Starter Kit. Idea 160 of 500. Cluster 7
Tour guide certification programmes
The mechanism, from the book
The tiny business pathway. A rural woman with an exceptional product should not need photography, English copy, packaging design and a distributor before the world can find her.
The first step
Write a clear standard for a certified guide at one site or town: what they must know, which languages, first aid and conduct. Show it to five guides and two tour operators and ask whether guides would pay to be assessed, and whether operators would prefer to hire certified ones. If both say yes, run the first assessment day and charge a fee.
- Who pays first
- A tour operator who needs to show foreign clients that the guide they are paying for has been properly assessed.
- What leaves today
- A visitor cannot tell a trained guide from an untrained one, so price wins and the good guides earn the same as the rest.
Ask first
- Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. Ask how guides are licensed today and how a training course could support it.
- Tertiary and Vocational Education Commission. Ask how a guide training course can be recognised.
Check before you spend
That the certificate is recognised by those who license guides, that the course content is accurate, and that assessment is fair.
Find out these three numbers
- How many guides would pay for certification?
- Will hotels pay more for certified guides?
- What does running one course cost?
A comparison from the book
Japan. Chapter Eleven
"a prize, a standard, a circle of workers, an inspector at the port."
Standards and inspection are cheap tools that changed how the world saw quality.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.