A Year in the Life of a Tour Leader - July & August

The Summer I Didn’t Tour

It’s early September. I’m home alone and, surprisingly, very well behaved. I’m enjoying the last few hours of peace and quiet before the madness begins again. I’m sitting by the pool, under yet another heatwave, reflecting on July and August with a glass of sparkling water beside me. Because before every big chunk of the season, I rediscover healthy habits. It’s the only way I’ve found to survive this profession - impeccable health habits and sleep habits. 

Now this summer was different. Very different.

I didn't spend this summer rushing from one place to another. I stopped. And I noticed things.

For the first time in years, I had something almost unheard of in my world: two months away from the road. Not two months away from work. That would be fantasy. But two months without packing a suitcase, checking a rooming list, chasing a supplier, counting passengers, watching the weather forecast every fifteen minutes or wondering whether the coach air conditioning would survive the day.

My father’s death certainly played a part in that. After the intensity of spring, grief and everything that came with it, I needed the time. But the more I talked to colleagues and other tourism professionals over the summer, the more I realised that my quiet season was not entirely a personal choice.

There were bigger forces at work.

International politics has had a real impact on tourism. Across the board, we are seeing fewer travellers, smaller groups, more last-minute bookings and less certainty. For people whose income depends on keeping travellers moving and touring, that uncertainty is not just percentages and spreadsheets. It affects our businesses, our cashflows, our ability to pay bills. But I think there is something else happening too. Something deeper, and probably more permanent than the political situation.

Climate change.

The thing we have been discussing for years as though it belonged to some distant future has become a practical consideration in our daily work. Over the course of this summer, we experienced an extraordinary number of days under heatwave conditions. And when July and August — traditionally some of our busiest months — become too hot to tour safely, the tourism industry has a problem that cannot simply be solved by adding another bottle of water to the coach or buying another ice-cream, courtesy of the company.

What does extreme heat feel like on tour? I was working during one of the heatwaves, in Dordogne, when the temperature reached 43°C in the shade. Imagine a village built almost entirely from golden stone that has been absorbing heat for ten days. By the middle of the day, it feels less like a medieval village and more like an oven with excellent architecture. And there is only so much your body can take. I’m fit. I’m healthy. I’m not old — although I’m beginning to think I no longer qualify as young either — and on that day, I reached a point where I genuinely wondered whether I was going to make it through the walking tour and had to sit down and find a way to cool down very quickly.

We, tour leaders and guides, do know how to adapt. That is part of the job. We move walking tours to seven in the morning. We rearrange schedules. We put activities earlier in the day, protect the hottest hours, make sure people have access to air conditioning, water and shade, and bring everyone back out again in the evening when temperatures become bearable.

I know exactly which hotels are going to cause problems because their air conditioning is questionable. I know which rooms face south with no shutters. I know which restaurants become saunas by lunchtime, which museums have decent air conditioning and where I can buy enough ice at the last minute to keep everyone alive and cheerful. We tour caves, museums, forests, deep valleys by water sources, but all of these have their limits when you are trying to run a programme around twenty people and a schedule. And when the temperature does not drop properly overnight, when buildings stay hot, when the coach air conditioning starts struggling because the entire vehicle is essentially sitting inside a furnace, there comes a point where there simply isn’t much more you can do.

For the past few years, there has usually been at least one tour between June and August where I have looked at the schedule and thought, Why did I choose to work over the summer again? Why am I not sitting by a pool reading a book?

A normal July and August for me would mean touring for at least 51 days out of 62. So I know heat. I know what it feels like to lead a group that is tired and irritable because everyone is too hot. I know how to tear a daily programme apart and rebuild it around the weather. I know how to keep people moving without exhausting them. What I had never experienced was this many consecutive days of extreme heat, including earlier in the season. And in that sense, I am genuinely grateful that I had this summer off the road, because I did not have to deal with it. Part of it was by choice, the rest was because of cancellations due to the extreme heat.

The few tours I led in early July went well. We were lucky: cooler conditions, higher altitude, and enough breathing space for people to actually enjoy themselves. But I do think we need to start accepting that this may be the new operating reality for summer tourism over here.

And that means adjusting.

Not just tour leaders and guides, but hotels, restaurants, transport companies, attractions, tour operators and eventually travellers themselves. We may have to rethink when we walk, when we visit, where we stay, how long we spend outside, what amenities are offered for travellers and groups, and what we consider a reasonable summer itinerary. Because if we keep pretending that July and August can operate exactly as they did twenty years ago, exactly like the rest of the year, eventually somebody is going to pay the price.

We have already seen tragic consequences of extreme heat during tourism activities in recent summers, with professionals and travellers alike ending up in hospitals, some dying. Safety cannot remain an afterthought.

So instead of touring and baking this summer, I stayed home. A dear colleague of mine takes his summers off every year. He has done it for a long time and did not wait for a family tragedy or a heatwave to justify it. He may have been onto something.

Because it was delightful.

I cleaned the house. I spent time with people I love. I gardened. I read books for work, but also books purely because I wanted to. I worked on home improvement projects and discovered approximately one hundred ways to kill a mosquito, or at least annoy them enough to consider relocating (potentially to my neighbours’ garden, oops). I went hiking in cooler parts of the country. I met friends halfway between our respective homes because we had been saying we really must see each other soon for far too long.

And something strange happened. My brain switched off, completely.

I realised how much space touring occupies in my head even when I am at home. There is always a colleague I care about on the road, another itinerary to prepare, another passenger who contacts me, another supplier, another problem to solve, another...

Without all of that constantly running in the background, I suddenly had brain space. I actually had time to call my mother and my siblings and have a proper conversation, one where I actually listen, undistracted. I had time to work on my business rather than simply work inside it. I made changes I should have made months ago. I made decisions that were long overdue because suddenly everything made sense. And then came the ideas: projects, innovations, solutions to problems I had been unable to solve.

There was another realisation during those two months, and this one was much harder. We care enormously about our passengers. But they do not necessarily care about us in return. I felt that very clearly after my father died. I was still at work when I learnt the news. My eyes were red. I was exhausted and grieving, and although I was doing what I always do — organising, smiling, answering questions, making sure everyone was where they needed to be — I was not okay. I crossed paths with travellers, partners and colleagues.

Only one person noticed.

He didn’t ask what was wrong. He looked at me, saw it, and somehow sent an entire message of sympathy through one quiet glance. Nobody else had a clue. Not because people were cruel. They weren’t. They were simply focused on their own experience, their own holiday, their own needs. And that is, in many ways, the nature of the job. But it made me realise just how much of a gap there is between what we give and what passengers send back in return.

We spend an enormous amount of time noticing other people. Very few people are looking back. I need to learn to protect myself. Not by becoming indifferent. Not by caring less. And certainly not by turning into some kind of emotionally bulletproof tour-leading machine who cares about the money only. I want to keep caring, but without giving it everything, to preserve my energy.

Energy. That’s the last thing that I (re)discovered this summer. A lot of it. In amounts I had forgotten I could have. I am ready to go back. I miss it. I miss the movement, the people, the stories, the ridiculous problems that somehow become funny later. I miss standing at the front of a group and knowing that for the next few days, these strangers are my responsibility. But I am going back differently, with more energy, more ideas, more perspective, and, hopefully, better boundaries.