From reading some of the topics on this forum, it sounds like there are good TDs and not so good TDs. I've only been on one tour (so far.. ..hopefully many more to come!) and our TD was excellent (Ian Walker on the Bonnie Scotland tour). . I was just wondering if any seasoned travellers out there can comment on their experiences with Globus TDs. Are there alot of mediocre TDs or are most really good? Since you obviously spend alot of time with this person on your trip, it is really important (I think) that they are friendly, knowledgeable, etc etc. It would be awful to get a bad one!

I have been on 2 land tours with Globus and have just booked a river cruise for next summer. Both land tour TD were excellent. I hope we have good luck with the cruise director next summer too. I have only heard one person on here complain about their TD and that was on a tour to Italy.

That was me that complained about our Globus tour director in Italy. We did give Globus a second chance and did the Grand Hawaii Vacation with them. Randy Schuster was an outstanding tour director who was very well organized.

Thanks for the replies.. .. .
I have recently joined this forum and was reading alot of old messages, so that's probably why I had seen a few bad comments about TD's. I would think if a TD was really bad, that people may complain to Globus and hopefully, they wouldn't keep them on staff. I don't know.. ..i'm really new to travelling (only been on one tour so far) so I was just curious what other people's experiences were on this subject.
This forum is great.
Thanks again.. .. .
Rue

I would imagine that Globus would need several complaints from travelers on several tours before they took corrective action. One couple on our Grand Hawaii Vaction tour went ballistic with Randy Schuster. The reason.. .. .. .. ..their scheduled helicopter and snorkeling cruise were both canceled because of helicopter engine problems and rough seas for the snorkeling trip. This was in no way Randy's fault. These people were just plain obnoxious.

Cheers

General Max

Italian Mosaic - TD Karlheinz Glock was excellent. In fact we need to find the address for Globus to send a letter praising him. He went out of his way to help us when (GULP) my husband left his money/passport belt at the hotel in Assisi. Our TD worked with a Cosmos TD to get it to our farewell dinner. It was over a weekend and delivery services could not guarantee delivery in time. And all the $, credit cards and passport were untouched. They went thru the hotel folks at Assisi, the Cosmos TD and the restaurant staff. Of course the hotel folks put it in a big envelope and we just really wanted the passport back. We cancelled the CCs and figured if the $ was gone we learned a lesson.

Not so. All came through fine and our TD did a wonderful job - and got a bigger tip for sure.

Donna

Donna, thank you. That is an outstanding example of a tour director doing his or her job. And rightfully so; consideration for that should be considered in the tip.. .

Cheers

General Max

I just returned from a Christmas markets tour with Globus. We had a fantastic tour director - Gerold. He seems fairly new to the position, but he was wonderful! No one wanted to do an optional dinner and illumination tour in Strasbourg, so he took us into town (via the tram) and basically gave us the illumination tour without the additional cost. (There were also only 13 perople on our tour which may have made this easier to do.) I have been on several Globus tours, and all of the tour directors have been great. All are very knowledgeable about the areas traveled and willing to help if it is in their power. I am sure there are some "rotten apples" out there (like the one someone had in Italy), but I have not experienced that.

Yes, the Italy tour director we had was horrible. Among other things, on the 2nd last day of the tour, she stood in the front of the coach and said to everybody. (44 people). .

"Anything less than 4 dollars per person per day would be a personal insult to her." Guess what? On the last day of the tour we insulted her with some low denomination US dollars. She had requested that the tip be in Euros and Euros only.

