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An Experienced Tour Manager/Guide With Your Church Group
On any of our standard touring programs, we include a Casterbridge Tour Manager/Guide to accompany your group 24 hours per day, from your group’s arrival until its departure.
The services of our Casterbridge Guide are exclusive to each group – they stay in the same hotels as you, eat dinner with you, and are available to help with planning of evening and free-time activities, if desired. Their job is to attend to your group’s needs at all times.
Training and Evaluation
Almost all of our Casterbridge Tour Manager/Guides attend our own intensive training course held in Great Britain. We only hire the top 20-30% of those that graduate.
This training familiarizes prospective guides with the Casterbridge approach to guiding, which provides a degree of personal attention to the specific goals of each group.
In all our destinations, we choose guides who are qualified to meet the unique needs of your particular church. We take great pride in matching guides to groups based on age, gender, or thematic content.
This is certainly appreciated by tour leaders and is often described as the single factor that most distinguishes a Casterbridge Church Tour from those of our competitors.
Our guides are evaluated after every tour, and we only re-hire on a regular basis those that are consistently well-evaluated.
The Role of a Casterbridge Tour Manager/Guide
The role of a Casterbridge Tour Manager/Guide is very different than the usual escort or manager/courier on a Church Tour program, not least because they are available exclusively for your group 24 hours a day, every day.
From airport arrival until departure, your Casterbridge Tour Manager/Guide will be with you at all times, no matter how small your group. He or she will sleep in your hotel, eat with you at breakfast and dinner, and remain available in the evenings for full consultation. Your Tour Manager/Guide will also make sure you arrive on time at your scheduled church services, fellowship opportunities, or service projects. This exemplary attention should guarantee that your church tour experience is an unqualified success.
There to Meet You on Arrival
Many tour operators employ a courier to escort you to your hotel upon your arrival at a new destination. This guide will only appear for the first scheduled sightseeing trip, which may not be until the next morning. So you are left to your own devices, even though you may have a dozen questions to ask and many initial concerns you want addressed.
Also, you may want to take advantage of at least half-a-day’s sightseeing, if you can. Yet a standard brochure quote for arrival day all too often says, “Free time for individual sightseeing.”
Your arrival day is when you will most appreciate the 24-hour service of your Casterbridge Tour Manager/Guide. He or she will answer your questions, help with money exchange, explain local currency and prices, give your group directions, and interpret your wishes to hotel staff and local shopkeepers. Your guide will also be available to take group members for introductory sightseeing on the first day, at no additional cost.
It is rare to find another tour operator that provides a comparable arrival day service.
24/7 Presence and Availability
Our Tour Manager/Guides will always stay overnight at your hotel with your group, instead of vanishing at 5pm and returning sometime the next afternoon. They will not have to rush off to deal with some emergency in another group.
They will always be there to back up and support your group leader in organizing and supervising spare time and evening activities. They are also instructed to focus on the cultural and spiritual values by which your group wants to abide while traveling.
This does ease the burden on the group leader compared with many other companies, which often leave group leaders alone with their groups once they are back at their hotel.
The Personal Touch
As well as being first-class guides, Casterbridge Tour Manager/Guides are renowned for the personal touches they bring to each group travel experience. They often find interesting biblical sites, local events, and free-time activities that are off the normal tourist track, making your tour a more memorable and spiritually rewarding experience.
This flexibility is impossible with the multi-group package deals that most religious travel companies offer.
We Get Off the Bus
Many church tours typically spend a great deal of time in a bus, but microphone descriptions of cities and sites can only provide the briefest of introductions to each destination.
Our philosophy is to get off the bus as much as possible, take walking tours where we can, and encourage longer, in-depth visits to important sites.
It’s all about the pace of the tour: not too hurried, and with time to relax and absorb the local atmosphere. It is important that participants on a pilgrimage or religious heritage tour not feel rushed. As a result, our Tour Manager/Guides are able to focus more closely on the spiritual, educational, and cultural aspects of most interest to your group travel tour.
Specialist Guides
We often use the expertise of local specialist guides for in-depth or thematic tours to your requested attractions. These local guides complement our full-time Tour Manager/Guide, and we have the flexibility in our planning to allocate these guides to biblical or cultural sites you might wish to emphasize, ensuring that the spiritual goals of your tour are not only met, but exceeded.
If you read the comments in our Testimonials area, you will understand why other tour operators have asked us to recruit and train tour managers/guides on their behalf.
What could be a higher compliment?
Register to plan a religious travel program with Casterbridge, either online or by calling 1-800-522-2398. Start planning your religious travel program today!
