The Story of That Dam Guide

The Story of That Dam Guide

I fell into being a tour guide. It wasn't part of a plan but then I never had a plan. Things just happen, life presents paths and you choose which one to follow. I guess you choose if you are lucky. This path has certainly been rewarding and stimulating.

Once I decided that being a tour guide might be a good idea, I joined a tour. It was one of those 'free tours'. I had never been aware of these before but I went to the advertised start point and was assigned to a guide. I was in a group of about 30 people and the guide led us around the old town, stopping every now and then in front of a landmark and telling us stories. The stories were very history based but also funny. I was so impressed and thought I would never be able to do something like that. At the end the guide asked us for voluntary donations that reflected the value of the service we received.

In 2011 I applied to be a guide for that company and was accepted. There was a lot of reading and learning to do and then I did a tour for the city manager and was accepted. I was shaking during my first tour but soon got used to taking to a large group. It was fun and there were a bunch of us guides who were both competitors and colleagues. Some have become life long friends. 

The business model of that 'free tour' company wasn't great. As guides we had to pay the company 2.50 euros per person regardless of whether they tipped or not. This is the reason for the group tour photograph taken at the start by a company representative - so they company can calculate its marketing fee to charge the guide. Then on top of that the guides need to get the participants to sign up for other, specialised, paid tours by the same company. This earned the guide points. Also at the end of the tour the guide needed to get the participants to dine in a certain restaurant. This earned more points. Naturally there were better days for earning and not all guides who were on shift worked. This depended on how many customers turned up that day. So the guides with the most points for the best days and were the first or second in line for customers on those days. I became disallusioned with the format.

My philosophy as a guide is to add value to someones stay in Amsterdam. That means give them the best advice for them. Not the best advice to score me points in the above system so that I get better shifts.

I broke out on my own and made my own little company, That Dam Guide. That was in 2013. I was used to group tours and went for a small-group format, 10 people max. This was a far nicer guiding experience for me as well as the participants. I still used the format of walk, stop, talk about a specific subject and so on. I constructed an info flow that told a story. Looking back I can see that I often went into too much detail and the stories were sometimes too long. My customes came primarily from Tripadvisor. This was early days of Tripadvisor when it was a site that simply gathered rviews. The idea was that people could get honest advice not slanted by a company trying to sell them products. Tripadvisor has become the monster it was created to slay in that it now owns Viator (or vice versa) and makes a fat cut on everythng sold there. So it promotes those tours over better ones as it takes a cut. Horrible! Still , there were many good years. 

Luckily for me I had been around long enough to build up a client base and benefit from many recommendations and repeat customers. I put in some work building a couple of websites over the years and improving my Google ranking. Business was ticking along acceptably and then 2020 hit.

Covid was a blessing and a curse. The first year I spent lying on the sofa which was great for my body - a year of rest after almost a decade of waking and talking. Then I decided to try and create some work for myself doing live tours on Zoom. My partner and I created a multi-format live stream tour and tried to get previous customers to sign up and watch and this was very diffiult to achieve.  Still we had time and it was an intersting creative process. 

Then a fellow tour guide in a different city told me about an online tour company that hosted live stream tours. I had a look and was sceptical. It was a 'free tour' format and I'd sworn off those years ago. Nevertheless I registed with them and planned a couple of tours and streamed them on that platform. It was incresibly fun. There was a large, supportive viewer base who would communicate with me in live time in a chat on the screen. Because there was a group of people who watched all the time, it was necessary to create new content all the time and this very stimulating to me. I love learning and this was constant learning. The money was fantastic at first but dropped off but was always aceptable. 

Many similar companies popped up, some the same free tour format, others who paid a fixed fee. I registered with anyone who asked and ended up working for about 8 or 10 companies. Covid passed and many of them went bust, including the main one I worked for. A couple are still going now as we speak but the volume of work from that direction is low.

I didn't want to drop the live-stream ball so started streaming through my own YouTube channel and have a weekly live stream. As of 2024 and into 2025, this is ongoing and there is a group of about 50 people who watch live each Monday. We have formed a nice little community and have a private Facebook group on the side. But this has become more of a hobby than an earner now as in-person tours have started up again.

Which brings me to the present. Business wa sluggish in tha aftermath of Covid. I'd now dropped from the being in the top 2 or 3 positions on Tripadvisor to being somewhere in the 30s. Google was still enabling people to find me in the search results and I had many thousands of previous happy customers recommending me. I chose not to list my tours on Tripadvisor/Viator as I don't trust them. They were already taking a 26% cut in the late 2010s and I know they were taking 30% in other another city. I felt that if I threw my lot in with them that they could up their cut later and I felt this was eveything wrong about the travel business. I despreately needed something else to bring the work in. And then the phone rang.

I was cycling in the Jordaan district. A voice checked who I was and said: "This is Rick Steves, I'd like to book a tour with you." Rick booked me for 4 hours some way in the future and I had a lot of time to think about the upcoming tour with him. I felt I was at the top of my game from doing a couple of years of live stream tours on all sorts of subjects so felt very confident that I could make a good impression on him. Then I went to his hotel to meet him and at the reception I said that I was there to meet Rick Steves and I felt all the blood drain from my face and wanted to burst into tears. Rick appeared and was so nice and charming that the nervousness soon disappeared. 

He was in Amsterdam updating his guide book and wanted to walk some of the routes in his book with me and check that the info was correct. I guided during our walks, including things that I thought he might not know. I spent 8 hours with him and loved every minute of it. He is such a cool guy. At the end of the day he said he would put me in his guide book as a recommended priavte Amsterdam tour guide. Wow, this was really a dream come true for me. 

So here we are. I am now recommended by him in the most important guide book in the travel industry and I feel so very lucky and grateful. I've had a noticeable increase in business and have manged to stay independent, not relying on companies like Viator. With the increased income I've even managed to set up a pension plan and the future looks brighter than before! I've switched to only offering Amsterdam private tours now and love the format. Each tour is different as the people are different and my challenge is to match up the right info with my customers so that they have the best experience they can in Amsterdam.







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