It is also true in a way that you can enter, let’s say, into Pompeii, walk around without a guide, and find your own way out. You can even do it with a guidebook.
Here is what I have found not just with clients, but also with my own travels across the world. Without a human for Pompeii guide you miss a kind of interpretation of the meaning of the place and especially what it could mean to you today, not only in the ancient times.
Since we are all different, it is really impossible, in my opinion, to package the personal meaning for you up in a
written guide or an audio guide. You can come close if it is well done, but it can never be personalized.
Personalization it’s the most important thing about a tour.
So in Pompeii they do have audio guides you can rent. They look like little telephones you hold up to your ear, and you get information about each place. Each place, as I told you, has a number. You follow the audio guide number to number.
But Audio Guides are not exactly like having a real Pompeii guide simply because you cannot personalize it. It cannot be personalized to your own knowledge, desires, and for your own personal things that you want to see or to know about a place.
Growing up, I am betting you liked to ask “why”. When you are inside Pompeii, it is no different and you cannot ask
why to an audio guide or a book.
For example, let’s try to imagine, to figure what’s happening when some of the houses are closed. That’s happening very often in the site of Pompeii. What then? What do you do? An expert guide will be able to change the itinerary for you according to the situation.
So that’s a fundamental point, which is not insignificant. With the Audio Guide you must follow it, whereas a true tour with a local guide is built around you.
So that if you are excited about seeing in one house and it ends up being closed, when you arrive?
An expert local guide can rearrange the tour, being able to alter what houses you can actually see in to ensure you
have you leave Pompeii having had a true sense the place.
