Originally Posted by
freecia
Japanese Tour director jobs would be a lot easier if they could pile everyone into a cart, stick a colored hat on them, and make them hold a rope. Or if their customers were so good at waiting patiently and carrying out their trash. I can only wistfully imagine being able to board & de-board a 40 person bus in less than 10 minutes
I'm not the tour person (my parents like traveling with a group of people who charter tours) but will say a good tour director does improve the trip experience and almost as magical as Mary Poppins. Some lean more towards being a bit of a concierge or fixer and have built up business relationships with the venues. Others are great teachers.
The first time I went to Japan (multiple decades ago, as a teenager) I went with 33 members of my family: parents, brothers, sister, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. You don't know my family, but if you looked up Brownian motion in the dictionary you'd see their picture. Because it was the first time in Japan for most of us, and given the unwileldiness of the proceedings, we booked a bus and a tour guide to take us around Japan.
A usual morning would start as follows. 7:30 AM on the bus, everybody ready to go and fully fueled with breakfast. That was the theory. In reality, at 7:30 AM there would be nobody on the bus, with the 33 of us scattered around the hotel in our rooms, having breakfast, possibly asleep, or maybe lost somewhere near by. Tour guide would go off to search for us and round up a number of us. At 7:40 there would be miraculously, 15 of us on the bus. Another round of search and rescue would raise the count on the bus to 28 by 7:55. One last laser-focused expedition would land one more, at which point the first few who got on the bus decide one (or all) of the following (a) they need to go to the bathroom, (b) they forgot their camera/wallet/brain in the room, (c) a number of them want to go across the street to the combini to buy snacks for the journey. Finally, by (say) 8:15 you'd get everybody in line.
Now, remember, the day would (in theory) develop as follows: 7:30 departure; 8:00-8:15 visit to Meiji Jingu; 9:00-9:15 stop by Shibuya crossing for photo op; 10:00-10:15 Imperial Palace gardens visit; 11:30-12:15 lunch at traditional folk restaurant with Geisha dance; 1:00-1:15 stroll down Ginza; 2:03 take Shinkansen to Odawara; 3:00-4:30 do the Hakone round trip without stopping for anything, including bathroom breaks; 5:00 arrival at Hakone hotel for dinner and free time (all times between events are to allow for bus transfer). When we'd leave by 8:15 something had to yield, and it wasn't the Shinkansen train, which we
had to take, no matter what.
Now repeat some version of this schedule for 15 days all over Honshu and you can imagine the tour guide going home and committing ritual suicide. She didn't deserve a tip, she deserved canonization on her way to sainthood.