post offices, bike shops, where to buy camp stove fuel, or medical services. Thus he had all he needed to know for group logistics. But, if you asked him a question on where to find something else that was not necessary for his guiding duties, he was clueless. One day he was saying that there would be showers at the campground, I told him I was at that campground a week earlier (I stayed there for a few days before I joined up with the tour group) and I was unaware of any showers. He assured me that there were showers there. We got there and there were no showers. Knowledge of the presence or absence of showers for one day is not a big deal, but it is an excellent example of what it is like when the guide has never been on that route before. I enjoyed the trip and am glad I went, but that experience changed my expectation of what the role of the guide is on an Adventure Cycling tour.

As noted, budgeting, logistics, possibly dispute resolution are probably the important points. On a self supported tour, the guide went to the grocery store with the people tasked with cooking that day and he told us his job was to ascertain that we had enough food for the group. I assumed reservations for campgrounds/lodging were made by the office, thus I assumed that was not a duty of the guide. Guide might need to have some first aid expertise and certifications.

I am good at budgeting, good at logistics, taught first aid many years ago, but quite frankly when I go on a trip the last thing I want to do is have to worry about others. I would never consider being a guide.

The people I've talked to (on AC and some other tours) gave some pretty broad hints that leading bike tours wasn't a way to make money. The best most of them get is a free trip (riding every other day or two of three days on supported trips), with a full day's work at either end of the trip.

That may not always be the case with higher-priced tours, the ones that charge $2,000 and up per week. But that's speculation on my part, because I haven't paid that much for a trip.

American Youth Hostels , did 1 SF to SD tour with a teen group they Put together .. mostly a Per diem that covered expenses,
and job included disbursing the daily funds as the group traveled .. With Hostels as the primary overnight.

and the Return Ticket to get back to where I Lived , which was SFO at the time .. 86

They Required the Leader To ride Sweep.

Thanks for the kind words, Indyfabz.

I've led 4 ACA TransAms and completed 3 of them. Trip 3 I had to leave in Kansas due to a medical emergency. I've also staffed several Cycle MT and Cycle VT supported tours. I rode the last 2 weeks of Indyfabz's '99 Northern Tier as a replacement leader.

The job has many rewards. A paid 3 month vacation on the TransAm (well, $50/day and all you can eat!) You will make travel friends in your groups that you will keep in touch with for years to come. The comraderie is overwhelming when you finish the tour together.

There is also a chance that you will have to compromise your own style of solo travel. On my own I never plan too far down the road. I often don't plan a definite stop for the day until I get close to the end. Leading the ACA tours you always have to be several weeks ahead to be on top of things. A group camping reservation in West Yellowstone may need to be made months in advance. On the last tour I led in 2009 I lost my temper at a group member who wanted me to nail down our exact arrival date in Eugene OR (apologies again Tom if you're in the BF audience). We were almost a month away relaxing at our layover at Yellowstone.

Another source of tension for me was breakfast/starting time in the mornings. Back in the '90s the groups were younger and liked to sleep in a bit and relax and enjoy a cup of coffee at camp. I'd be the early guy up at 7. My more recent tour in 2009 was an older group, several of whom were taking their tents down at 5AM in the dark in to order beat the heat, wind or whatever. The morning start time somehow has to be defined as everybody shares the same cooking equipment, yet each person has a different morning routine.

Another source of disappointment is when someone finds it neccesary to leave the trip early and go home. As leader you always wonder if you were at fault.

Yep! I remember trying to balance my account book at a windy KOA at Royal Gorge CO to see how much spare cash we had for our upcoming layover in Breckenridge. I sought shelter on the porch of a Kamping Kabin but the wind kept blowing my piles of cash away! Another time I ran short of group funds before the mother ship in Missoula had time to wire me more. I had to transfer cash from my personal account to carry us over.

Mike, that's so true but the perfect groups do happen. Pictured is our '99 TransAm group. 6 women, 7 men, ages 18-70, one married couple, one on the road romance within the group, and nobody dropped out of the tour. I'm the second head from the left. I've been followng on line journals of recent ACA tours. Sounds like there have been a lot of winners since!

photo by Greg Siple-

http://i977.photobucket.com/albums/a...0Am%20l999.jpg

The leaders are given guides containing information compiled over the years from the experiences of other tour leaders. (My favorite quote about a campground in Maine was "Combat camping at its finest.") But it's to be expected that a leader won't know where to find everything if they are not familiar with a route. If I were touring alone in an unfamiliar area and another tourist approached me to ask where he could find something I might not know the answer. There is a certain level of self reliance required even if one is on a group tour with a leader.

