Los guías de turismo habilitados como ejemplo de calidad

One of the most valuable gears for achieving quality tourism are tourist guides. If we want a correct account of what Barcelona represents abroad, the task of tourist guides becomes fundamental. The success of a tourist city is not based solely on large advertising campaigns. We have seen the decline of different tourist destination ports, despite the enormous promotional campaigns employed by administrations and private agents. Campaigns help, but what separates success from failure is the impression of the person who lands in a tourist destination and the subsequent evaluation they make. The level of retrospective pleasure will turn this tourist client into a prescriber or not. All experts agree that the best advertising is done by these hundreds of thousands of prescribers who, Covid-19 aside, visit us year after year. The quality of tourist establishments, hotels, restaurants, cafes, terraces, street safety, the organization for visiting museums, monuments, parks... and tourist guides are what determine the degree of satisfaction of those who have visited us.

[subscribe_newsletter_esp]

For many years in Catalonia, to become an authorized tourist guide, one had to have a degree or diploma in Tourism and pass quite demanding oral and written tests that accredited knowledge of Barcelona and Catalonia's tourist product, that is, history, art history, popular culture, traditions, gastronomy, literature, among other topics. There was also a language test, in which the level of Catalan was demonstrated. That is, professionals who could explain and interpret to a tourist what Barcelona is with knowledge. In this case, understand this word "knowledge" with all its meanings: awareness of what is being done, transmitting the city and the country to a person who is interested, and doing so with the necessary preparation.

However, since the promulgation in 2006 of the European Services Directive, which proposed greater liberalization of economic activity, known as the Bolkestein Directive, everything has become complicated. Since 2012, the Generalitat itself has made a biased interpretation of the directive in question and at different times it has been considered that everyone could become a tourist guide. Anyone without a shred of knowledge of the city can stand in front of a group of avid tourists and explain anything. The so-called free tours respond to this paradigm. There are plenty of anecdotes about the barbarities that some of these supposed guides spout. Just one example: to the question of an Anglo-Saxon tourist as to why the Sagrada Familia was under construction, an unscrupulous person replied that it was bombed in the Second World War. Joking? Sarcasm? Or daring ignorance?

The disorder at this very delicate moment for the sector is that the guides authorized by the Generalitat through examination have to compete with the aforementioned free tours and with those from other autonomous communities to whom in recent years the Generalitat has allowed to validate their recognition as official guides, obtained without any examination and with less demanding qualifications, which has also allowed them to work in Catalonia. None of these ways to obtain the qualification of tourist guide of Catalonia implies having knowledge of Barcelona, let alone Catalonia.

The Generalitat has tried to solve this disorder with a decree that came into force on June 30 and guide qualifications obtained in other autonomous communities are no longer validated. It still does not call for tests for authorized guides but instead allows it to be obtained with a higher technician degree in Tourism or a professional certificate.

In Italy, for example, tourism competencies are transferred to the regions and the guide card is managed by each province. Exams continue to be held and unofficial guides are prohibited from explaining on the street. In Florence, free tours have even been banned.

All this injustice and lack of rigor does not align well with quality tourism. In the same way that we demand that the hotel, the restaurant, or the airport function well and offer quality products, we must also demand it from tourist guides, and being able to control this aspect seems much simpler than controlling the product served on a terrace of Las Ramblas or preventing illegal street vending.

We often hear some rulers say that tourism is also a way of showing the country what we are. But this is quite difficult if trained guides have to compete with people who don't know who Elías Rogent is or are unable to explain the original project of the Eixample or what the four columns of Puig i Cadafalch represent, to give a few examples. Or, isn't it worrying for the Catalan administration that some of these supposed guides do not master the Catalan language and answer any nonsense to a tourist's question about signs and texts in Catalan?

We have been confusing guides and tourists for too many years with a policy without direction in this regard, and the current crisis could be an opportunity to put things back in their place. Tourist excellence also involves the narrative we create about the city. Many people participate in the creation of this narrative, but to a large extent, it depends on our tourist guides. Let's take care of them.