Private guides

How to hire a private tour guide in the U.K.

Sometimes you want something that goes beyond the pages in your guidebook or the audio tour at the museum.

Though they aren't cheap (see below), private local guides can be the keys to the most rewarding vacation—and if you're already spending a few grand on the trip itself, what's an extra couple of hundred bucks to make sure all that effort of getting over there was worth it?

How much does a guide cost? 

The rates charged by private tour guides varies widely based on the guide's experience, the popularity of their destination, and, frankly, however much they want to charge. For a ballpark:

• $35–$90 per hour
• $200–$600 per day

Many guides will offer a "first hour free" sampler of their services.

Why hire a guide?

A tour guide can help you tailor your days of sightseeing and shopping to your own tastes, and give you the utmost depth of information about any subject that catches your fancy.

Local guides know the hidden corners and amazing anecdotes that can help make their city and its history come alive, and can answer all your questions. Yes, with enough guidebooks, history tomes, and Googling you could probably uncover much of this on your own, but it would take a phenomenal amount of time and research whereas a guide can spoon-feed it all to you at the drop of a hat.

If you've never toured with a private guide before, treat yourself to one for a day—or even just a few hours in the morning —in one of the major cities. Trust me; you won't be disappointed. Just make sure it's a licensed tour guide.

How to find a licensed private guide

You can get a list of officially sanctioned and licensed guides from the local tourist office—but that's all you get: a list.

Some travel guidebook will recommend a local guide or two (someone who often doubles as the local stringer the publisher uses to update the information in the book).

Aside from a direct recommendation from a friend who's been there before and used a guide, your best bet for finding a local guide is to book one via a third party:

Private tours

• Contexttravel.com - Bespoke tours available in London and Edinburgh from their expert local docent guides.Partner
• Viator.com - Private guides & custom tours in England.Partner
• Viator.com - Private guides & custom tours in Scotland.Partner
• Viator.com - Private guides & custom tours in Wales.Partner

Activities, walks, & excursions

• Viator.com - Best one-stop shopping site for all sorts of activities, walking tours, bus tours, escorted day trips, and other excursions. It is actually a clearinghouse for many local tour companies and outfitters, and since it gets a bulk-rate deal on pricing (and takes only a token fee for itself), you can actually sometimes book an activity through Viator for less than it would cost to buy the same exact tour from the tour company itself. (I once booked a Dublin pub crawl via Viator and later discovered that I saved about $1.50; also, the tour turned out to be sold-out, and they were turning away the folks in front of me in line, but since I had a pre-booked voucher I got in.)Partner
• Londonwalks.com - Since the 1970s, the gold standard in city walking tours and museum tours—and cheap, to boot. Just meet your guide at the appointed time and place (usually a Tube stop), pay your £10 (students or over 65s are £8; under 15 free), and prepare for a good two hours of amazing cultural insight and historic anecdotes. If you plan on taking three or more walks, buy a "Frequent London Walker" card for £2 from your first guide, then each subsequent walk costs £8. They also run popular excursions outside London for £18. Note that the fee just covers the guided tour; you pay for any admissions (or, for excursions, travel expenses) yourself.
• Contexttravel.com - This bespoke walking tour company doesn't even call its 200 tour leaders "guides." It calls them "docents"—perhaps because most guides are academics and specialists in their fields: history professors, archeologists, PhDs, art historians, artists, etc. Groups are miniscule (often six people maximum), and most docents can be booked for private guiding sessions as well. They aren't always the cheapest tours, but they are invariably the best. People rave about Context.Partner
• City-discovery.com - Chief rival to Viator (though with a less spiffy interface and often sub-par text descriptions), representing many of the same tours (at the same prices). However, it also seems to cover more destinations, especially secondary ones. When it comes down to it, City-Discovery and Viator have maybe 70% the same inventory, but then 30% will be completely different (some Viator has City-Discovery does not, other vice-versa) so it pays to check through the offerings from both.Partner