Cheers Cheers

General Max

Originally posted by: Dave and Katie

Before you run the TD down to much please read this. By Steve Hendrix The Washington Post There are two words that we tour guides hate to hear when checking into Budapest hotels with 30 road-whipped passengers waiting in the bus, all limp from their third change of cities in six days and footsore from hours of sightseeing in 93-degree heat in a country without air conditioning amid a group-dynamic that is just barely propped up by the prospect of a much-anticipated "Hungarian feast" in the hotel dining room an hour from now. Those words are: "What dinner?" But that's exactly what the smoothly dismissive desk clerk says to me and my tour-guide boss, Rita Banning. "Dinner? . .. .. . " he purrs, as we gape at him in the lobby of the Mercure Korona hotel. "I'm sorry, we have no record of that." Gulp. I have been Banning's faithful sidekick for a week by this time. She usually works alone, but she and her superiors at Collette Vacations agreed to let me sign on as an assistant tour guide for the 14-day "Magnificent Cities of Central and Eastern Europe" tour last month. I hoped to see how these package-tour sherpas negotiate the perils of mass travel. It's hard enough for most of us to get the family over the river and through the woods each November. Imagine taking on a family of 30 you can't even yell at. The red-carpet treatment Travel tips The next time I go on a group tour, it will be as a passenger, not a guide. Here's what my turn as a crew member taught me about being a better customer. 1: Don't hog the front seats. Your fellow travelers will quietly hate you if you're one of those selfish spoilsports who gulp breakfast every day in order to grab the shotgun rows. (Collette Vacations enforces a seat rotation policy to prevent this outrage.) 2: Don't be late. Everyone can oversleep once, especially in a new time zone. But, my goodness, you should hear what they say about you on the bus if they have to wait on you a second time. 3: Don't complain about things the guide can't fix. To name a few: the weather, the exchange rate, the maddening insistence of foreign countries to use currencies other than the dollar, the number of tourists in Europe who want to visit the same places you do or the number of stairs that Emperor Franz Josef built into his summer palace. 4: Do complain about things she can fix. The guide I worked for actually relished doing battle on behalf of her guests over balky air conditioners, underdone steaks, twice-billed wine and noisy rooms. 5: Don't steal the bananas. Each morning, I searched for a banana for my cereal, and every day the buffet was banana-less. Finally, I complained (see Rule 4) and learned that hotels commonly hide unpeeled fruits from big bus groups because it all gets stolen for lunches! Please don't strip the buffet to save yourself a few euros, and maybe they'll give us our bananas back. Steve Hendrix, The Washington Post I admit I was fairly dubious about big-bus travel when I reported for duty in Berlin. I've spent most of my traveling life trying to blend in to local scenes and negotiating the world on my own. Those massive coaches, I always assumed, were a less-pure travel experience: rolling bubbles designed to insulate timorous flocks from the same rigors of the road that I embraced. Still, I did relish the idea of doing battle with all the dragons of foreign travel as a professional mercenary this time. So far, through Berlin, Prague and Vienna, we have easily batted away every snafu, from missing passports to busted cameras. I have hauled baggage, fixed broken watchbands and waited — sometimes for hours — for some truly dedicated souvenir shoppers. And I have marveled at the unflappable Banning, a brash, short-haired grandmother, as she sways at the front of the coach with a cellphone in one hand and the bus microphone in the other, tracking down missing luggage and riffing on the Czech monarchy, respectively. But even her seen-it-all-before eyes grow wide at the news that we have no Hungarian feast for our edgy wards. The sheaf of tour documents that she's waving in the face of the desk clerk clearly shows that dinner has been prearranged. But he remains unmoved, in that way that only a post-Soviet apparatchik can. Banning has been hoping to spend the hour doing paperwork, and I have dreamed of a shower. Now we go into full crisis mode, scrambling to scare up dinner for 30 on a Sunday night in Budapest. "A lonely lifestyle" Being a professional tour guide may be the most schizophrenic job in all of travel, equal parts master and servant, lecturer and concierge, scold and nurse. Banning, 62, has been at it for almost 20 years, leading nearly back-to-back tours through Australia, Canada and Europe. She's a former special-education teacher, which she describes as near-perfect training for herding vacationing Americans around the globe. On the road for 250 days a year, she's most at home where the rest of us are most at sea in the out-of-a-suitcase transience of vacation time. She pays her bills electronically, and has standing arrangements with her Florida neighbors to collect the mail and mow the grass. "It