Home / Blog / How to Hire and Train Tour Guides: A Three-Stage System How to Hire and Train Tour Guides: A Three-Stage System LM Lily Miggins September 2, 2026 11 min read Tour guides are in shortage in every state and territory in Australia, even as hiring got easier almost everywhere else.1 So the job is not to find a unicorn. It is to hire and train tour guides with a process you can repeat every season: one job ad, one paid trial shift, one shadowed tour, and one checklist that says when a new guide is ready to take a departure alone. The three-stage plan to hire and train tour guides Each stage has one job, and none of them require you to stop guiding. Stage 1: advertise and shortlist. Post one job ad that describes the work honestly, including the seasonal hours. Shortlist against a single question: can this person hold a group’s attention for two hours? Everything else is teachable. Stage 2: paid trial shift, then a shadowed tour. Bring your shortlist out on a real departure as paid staff, not as observers. The ones who stay curious after four hours in the sun are your hires. Then put each hire on a tour you lead yourself. Stage 3: first solo tour against a checklist. They run the departure, you or a senior guide sits in the back. Afterwards, you go through a written checklist, not a vague chat, and either sign them off or name what to fix. Run the stages in order and you have a guide who can take a departure alone, plus a written record of why you think so. How long each stage takes is up to your season. The order is what matters. Write the job ad for the person you want, not the role you have Most operator job ads describe duties. The good ones describe a day. Candidates self-select far more accurately when they can picture the work: the 6am start, the 40-litre pack, the same jokes on the fourth departure of the day, the guest who asks about the toilet situation twice. Be specific about the things people quietly worry about. Say whether the work is casual or seasonal, roughly how many shifts a week they can expect, how pay works, and what happens when the season ends. Nearly half of tourism vacancies in New Zealand are seasonal, and outdoor adventure guiding is one of the roles driving that.2 Vagueness on hours is the fastest way to attract people who leave in November. It is worth knowing what you are competing on. When Tourism Industry Aotearoa asked operators what made recruitment hard, the answer was not the number of applicants but the quality of them.2 A vague ad is what turns a thin field into an unusable one, so treat the ad as the first filter rather than a formality. Keep it up year-round on a careers page instead of posting only when you are desperate. Run a paid trial shift instead of a second interview An interview tells you how someone talks about guiding. A shift shows you how they handle a late bus and a guest who has decided the tour is too long. There is no substitute, and the difference usually shows up inside the first hour. Pay for the trial. The Fair Work Ombudsman allows an unpaid trial only as a supervised demonstration of the skills the job needs, lasting no longer than reasonably required, which it puts at anywhere “from an hour to one shift”.3 Anything past that has to be paid at the applicable minimum rate, and the Ombudsman’s own suggested alternative is to put the person on as a casual and pay them for the hours worked.3 That is not just a compliance point: paying signals that you take the job seriously, which is exactly the signal that makes a good candidate take you seriously back. Watch for three things on the trial. Do they look at guests or at you? Do they fill silence naturally? Do they help pack down without being asked? Product knowledge you can teach in a fortnight. Those three you cannot. Shadow, then hand over with a checklist Shadowing only works if you debrief it. Bring the new guide on a tour you run the way you want it run, then sit down afterwards and explain the choices they could not see: why you greet everyone individually before the safety brief, why you hold the first story until the group settles, why you name the finish time out loud at the start. Then give them the same tour and a checklist to be measured against. This is where most onboarding goes wrong. In a 2025 survey of employees who had started a job in the previous year, 52% said their onboarding focused too much on admin rather than on training for the actual role.4 A guide who has read the waiver policy but never been told how to hold a group has been processed, not trained. A workable sign-off checklist has ten or so lines, all observable: greeted every guest by name, delivered the safety brief without reading it, kept the group together at the two pinch points, handled one unscripted question, finished within ten minutes of schedule, packed down correctly, asked for the review at the right moment. The checklist matters more than the training. It turns “she seems ready” into a decision you can defend, and it gives the guide something to aim at rather than a general hope of approval. Give a new guide the manifest, not your whole system Day one, a new guide needs to know who is booked, who has paid, who has a dietary note, and who has not turned up. They do not need your revenue reports. Rezdy handles this with a Resource User role, which is built for exactly this situation. A Resource User gets full access to the mobile passenger manifest on their own phone, and nothing else: no orders, no customer records, no reports, no