This is our first blog post written by employees at Landsea Tours & Adventures. Every week or so for the next month, we will be releasing a new blog post written by either a member of our guest services department or a tour guide. We want to open our doors to showcase how working at Landsea can be an excellent experience! Please find below a blog written by one our Tour Guides who started May 2015.
It was a few years ago when I was a tour guide in Banff, Alberta where I first heard of Landsea Tours & Adventures. I had met another guide in Banff that had previously worked for Landsea and spoke very highly of their experience with the tour company. Before working in Banff, I lived in Vancouver most of my life and was planning on spending the next few years living in other towns and cities around the world. Then in the spring of 2015, I came to realize I didn't want to miss another summer in Vancouver, and applied for a position as a tour guide at Landsea and soon thereafter started working.
Landsea Tours & Adventures has been offering sightseeing tours out of Vancouver for 30 years, and even the founder of business still works with the company! Which shows a lot around the office. Everyone's chummy and introductions come fast and friendly, and this continues outside of the office too. Everyone in Vancouver's tourism industry is familiar with Landsea Tours and enjoys working with the company. As a tour guide wearing the company uniform around the city, hotel concierge and attraction attendants recognize you and they are always willing to help out if needed.
Right off the bat you get told about how the company showcases it's brand and operates. It's a 'customer service'-oriented company so everything is geared towards quality. Landsea's vehicle fleet is primarily made up of 24 to 32 passenger mini-coaches, which are easier to navigate than those big coach buses! When you first start out as a guide, you get a month or more of training. In training they take you through driving safety, tour training, and give you a couple workshops on mechanics and customer service, and go over all the administrative stuff. Training was sometimes difficult because there are a lot of moving and interlinked parts of the job to know about, but as you get more comfortable, everything gets pretty clear.
What I liked about training is after a month of learning a tour you can split your time between guiding tours and continuing to train on other tour options to Victoria and the North Shore, for example. From what I learnt in training, all the 'must-dos' and precautionary scenarios I had been prepared for became common sense when I started guiding. When you're training on the other tours once or twice a week, you participate in a ride along where you pretend you are a guest on the tour, which lets you put all that training into context through seeing how other guides conduct their tours.
Working at Landsea is a fun job to figure out and you get the hang of it rather quickly. However, at the same time, no day or season is ever the same. You see different people each day and take them on different tours through the year. Even more, Landsea Tours & Adventures is growing. They are proactive and progressive about making improvements to how things are run which keeps things around the office exciting. Any improvements or changes that may affect the guides are laid out simply, so that your attention stays focused on individual guests and their experiences.