Also, on ACA tours, and as BobG notes below, the office does not make lodging reservations. The leader does to the extent they might be necessary. (Staying in a place like a city park didn't require reservations, but our motel in Cleveland did.) On my Northern Tier trip, the early days were set in stone in order to get people into a groove. After that, we usually sat down on a rest day to plan out the following week or so. Participation in planning was totally voluntary. The leader would then contact the places we planned to stay to make any necessary arrangements and get exact directions. I don't remember our first leader having a cell phone. If he did, it didn't work everywhere because one day he went missing for a while and found at a grocery store in Chester, MT using a pay phone to call campgrounds.

While I know it's not him since he was on our Northern Tier trip, the older gentleman in the back center with the glasses looks like Stu Duff, who turned 77 during the tour. I thought I saw Stu in 2013 while riding the GAP, but I looked him up and found out he died a few years before that. He was a nice man. Emily emailed me in 2012. She now goes by her married name and lives in Oregon with her husband and child. It was crazy to hear from her since I had done Cycle Oregon earlier that year. Our rest day was in the town where she lives. Wish I had known before the ride. I made her a CD of photos from our trip and was going to mail it to her but my email account was disabled due to hacking and I lost all her contact information. Another small word story related to our trip is from VT. In 2010 I did ACA's Cycle Vermont. We spent one night at Sliver Lake State Park in VT. That was the place where Laruen and her husband brought us lasagna for dinner. You may recall that she dropped out of the trip in Davenport, IA, before you joined us. I still use the CHiP key chain Jerry gave to each of us on the last morning of the trip. It's sitting in front of me right now.

Excellent input and plenty to think about. Thank you.

Just to add one more thing, I think it helps is you can deal with people who you may really dislike. In our group we had an alcoholic bigot. I would have recommended that he be tossed from the tour after his first crash and near arrest for drunk and disorderly in ND.

There was also a guy who always tried to shirk his cooking and cleaning duties, which came around once every week or so. He would do things like take a bag of trash to the dumpster during breakfast and slink off onto the road, leaving his assigned partner to wash the group dishes. This would delay people who carried group gear that was usually used for breakfast and to make lunches for the road since they could pack up until things were cleaned. Other in the group would chip in to take up the slack he left. The other amusing (yet) sad thing he would do involved carrying groceries. If we had to carry groceries to a campground we would wait outside the store while the two people responsible for dinner that night would shop. We they would come out of the store, this guy would rush over to the carts and grab the lightest things he could get his hands on. Things like loaves of bread and bags of tortilla chips, leaving the heavy stuff for the rest of us. Not sure if he knew we all noticed it and thought it was pathetic. One day he complained to the leader that I didn't carry groceries one day because I and another guy had to go off route to a LBS for some repairs. (Seems we got no credit for bringing back a case of beer for everyone.) Another participant overheard him beefing and told me. The next day I reminded him that at the end of the third day of the trip I and two other participants rode 16 mile round trip from camp for groceries for the entire group because our leader mistakenly thought there was a grocery store near by. Petty stuff like that would drive me crazy.

You may also have to deal with a group member who dislikes you as leader. On my 2009 tour there was one participant who had taken the same TransAm tour the previous summer with a very small group of 6 or so with an attractive, young female leader. He was initially put off with our big group of mostly 50+ men and had a "been there, done that" attitude towards me the entire trip and even wrote a letter of complaint to the Tours Director about my performance. He was ex-military and didn't like my rather laid back, non-authoritarian style. The Tours Director held a meeting in Missoula during a layover day with the group, without me present, to discuss the "problem". The complainant did not attend. The group pretty much responded with "What's the problem?"

Indy- I had a chance to re-visit Silver Lake VT SP on one of the Cycle VT tours. I remember dragging your group quite a bit off route to stay there and also the detour across Bear Notch NH to stay in Glen NH for the layover. I got to re-visit that neat in-town "Pastures Campground" in Orford NH on my solo trip to VA a few years back. Still $10 sites for cyclists.

Thanks, everyone. Very interesting thread. During summers in grad school I was a Y camp canoe guide in northern Minnesota and Canada. The first summer was tough, as I wanted to take "my" trips, but I had the annoying ballast of all these whiny, inexperienced kids I had to drag behind me. At some point early in my second summer (and I'm embarrassed it took that long) I learned what someone mentioned upstream in this thread, that it wasn't about me. And then everything changed. All of a sudden it got to be fun to enjoy the trips through kids' eyes and help them along. I may have to consider leading bike tours after I retire (no time soon).