settings. You can email them the manifest link directly. It means a guide you hired a fortnight ago can run a departure competently without you handing over the keys to the business, and it means you stop being the person who texts the pickup list at 5:45am. Check which award actually covers your guides This one catches operators out, and most articles on the subject get it wrong. There is no single tour guide award in Australia. The Fair Work Ombudsman is explicit that coverage “depends on: the industry or industries their employer operates in”, and it lists six possible awards: Amusement, Hospitality, Live Performance, Passenger Vehicle, Racing Clubs Events, and Wine.5 The Amusement, Events and Recreation Award does name tour guides, but only where the employer mainly runs something like a theme park, a heritage or cultural centre, a museum, a zoo or a recreation facility.6 A standalone sightseeing operator is not automatically covered by it. Marine tourism and charter vessel operators have their own award again.7 And any tour guide not covered by an industry award falls under the Miscellaneous Award.5 Work out which one applies to your business before you write a rate into an offer, and check it again each year: the Fair Work Commission’s annual review lifted minimum award wages by 4.75% from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026.8 The feedback loop that decides whether they come back Hiring is the expensive part, so the goal of a first season is a second season. Guides are hard to replace: the 2025 Occupation Shortage List rates Tour Guide as in shortage in every state and territory, and the skill band guides sit in was the worst affected of any, at 43% of occupations in shortage.1 That is against a national picture that actually improved, from 36% of all occupations in shortage in 2023 to 29% in 2025.9 Recruitment got easier for most employers. It did not get easier for you. The good news is that most leaving is preventable. Gallup found that 52% of employees who left voluntarily said their manager or organisation could have done something to stop them, and 51% said that in the three months before they left, nobody had talked to them about their job satisfaction or their future.10 Two habits close most of that gap. Ask guests to score the guide separately from the tour. One combined rating tells you nothing actionable; two tell you whether a soft week was the guide or the weather. It also happens to be the thing your reviews turn on. GetYourGuide’s analysis of its own review data found that for vehicle tours the top three drivers of a good review were guide quality, guide knowledge and guide attitude, and Arival’s review of more than ten million reviews across seven platforms put guide quality among the leading delighters.11,12 The same GetYourGuide analysis puts a number on what that is worth: moving from three stars to four lifted conversion by an average of 39%.11 Then ask the guide what is not working, early enough that they still expect an answer. Scheduling, gear, the handover at the depot, the tour that always runs late: these are the things people leave over, and they are usually cheap to fix once someone says them out loud. Your three-stage checklist Stage 1 Job ad live, with hours and pay stated plainly Shortlist against one criterion Careers page set to stay up after this round closes Stage 2 Paid trial shift on a real departure for every shortlisted candidate Each hire shadows a tour you lead, with a debrief afterwards Stage 3 First solo tour observed, ten-line sign-off checklist completed Resource User access set up so they have the manifest on their phone Every season Correct award confirmed and rates checked against the current wage review Separate guest scores for guide and tour, shared with the guide One direct question to each guide about what is not working References Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025 Occupation Shortage List, October 2025. Tour Guide (ANZSCO 451412) rated in shortage nationally and in all states and territories. jobsandskills.gov.au Tourism Industry Aotearoa, TIA Workforce Survey Report Summary, August 2025 (n = 304 organisations). tia.org.nz Fair Work Ombudsman, Unpaid trials, updated 21 August 2024. fairwork.gov.au BambooHR with TalentLMS, First Day Fog: Onboarding Benchmarking Report, survey of 1,156 employees fielded May 2025. bamboohr.com Fair Work Ombudsman, Award coverage for tour guides (K600606). fairwork.gov.au Fair Work Ombudsman, Amusement, Events and Recreation Award [MA000080] summary, updated 25 November 2025. fairwork.gov.au Fair Work Ombudsman, Marine Tourism and Charter Vessels Award [MA000093] summary. fairwork.gov.au Fair Work Ombudsman, Annual Wage Review 2026. Minimum award wages increased 4.75% from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026. fairwork.gov.au Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025 Occupation Shortage List: Key Findings Report, October 2025. jobsandskills.gov.au Gallup, This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses Trillion, McFeely and Wigert, 2019, updated May 2025. gallup.com GetYourGuide, Travel Experience Trend Tracker, Spring 2025. getyourguide.supply Arival, Five Keys to Five-Star Reviews, 9 July 2025. Analysis of over ten million reviews across seven platforms. arival.travel Get your new guides running departures on their own Rezdy gives every guide the mobile manifest they need and nothing they don’t. Set it up in an afternoon and stop texting pickup lists at dawn. Start a Trial