Two-Way Tour Guide System Brings New Level of Professionalism to Tour Company’s Cultural Trips
“No more huddling together and speaking in hushed tones, or yelling to be heard over the noise of the traffic.”
– Joan Hill, Founder, Artful Journeys
Joan Hill has been an entrepreneur her whole life – with stints as a medical researcher, leatherworker, and most recently, owner of a small bookkeeping business. She’s also a lifelong art and music lover and an accomplished pianist in her own right.
But it wasn’t until Hill founded Artful Journeys that she finally managed to funnel together all of her passions and talents into a single successful business. The result is a unique boutique tour company that for the last ten years has offered specialty trips and workshops designed to intimately connect participants with the art and culture of another region. Tour sizes are small – four to sixteen per group – and themes range from hands-on foodie trips to Italy, to tours of famous pipe organs in France and England, to painting workshops in New York’s Hudson River Valley.
Enhanced Hearing and Communication for Tour Participants
Like most entrepreneurs Hill is constantly on the lookout for innovative ways to improve her tour participants’ experience. So when she learned about a two-way audio communications systems offered by Tripp Communications Systems, she jumped at the chance to try it out.
Two-way audio communications systems let tour guides speak to their audience in a normal voice or even a whisper and be heard clearly. At the push of a button, guides have the option of controlling how the tour participant group communicates back to the tour guide, the entire tour group or not at all by muting the talkback capabilities. Depending on the setting, participants can ask the guide a question privately or share their comments and questions with the whole group.
Hill realized that this high level of flexibility and performance was exactly what her tour guides needed to get their message across in environmental extremes that include hushed art galleries, lofty cathedrals, noisy city streets and bustling marketplaces.
Easy-to-Use Tour Guide System
After testing out the equipment during a trip to Norway, Hill purchased a system with 16 transceivers and a docking station. She debuted the new two-way tour-guide system on her Art History in Provence tour in November 2018. The 10-day trip included three days in Nice followed by a seven-day van tour through southern France to small towns and villages that included Cagnes sur Mer, Aix en Provence, St Paul de Vence and Les Baux.
Tour leader Sevan Melikyan, an art lecturer and gallery owner from New York, started using the new system on the very first day of the trip. The morning itinerary included a two hour walk along the Mediterranean on Nice’s famed Promenade des Anglais and shopping in the lively open-air market in the city’s old quarter. In the afternoon the group visited the famous Musee des Beaux Arts.
Right away Melikyan realized just how great the system was to use. Tour members could stop to take a photo in the busy market or wander away from the main group and still hear what he was saying. In the museum galleries, where talking in a normal voice might disrupt other patrons, Melikyan could speak in a whisper and the only ones who could hear him were the members of his tour.
Adjusting to the new audio communications system was painless, too. “I worried that our tour members might find it cumbersome and intrusive to wear the transceivers on lanyards around their necks.” Hill explains. “But I handed them out to people in the morning and they all kept them on all day until we had dinner. Everyone simply forgot they were wearing them.”
Each night Hill sanitized the transceivers and ear buds with antibacterial wipes and put them in a docking station to charge up for the next day. At the end of the trip – since the docking station doubles as a carrying case – she simply put all the equipment inside the case and took it home with her as carry-on luggage.
“After the trip all of our tour participants told us that the tour guide system was absolutely brilliant,” Hill says, “and using it really makes a difference.”