Finding Humanity (and Occasionally Losing It) on Tour

Being a tour leader isn’t just about pointing at pretty cathedrals, spinning a few stories, and reminding people that yes, we are meeting at 9 a.m. sharp tomorrow. It’s more like juggling flaming baguettes while conducting a choir of slightly jet-lagged (and sometimes not so polite) cats — on cobblestones, in the rain, while trying to remember where you parked the bus.

My real job? Eating humanity for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Finding humanity while herding cats, on a tightrope

I don’t just manage schedules, I manage souls — including my own. I juggle twenty relationships at once, because I have to build enough trust with every single traveller to make sure they feel safe, heard, and cared for. Even the ones who push my buttons so hard I sometimes wonder if they’re secretly sent by HQ as an stress-test.

Take the couple who greeted me on Day 1 with this morale-boosting gem:

“We don’t think this is going to be an interesting trip. It looks uninspiring on paper. We didn’t even want to come — someone else booked it for us.”By Day 6, they were glowing: “This trip is rich, entertaining, full of experiences and fun — with a great group dynamic and a great tour leader.”

Those are the moments that make you exhale and think, maybe I can do this job one more week.

And it’s not just individuals I’m managing. I have to shape the group as a whole, balancing personalities so that the introverts don’t vanish, the extroverts don’t dominate, and the bus slowly becomes a single, strange little family — wine o’clock uncles and all.

There was the brash joker who interrupted every briefing to make a wisecrack (sometimes even a funny one). I channelled his energy into “special missions”: switching and reattaching the group flag, and performing impromptu one-man shows while I handled emergencies behind the scenes. Sometimes leadership is just creative stage management.

And then there are our suppliers — the invisible backbone of any trip. The coach drivers, restaurant owners, hoteliers, local guides — all of them living, breathing humans who occasionally get fed up with our travellers, struggle with their own challenges, or just haven’t been paid on time by the company. Maintaining great relationships with them is an art form.

A bit of kindness, a coffee shared during a break, a genuine “merci” — these things go a long way. Treat them well, and they’ll pull off miracles for your group. Forget that they have lives outside of our tour bubble, and suddenly you find yourself with a locked restaurant door and a very hangry crowd.

And then there’s my other relationship: the office. The well-meaning folks who see tours as tidy numbers, percentages, and colour-coded spreadsheets. Sometimes they forget that the “product” they sell is made up of messy, scared, wonderful, unpredictable humans. That’s where we, tour leaders, come in — the safety valves between corporate metrics and real-life chaos.

Like the day I was told to stick to the schedule despite a heatwave. My teenagers were wilting — sweaty, hatless, waterless, and halfway to heatstroke. So I scrapped the big-ticket visit (farewell, Sun-King Theme Park™) and rerouted us to the seaside instead. We cooled off, laughed, and ate ice cream all day. Technically off-plan, but no spreadsheet on earth can measure the morale-boosting power of pistachio gelato.

The Good, the Bad, and the Unwashed

And oh, the things we see. If humanity is a buffet, we get the whole spread.

We see selfishness: the last croissant snatched without shame, the four daypacks reserving prime seats, the passive-aggressive standoff over the hotel’s one available outlet.

Once, a couple built an entire fortress out of hats, scarves, and water bottles to claim the front row of the coach. By Day 3, I gathered the group and introduced formal seat rotation — something I had never had to do with adults before. The group applauded. The fortress fell.

We see entitlement — the kind that makes you wonder if some travellers thought they were boarding a private jet and are shocked to find seat-mates.

I once had a passenger who couldn’t bear not being the center of attention. She called me at 3 a.m. to report her “noisy safe,” insulted other travellers’ questions, and monopolized my time like a toddler tugging at a parent’s sleeve. By Day 2, the group had turned against her and the hotel staff were crying. For everyone’s wellbeing, she was sent home — first-class ticket back to peace for the rest of us.

We see sexism, machismo, racism, and power struggles that would make Napoleon look like a chilled-out yoga instructor.

There was the man who double-checked every fact if it came from a woman — in front of his wife and a group made up of 90% women, myself included. The day he verified my statement with the male receptionist, I smiled and said: “Just as the woman here told you.” The receptionist laughed. The women laughed. He stopped checking.

And just when I’m mentally drafting my resignation letter and googling “jobs that require zero human interaction,” humanity delivers a plot twist.

Someone quietly gives up their seat for an elderly traveller.

A couple married for 50 years hold hands during a sunset stop, and you remember love can last longer than most airline mergers.

A group that bickered through breakfast is suddenly passing wine and laughter like they’ve been friends since childhood.

A bunch of teenagers listen to a talk on the rise of fascism, connect it to the present, and quietly promise not to let history repeat itself.

These moments are rare and precious — like finding decent Wi-Fi in the Winocratian countryside.

Why I Keep Showing Up

It’s maddening. It’s magic. And it’s why, even after the shouting, the entitlement, the seat-saving wars, and the occasional meltdown (sometimes theirs, sometimes mine), I show up again the next morning — yes, even on PMS days — with a smile.

Because somewhere between the ugly and the sublime, people change. They drop their armour. They surprise each other. They surprise me. They discover something new, both outside and inside themselves.

Sometimes they even go home a little kinder, a little braver, a little more human.

And honestly, so do I.

That’s why I do this job, why I keep walking this tightrope: to find humanity.