Recently went to a seminar about the foreign language tour guides in my country, and yikes, it sounded both hard and unrewarding. They expected a quite difficult-sounding certification and then work in an industry that demands a lot of its workers, like not being able to say "I don't know" to any question and only being allowed a few complaints from customers before companies blacklist you.
I respect the people that can do it, but I decided it likely wasn't for me.
Since most of the locations tour guides took foreigners to around here were history-related, I'd like to know what the historians of reddit thinks of the tour guides they've met on the sites related to their particular field. What makes one a good tour guide, or a bad one? What do you wish would be different about tours at your locations?
Well currently living in Istanbul and having gotten a couple of tours, I'll give my experience.
To begin with, chances are unless you extensively studied everything about your field in a particular area, you're simply not going to know everything there is to see in a city. For example, my Byzantine history knowledge is basically military-political organization and history from the rise of Basil I to the death of Manuel I along with some of the more obviously famous people and events. For this reason, my tour guide (a lovely lady by the name of Gokçe, who any readers that are going to Istanbul should hire) didn't really even bother giving me the details of who the people were inside or what the building was, but there was still a lot of folk lore about the building, stuff from outside my specialty, and just plane obscure little details that were fascinating. She knew her shit, even more than I did really because her focus is just on this one area. They know all the little nooks and crannies of things that you probably don't know.