Hosted Trip or Guided Tour: The Difference Nobody Explains
A guide knows the route. I spent twenty years being responsible for the room.
In 2012 I was the political officer at the U.S. Embassy covering Baghdad province, and the civilian/military team that had held every relationship in that province for years was about to pack up and go home.
The Provincial Reconstruction Team, which everybody just called the PRT, included relationships with the Governor, the Mayor, the Provincial Council Chairman, and a long list of other people who could actually get something done in a city of seven million. Those relationships took years to build and belonged to individuals from the PRT, not to the institution. The PRTs were about to close up and transfer their portfolios (contacts) to the Embassy, which had fewer armored vehicles, a much harder time getting anywhere, and nobody most of these contacts had met yet. A visit that used to be a routine run with a military convoy had turned into a week of security and movement coordination for one hour in somebody's office. You could already see the writing on the wall - we'd write a very thorough handover memo and probably lose most of these contacts within a few months.
So I talked the Ambassador into throwing a party. Officially it was a reception for Baghdad's local leaders to discuss electricity delivery and basic health services, which is a very dry way of saying that the power kept going off and people were furious about it. Over eighty Iraqi contacts came.
I spent the evening walking political officers across the room. This is Mr. So-and-so, he's worked with Dave on the PRT for three years, you're going to need him in March, and Dave standing right there to vouch for the handoff. Over and over, for a couple of hours, while people ate and complained about the power. None of that was on the invitation and none of it went in the cable, but it’s what good transition planning looks like.
That wasn't an unusual week either. In a single afternoon back then I might be picking candidates for an educational or cultural exchange program, sitting with Iraqi parliamentarians about whatever had broken that morning, hosting the Deputy Governor, and coaching an officer who had never in his life written a spot report. You get good at one particular thing doing that for twenty years, in Muscat and Sarajevo and Geneva and New York and Baghdad twice. The thing is not knowing the route. Somebody else usually knows the route.
Here's why I'm telling you this.
I'm not a guide. A guide knows the route — the dates, the walking tour, the restaurant with four hundred good reviews, the bus at nine. That's a real skill, some people are brilliant at it, and I'm not one of them. I'm a host. And what I didn't understand until I started selling weeks away instead of negotiating them is that hosting doesn't show up anywhere on paper.
An itinerary reads the same whether the person who wrote it has done this once or has done it for two decades in places where getting it wrong had consequences. So somebody at their kitchen table choosing between a week with me and a very similar-looking week from a company with much better photographs is reading two documents that say nearly the same thing. The difference is real and it's completely invisible.
So what is the difference between a hosted trip and a guided tour? Some of it is unglamorous and obvious. Who's awake at two in the morning when a flight cancels and three of your people are stuck in Frankfurt. Whether the person running your week knows the family that owns the vineyard or just the booking agent for the vineyard. And then there's the small stuff nobody ever sees, which is honestly most of it — noticing on the second night that two of your ten people aren't going to work next to each other, and moving the place cards before either of them has quite registered why.
What I do know is what it looks like when it works. Ten people who've never met sit down to dinner the first night, polite, a bit braced, doing the where-are-you-from thing. By Thursday they're making plans with each other and I'm the least necessary person at the table.
My challenge is how you'd put that on a page for somebody deciding in October whether to spend a week with a strange (like Napa this week). I haven't managed it yet but we’ll get there.
—Cynthia
If that's the kind of week you'd want, I keep a list for Italy. No dates and no price yet — the list hears first.