It’s also true that you can walk into, say, Pompeii, walk around without a guide, and find your own way out. You can even do it with a guide.
This is what I have found not only with clients, but also with my own travels around the world. Without a human guide to Pompeii, you miss out on a sort of interpretation of the meaning of the place, and especially what it might mean to you today, not just in ancient times.
Since we are all different, in my opinion it is really impossible to package the personal meaning for you in a
written guide or an audio guide. You can get close if it’s done right, but you can never customize it.
Personalization is the most important thing about a tour.
So in Pompeii they have audio guides that you can rent. They look like little phones that you hold to your ear and get information about each place. Each place, as I told you, has a number. You follow the audio guide number by number.
But audio guides aren’t exactly like having a real guide to Pompeii simply because you can’t customize it. It cannot be customized based on your own knowledge, wishes, and for your own personal things you want to see or know about a place.
Growing up, I bet you liked to ask “why.” When you’re inside Pompeii, it’s no different and you can’t ask
Why an audio guide or a book?
For example, let’s try to imagine, to imagine what happens when some of the houses are closed. That happens very often at the Pompeii site. So what? What is your job? An expert guide will be able to change the itinerary for you depending on the situation.
So that is a fundamental point, which is not insignificant. With the Audioguide you have to follow it, while a real tour with a local guide is built around you.
So if you’re excited to look at a house and it ends up being closed, when do you get there?
An expert local guide can rearrange the tour, being able to alter which houses you actually get to see to make sure you
you have left Pompeii having had a real sense of place.