Become an Amateur Tour Guide With Guideal
Guideal (a curious, non-English-in-origin name that has me thinking of GUIDs) is a website that connects tourists and tour guides:
If you want to show a part of your neighbourhood or your entire city to travellers or if you want to visit a place like never before with of one of its residents; welcome to Guideal!
Each tour guide creates his/her own tour according to his/her knowledge and personality and can, if desired, be paid for each tour accomplished.
So, for example, you could get a historical tour of Chicoutimi in English or French for $50. Or a free tour of Belfast in the seventies.
I’m not one for guided tours myself, but I could see a place for Guideal in the long tail of tours. I’m thinking of smaller towns and remote locations that may not have fulltime tours that are advertised offline. Alternately, in big cities, there’s probably a demand for guiding in less popular languages like, I don’t know, Tagalog or Xhosa
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:17 am
I’d guess Tagalog is a pretty popular language, at least around this city.
July 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
Derek: True, but maybe not so popular in, say, Cairo.
July 3rd, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Actually, if we’re going to be completely picky, there’s probably a lot of Tagalog spoken in Cairo due to the overseas Filipino workers. There are overseas Filipino workers EVERYWHERE. I saw recruitment signs for overseas workers (balikbayan, as they are known in Tagalog), in numerous cities when I was in the Philippines. Almost every one I met had a relative who was working in another country, or had done a stint in another country themselves.
Filipino overseas workers are as ubiquitous as Japanese tourists.
Most Filipinos learn English in school, and anyone who is wealthy, or who has managed to pick up an overseas work visa can probably speak English too.