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Pompeii Tour Guide Trap: Three ways to avoid the traps

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It’s easy to fall into the Pompeii tour guide trap as it affects even relatively respectable channels. Let’s go through them one by one.

1. Reservation of excursions to Pompeii through private drivers and limousine service companies.

This is perhaps the easiest way to book Pompeii tours. This happens when you arrive in Pompeii using a pre-booked private car. Private drivers are usually found through a car service website or agency network that feeds them customers.

Upon arrival, once the driver has earned your trust, additional services will be suggested to enhance your visit.

But here’s the problem.

Quality private drivers do not necessarily mean a quality private guide. This is a case of losing their trust. Drivers seek to increase their income by offering extra services and add the services of a guide. They charge the customer the total price, and then they look for the guide via cell phone. But drivers rarely want to pay the guide their official fee.

It also happens frequently at the last minute, so the quality of the guide you’ll get tends to be a lottery.

You should know that the best guides can work once for these private drivers once or twice with the private drivers they already know; but thereafter they tend to avoid the experience because they don’t get the proper money to be paid for their services. For example, I have worked with virtually every driver in the Bay of Naples for 20 years and have my own set of preferred shortlisted drivers. However, it is extremely rare these days that he would accept such a job.

2. Guides in place:

These are local guides at the main entrance of the Pompeii archaeological site. Many of these “guides” began working in tourist shops many years ago. They learned a few words of a foreign language, and from that, let’s say, they qualified themselves as guides.

You know that the mere fact of deciding one day that you are a local guide does not mean that you have the qualities to communicate what a place really means to visitors.

This may work for certain places in the world, but for the complexity of Pompeii, it’s not enough. Many of these self-proclaimed guides are still there greeting clients at the site’s entrance half a century later. Today, since the end of 2008, they have created a kind of gazebo or formal reserve tent outside the main entrances to the Pompeii site. Whatever the system, the risk you run is the same…and this means ending up with a very low level of guidance.

In general, it’s common for the “on-site” Pompeii Tour “guides” to take you to the site, give you a quick tour, and then let you continue to “explore the site on your own.”

Why do they do this? Why do they leave you in the middle of the site? They drop you off in the middle of the Pompeii site so they can quickly make it back to the gazebo to get their names on the list in time to do another tour with more poor customers. Who would have imagined it!

The result is that you will have to continue exploring alone rather than being shown a more appropriate escorted tour from start to finish for a couple of hours.

I’m not saying all off-site guides are shoddy. There are also good quality guides there.. But the risk to your client of finding a guide outside of Pompeii in this way is that they end up with a poor quality guide, because they don’t get a chance to choose their guide due to the waiting list system. Even if you find a guide outside that you like, the waiting list system means you get assigned to the next one on the list. It’s all a matter of luck in the draw.

You may be wondering, how could all this happen in such a world famous and important site? And you are quite right to ask. It’s through mismanagement and corruption in the industry, but that’s a whole different article. Let’s look at one final group you might also run into: the Pompeii siege guards.

3. Pompeii siege guards

Site guards are responsible for monitoring the site and keeping visitors safe. But the most frequent complaints I hear are about things that are under your control:

people complain

* Stray dogs
* Dirt from the site of Pompeii
* Many houses within the site are closed.
* There is no one to ask for information or direction.

Why is all this happening?

Because guards sometimes offer their services to visitors who are inside a site and need information instead of doing their own job of monitoring the site and making sure people are safe. They started doing this similar to self-proclaimed guides decades ago, and they’re still there.

If you get hurt, instead of being there to provide assistance, some site guards are working illegally as guides.

In my opinion, each person is his own profession. Let the guards to protect the site. If you want a guide book a decent guide before you arrive.

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