can be a lonely lifestyle," she says. "A lot of guides get into trouble with alcohol." We had met in Berlin one day before our guests were due to arrive. She always shows up early at the starting point so she can meet the first incoming flights and to get a jump on the jet-lag crankiness that often colors the gathering of the group. Sure enough, we're in far better shape than the two couples from Texas who reach the hotel after a two-mile Berlin traffic jam. "Where's my room?" is all one white-haired man can manage when I meet them in the lobby, brief them on the dinner schedule and take charge of their bags. "Don't pay attention to anything anyone says on the first day," Banning says. "People haven't slept. They have eaten every single thing offered them and watched every movie. The first day is always the worst." I'm looking for someone to emerge as the group pill, but Banning tells me not to count on it. "They say there's one in every group, but it's not true," she says. Only rarely does a serious carper sign up, someone who complains as a way of life, or as a strategy for bagging refunds or discounts. "People pay a lot of money for these trips. They want to have a good time." That they do is crucial to Banning, who depends on tips for about half of her income. She doesn't bring it up to guests (and is contemptuous of guides who let it be known that they'll gladly accept major credit cards), but the tour materials suggest $3 to $5 per day for both her and the driver. She is hardly ever stiffed, she says, although her gratuity envelopes often are the dumping ground for people's leftover forints, korunas and zlotys. All aboard! The group, when it assembles in the dining room, is largely a clutch of hearty retirees. One extended family includes a 20-something niece, but otherwise it's the heavily AARP crowd typical of international group travel. And they do seem like a bunch of bright-siders. "Well, it's certainly beautifully striped," says an 81-year-old matron from Peoria, Ill., of an otherwise unexceptional hunk of grilled pork. Our food throughout Eastern Europe will consist largely of hearty, starchy hotel buffets and meals at high-volume "traditional" restaurants that cater to bus tours. People seem to approve, by and large, but I don't see anyone buying any local cookbooks. The next morning they board the bus for the first time. Banning and I have placed name placards on the seats, assigning everyone a place that we will rotate daily. It's a strict Collette policy based on years of hassles with front-row hogs. "If you don't assign them, people will break their legs getting to the front seats," Banning says. The driver, a mustachioed Austrian named Christian Stamfl, is Banning's favorite in Europe. She calls him "my Austrian son." A good driver, she says — one who knows shortcuts and local customs — is crucial. Guides still talk of the novice wheelman who made a wrong turn in Innsbruck and lodged his bus full of tourists in a narrow alley. But Stamfl whips the huge Volvo coach through our Berlin day tour like a moped. And as we race down the autobahn toward Potsdam, Banning stands at the front without fear. I surf the aisle selling water and Cokes for a euro each out of the bus cooler. At Sans Souci, the rococo pleasure palace of Kaiser Frederick Wilhelm IV ("He could have done 'La Cage aux Folles' all by himself," Banning whispers in one of the more overwrought chambers), she is delighted to see how mobile our group is. Three women are already lagging badly, but Banning considers any group needing fewer than four wheelchairs a veritable track team. In fact, while I settle into the hotel bar to watch the United States get creamed in the World Cup, the two eldest women take an optional mile walk to a biergarten for dinner. Any ungenerous thoughts I've had about the softness of bus tourists fades when I see how these folks — with numerous artificial knees and hips among them — log the miles afoot. A travel day, a tour day We leave for the Czech Republic the next morning, and our days fall into a tolerably frantic routine: A travel day is followed by a full day in a city, including a driving tour narrated by a local guide, three or four stops at billboard palaces and cathedrals, and several hours of free time in the main shopping district. That's a fast pace by modern tour standards, which have mellowed considerably since the "If it's Tuesday it must be Belgium" days. Our own itinerary amounts to two nights each in Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Krakow and Warsaw. "Americans have become better travelers," Banning says. "They watch travel shows now and realize how much there is to see in a place, and they want to stay three or four days." She's off the mike now, giving folks a break to nap off their lunch. She spends a lot of time "reading the coach," trying to decide how much history and chatter a particular group wants. Now it's quiet, except for Banning's frequent calls on her cellphone, lining up opera tickets in Vienna for one couple, organizing a day trip from Warsaw for a family that wants to visit their ancestral village. Prague is sweltering when we pull up to the cavernous