2020 As a Tour Director
Today I am bringing you a different perspective on travel and those industries that have been impacted by the pandemic this year. This post comes from my lifelong friend, Skye, who is a professional Tour Director. This post talks about what 2020 has been like for her as a tour director. You can find more about her on Instagram at @tdskye.
I am a Tour Director. If you are driving around and see motorcoaches (the fancy busses) on the road going from site to site I am the person in the front giving them the history of where we are. I also manage the restaurants & hotels, tell jokes, be a therapist, the list goes on. I have been lucky enough to travel all around the United States with this career.
The Year Started Normal Enough…
When Covid-19 started to hit I had heard about it on cruise ships and international tours, but it seemed like the tour season was going to go ahead as scheduled in the United States. 2020 was going to be a great season to be a tour director. Tours generally run from late Feb-Nov. In the beginning of March I was able to get on a flight and head to Atlanta to start my Civil Rights tour with a middle school from Arizona. They landed and off we went, mask free, with hand sanitizer for the health-conscious people only. We were having an incredible learning experience, walking the Edmund Petus bridge in Selma, visiting where MLK preached, walking the same paths as many trailblazers before us. While on tour we started to realize this disease was hitting the United States and hitting it hard.
Then Everything Was Getting Cancelled
We had tours canceling day of, Tour directors were in DC, NYC, and Boston all-ready to meet their groups only to not have them get off a plane. The school I was with had their principal on board who was on mandatory calls with the Arizona Board of Education hearing about new school protocol. In fact, on March 13th when Covid-19 was declared a pandemic we were in Birmingham, Alabama. At the time Alabama hadn’t diagnosed any cases and Arizona already had a bunch. My tour company called and urged us to please head to the airport. My group refused saying why the heck would we leave a safe state early to go to a state that is already incredibly infectious?
A Quick End to the 2020 Tour Director Season
On March 14th the group was in Atlanta, a city normally filled with a crazy rush hour traffic, yet we cruised into the city and were the only ones walking around. We were sitting in the CNN building having lunch while CNN was reporting about the country going into lockdown. This was the day the group went home – the day they were supposed to go home. My spring schedule was filled with 110 days work of work in a few short months. At first half the season canceled, we looked at this as an opportunity to ACTUALLY be home, most of us are on the road about 200 days a year. We all discussed home improvement projects and how we were going to see our significant others! Obviously, that was not what happened.
How It’s Going Now
There are a few companies who started touring again with the max amount of 15 people on the coach. This isn’t really the reality for most of us. 99.9 percent of tour directors are out of work and have been since March. To add to the complications of this, many of us are independent contractors who had work scheduled in the future which limited our ability to find new jobs and because we weren’t considered employees we didn’t qualify for unemployment at first. We have no real clue when our industry will bounce back or even if it will.
The concern of the unknown is now what we are dealing with. Will we be back in New York City with 40 people behind us in the mayhem that is Times Square? Who really knows? Travel is out there but much more so in the sense that families are getting out there in camper vans or driving to a unique Airbnb. All I know is that there are few better feelings in the world then watching a kid see their first Broadway show or bringing a group of adults to the Grand Tetons and watching them finally see what they have dreamed about. Fingers crossed the world gets back to normal, and life as a tour director, and tourism comes back with a vengeance!
Like what you read and want to support this blog?
