In Tour Conducting, Glamour Takes a Back Seat

In his full-disclosure class on tour conducting, Marc Mancini reminds his students that along with describing the Great Pyramid, they may also have to deal with Death on the Nile. In Mancini’s 24 years as a tour conductor, he’s had several elderly passengers die during excursions, including one who quietly stopped breathing in the seat of a moving bus.

If that doesn’t trash at least half the glamour imagined to fill the lives of globe-trotting tour escorts, Mancini mentions that he once supervised a group that got stuck in an outside glass elevator in an observation tower 500 feet above Niagara Falls. And for those who still think tour directing is a fun way to see the world for free and get paid for it, he outlines several other scenarios: the tour to Tahiti in which five participants contracted an exotic fever, the time he was intentionally locked in the luggage compartment by an angry New York bus driver, and the day he loaded a group onto a bus that was crawling with roaches by mid-journey.

But Mancini, a 41-year-old Manhattan Beach resident, is not the tour industry’s answer to Larry, Moe and Curly. Rather, he is an instructor of tour escort instructors. Mancini teaches the people who hire and train tour directors for major travel companies--instructing them in how to pick good candidates and how to prepare them psychologically for the 24-hour-a-day demands of the job, including heading off and coping with disasters.

Although tour escort jobs can be among the higher-paying in the travel industry (with wages of $50 to $120 a day, plus tips and on-the-road expenses), the burnout rate for tour conductors is extremely high, says Mancini, who also offers a class on tour conducting at West Los Angeles College, where he’s a professor of French.

“The average part-time tour escort lasts only about four years in his job, the average full-timer only about seven years,” says Mancini, who has surveyed travel companies for a book he’s writing on tour conducting. He feels that improved selection processes and better training of tour conductors could extend those numbers considerably.

To that end, Mancini, who is also a film journalist and an adjunct professor of cinema at Loyola University, is working with experts in vocational testing to develop a psychological screening system for identifying potentially successful tour conductors.

“The ideal is someone who’s an entertainer and also organized but who’s also resourceful and follows rules,” he says. “That combination is not easy to find.”

With psychological screening, though, he believes tour companies would be far more likely to select candidates well suited to the job. “Major tour companies get an average of 500 inquiries for jobs a year and they hire only an average of 20 to 30 people,” he says. “With that kind of competition, they should be able to find people who do not burn out easily. Yet they don’t.”

William Newton, co-founder of International Tour Management Institute, a San Francisco-based firm, extensively discusses the psychology of tour participants with trainees in his intensive four-week tour conductor training seminars.

The $1,600 programs (in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco) include weekends in which trainees observe and assist in the supervision of actual tours.

Can Become Family

Like Mancini, who points out that a tour is often the first time that adult travelers have been under such close supervision since their adolescence, Newton emphasizes that a tour group can become like a family, with the conductor as mother/father and tour members as children.

To avoid parent/child interactions, he’s adopted the Transactional Analysis “I’m OK, you’re OK” model to tour conducting.

“At the beginning of the tour it’s like a parent-child relationship, but if you’re going to have a successful tour, you have to be dealing with your group as adults,” says Newton, who holds a Ph.D. in educational research from UC Berkeley. “However, when problems come up, people often go into their child state, and you have to recognize that. You can’t respond as a parent or a child yourself. You have to learn to approach people from an adult standpoint when they’re angry or upset, and sometimes that’s not easy.

“We do role-playing of situations that can occur on tour. . . . We feel that if you learn the social and psychological aspects of tour directing, the mechanical aspects are then very easy.”

Newton and his partner--who still work part-time as tour conductors and give four training sessions a year for a total of about 220 people--say job opportunities for tour conductors are increasing “dramatically.” In fact, they claim to have more job referrals for their graduates than they have graduates.

But “we screen out people who want to be tour conductors because they think there’s a quick buck to be made,” he says. “I always ask myself, ‘Is this somebody it would be fun to be on tour with?’ ”

Though many tour conductors learned the ropes of their profession through on-the-job, seat-of-the-pants training, classroom instruction such as that offered by Mancini and Newton is now springing up around the country. It’s the next logical step, observers say, for an industry that’s booming--spurred by an ever more affluent and footloose American population eager for a “managed” travel experience.

Company Training

“I want people to walk out of my seminar and know whether it (tour conducting) is for them,” says elementary schoolteacher-turned-tour director Lisa Calmenson, who earlier this year began offering a half-day seminar on travel careers through UCLA Extension. “Tourism is one of the fastest-growing industries in our country and more and more jobs for tour conductors are being created,” adds Calmenson, who would seem to be living proof. Her UCLA class was oversubscribed, and now Extension plans to repeat it as well as increase it to a full day. She also offers monthly tour escorting courses at the Learning Annex in West Los Angeles.

Another opportunity for aspiring escorts is the training increasingly being provided through tour companies themselves.

Leo Lucas, who is director of field operations for Los Angeles-based AmericanTours International, leads an annual three-week tour escort seminar with an additional two weeks on the road.

“The way you can tell a real pro as far as I’m concerned is a fairly realistic outlook,” Lucas says. “They realize the nature of the job is that you spend all your time with people and all your time traveling, but it is a job. You don’t have time for enjoyment. The motivation is the self-satisfaction and gratification you receive--for meeting challenges in fairly difficult predicaments.

On-the-Job Training

” . . . the worst can come out in a person on tour. If you love people and that’s your only motivation for wanting the job, you can be sorely disappointed. . . . By the time you’ve earned the right to appreciate the glamour, you don’t think it’s glamorous anymore.”

At Maupintour, a Lawrence, Kan.-based company, Dale Vestal, director of tour managers, says he looks for people more interested in service than international intrigue.

“Many people think it’s a very glamorous job when all you’re doing is seeing Tahiti or the Orient. But many times you’re working so hard and spending so many hours with your guests that you don’t even realize where you are,” he contends, adding that his company does not offer classroom instruction but its tour manager candidates travel with experienced escorts for two weeks.

“I feel the schools are good. They make acclimating a lot easier. Years ago, people were just interested in this because they could see the world. Now people are seeing this is a serious career. I think you’re going to see more and more emphasis on instruction.”

At the moment, though, Mancini is not too impressed by the education provided by most tour companies which, he says, “generally train people in rules and regulations of the company.” He would rather see training that prepared people psychologically for “how hard the job is and how to understand the psychological dynamics of a group of travelers.”

But Mancini allows as how even the most sophisticated testing system might overlook some of the finest candidates.

“I once introduced my middle-aged, widowed mother to one of my tour bus drivers,” he recalls. “A year later I was the best man at their wedding and almost immediately they hit the road as an escort/driver team. To my complete surprise, my mother, who did not fit the typical escort profile, turned out to be a terrific tour conductor.”