Diplomat Hotel, an austere but friendly four-star on a busy avenue. It's a new hotel for Banning, so while the guests bolt for their rooms, she and I walk to the local subway station. We're going to make a dry run down to the old city, where we'll be leading the group after dinner. We find the station, hunt around for an elevator and decipher the route map. "You don't ever want to do something like this for the first time with the group behind you," she says. Tour guides work to preserve a certain in-the-know mystique. Banning even makes a point of eating apart from her guests so no one can accuse her of captain's table favoritism. Later, at a Czech folklore and dinner show that is one of our optional Prague events, Banning, Stamfl and I sit with the other guides and drivers far from the stage. Banning, too, thrives on the bustle. When we have a free afternoon following visits to Prague's Hradcany Castle and St. Vitus Cathedral, I look forward to a little cafe time. But Banning fills every minute with optional side trips for anyone interested: crossing the Charles Bridge, shopping for amber jewelry, seeing the Infant Jesus of Prague (for some of those who had been hearing about this small altar icon since catechism class, seeing it in person meant quiet tears). . I am her sweep, bringing up the rear and counting heads. Most of these people are my parents' age, and I am exhausted. The traveler's advocate By Vienna, the pace and the high-80s heat have begun to tell on a few people. At our long morning tour of the Schoenbrunn Summer Palace, I end up pushing one woman around the gravel gardens in a wheelchair. Banning tells me to muscle the chair right through the crowd so the woman can hear better. She particularly wants me to get ahead of some outsiders who are mooching off our private guide. "We pay a lot of money for these local guides," Banning says. "If there are too many people around, my people can't hear." This may be the most pronounced characteristic of a successful tour guide: an utter lack of self-consciousness. Banning doesn't have a moment's hesitation plowing the mob into a crowded museum, green umbrella held high. Or having her hollered reminder about tomorrow's breakfast echo through the nave of St. Stephen's Cathedral. "In this job, if you're shy you're in trouble," she says. At first glance, Banning, a bustling fireplug given to wearing bright prints and dangling earrings, seems to cut a classic Loud American figure. But that begins to fade when you see how the Europeans love her. Time after time, I see stuffy bellmen and waiters drop their stern miens and beam as she hectors them about room keys and luggage delivery, always followed by "You're so nice to help us" or "You're doing an excellent job." And that's how she salvages our dinner in Budapest. "I'm sorry, I have no record of dinner for your group," the frosty desk clerk repeats for the third time, turning away. Banning switches tones. "I'm so sorry we have made this mistake," she says. "It's clearly our fault." He turns back. Glances at his watch. "The executive chef will be here in 20 minutes. Let me see what we can do." We race upstairs, split the guest list and phone every room, telling our charges that dinner will be delayed an hour because of "a backup in the dining room." Banning works on the desk clerk and the chef. She suggests a choice of lamb, beef or goulash, sauteed vegetables and ice cream. Finally, they agree to rush out 33 chicken breasts, a yet-to-be determined vegetable and a dessert of the chef's choice (which turned out to be an unpeeled apple on a saucer). . It's fine. Most people enjoy the extra hour of rest, and the dining room is filled with excited chatter about the next evening's cruise on the Danube, the days to follow in Krakow and Warsaw and the emotional climax at Auschwitz. "And hasn't the food been good," says our eldest, chipperest lady, polishing off her austere chicken.

My wife and I went on the Heart of Europe tour this past aug. and couldn't have asked for a better TD. Her name ws Bridgettte and she was the best, she made sure we knew as much about the places we were going and what we would see before we got there. She would come by on the bus checking to see if we needed anything or if we would like any additional information. She always made everyone on the tour feel as if she was there to make their trip special just for them. She insured we went to the front of every line and were the first to eat at each planned meal. Hotel check ins couldn't have wet any smoother, Not only did she get us checked in she always asked if there wer any problems with the rooms and handled them gracfully with the hotel staff.

She tried her best to accomidate all the questions and concerns of our travling companions, from where is the good plpace to eat to can you get me tickets???

Bridgette made the trip worth taking and I can only hope to ravel with her aging in the future.

Rita Banning did an outstanding job as a tour director as indicated in the post above by the Site Administrator. Certainly based on what she did she would receive the maximum tip of $10.00 per day from us as well as a glass or two of wine along the way.