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Today on CityCastDC.
Look out for all those tourists because in a recent poll,
DC was ranked the third best destination in the US for tourism this summer.
But giving and taking tourists in the district is not as cut and dry as you might think.
Caitlin Calogera and Rebecca Grawl, who founded a tour of her own,
explain what makes DC tourists tick and which ones you should try, even if you're a local.
Today is Tuesday, May 23rd.
I'm Brigitte Todd and here's what DC is talking about.
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So Caitlin and Rebecca, you're both founding members of the Women's Focus DC Tour Company,
a tour of her own, love the name.
Plus, I know that you're both tour guides yourselves.
I'm so curious how this system works in DC,
especially since I know that the city kind of lends itself to a lot of quirky tours.
I'm curious, what is one of the most bizarre tours that you've heard of in DC?
Well, I think when you're talking about Washington, DC, people tend to think about the National Mall.
But what we encourage people to do is get off the National Mall,
go into the corners and the neighborhoods of Washington, DC,
and really look for the themes and the topics and the tours and ideas that are different,
that are not mainstream.
For folks who are local who are listening who are like,
oh, tours, that's just for tourists looking to check out the mall.
What are some of the more unique or niche or offbeat, unexpected ways that folks are exploring the city through tours?
I think just like you could, you know, on any given night go to a restaurant that represents any kind of cuisine
or go check out an art exhibit that could represent any period in art history.
When it comes to tourism, Washington, DC, whatever your bag is, whatever you're into,
there's probably a tour for it, whether that's true crime, whether it's marginalized histories,
I think is an important thing to bring up, whether it's just really understanding what happened on your block or in your community,
there's a tour for that.
And so the tourism community and the public history space in Washington, DC is really, really strong.
And a big part of that is I think people who live here, who work here, and people come to visit here
really are interested in moving beyond just the face value of any given thing.
So we've got a nice little buffet of tour opportunities in Washington.
When y'all are just like out running errands with friends, like, oh, I'm going to go to the dry cleaner.
Are you like, oh, well, just did you know that on this block where the dry cleaner is, yada, yada, yada happen?
Like, are you are you constantly finding new things to connect with in the city and your personal lives?
Guilty.
Absolutely. We do it individually.
And then when we're out in groups with other tour guides, we totally nerd out and find new things and just never stop talking and sharing all the things we know.
There are just group chats and it's just like plaques and like weird corners of a building.
And here's a grave marker.
Like, you really do get a little bit of that.
Did you know syndrome too, which I'm sure anyone listening to this, you know, Caitlin and I personally has been like,
yeah, I've been a brunch and you have just been going on and on about this person that lived across the street.
So what qualifies someone to become a tour guide here in DC?
So in Washington, DC, there are two elements to getting licensed as a tour guide or as a tour operator.
Essentially, what you do is you register with the DC government and you get a license.
For me, I have two licenses, one as an independent tour guide, Caitlin Caligira.
And then I have a second license as a business, a tour of her own LLC.
So depending what you're looking to do and how you register, there's a couple ways to go about it from a legal perspective.
Now, beyond that, there's used to be a test that would encourage like knowledge and information and see if you were skilled and trained from that point.
So if you're skilled and trained from that perspective, we don't have that anymore.
And so there's a lot of independent professional development that we do as freelancers and I'll pass it on the back end and explain a little bit more.
Yeah, so I'm old enough and I've been guiding long enough that when I first started, you had to take the test, which was 100 question multiple choice tests.
And I'd say about 90 of those questions were basic American and local history stuff.
So if you're a local American history class, you could probably pass this test.
And then about 10 questions were specific to regulations.
And I will say within the District of Columbia, there's about two to three pages of city code that we are obligated as license carrying tour guides to follow.
And a lot of that falls under consumer safety and protection.
There are rules to which how we can conduct our business.
And if you've ever been in a situation or if you ever go on a tour, where you ever are made to feel unsafe for any reason, it's never a bad idea to maybe ask for someone's license or look up someone's license.
Or number, but that is a way in which the city and the industry tries to safeguard clients and consumers.
I think on the kind of professional development perspective, I think most reputable tour guides and companies take the educational part of this shop really seriously.
Most of all, we do this because we love it.
I would not do this job if I didn't want to read and research history all the time and learn about people.
But I think a lot of local tour guides and local tour companies put a lot of time and effort into training.
And just to sort of jump on that a little bit, some of the training we do isn't even necessarily specific to content.
It's about how do we educate?
How do we engage?
And how do we be responsible members of our community?
So in a lot of ways, it sounds like as a tour guide, you're really kind of a community liaison.
I love that.
That's beautiful.
That's exactly how I'd like to see it.
And so many people too who come on our tours are still relatively new, especially people who maybe moved here during the pandemic or right before.
And then so many things were closed or difficult to access.
So they're utilizing tours to kind of catch back up or feel more engaged.
And I'm going to start using community liaison.
I love that.
That's a freebie.
You can have that one.
I know that most tour guides in DC are freelancers.
Can someone make a full time living as a tour guide?
I mean, we do.
I think you absolutely can.
It's very much, I think, and I got into tour guiding right about the time where I think most elder millennials to date myself for listeners.
You know, we're realizing that perhaps this explosion of the gig economy and the freelance world has a lot of benefits and also some drawbacks and some really serious systematic structural.
Issues that probably need to be addressed.
But I absolutely think that if you are passionate about this, if you're savvy, if you're willing to diversify what you do in terms of the kinds of tours you're offering or the kind of work you want to do or the kinds of people you're partnering with, you can make a living doing this.
I absolutely think there are ways in which it could be easier to make a living in our city doing this job.
And I think that's true for freelancers across the board, even outside of tourism as well.
We have some serious struggles in freelancing more broadly.
But because so many tour guides are independent, I really think it's in some ways a benefit, maybe to the industry.
That so many of us are independent too, because we can create and develop tours that are meaningful, that are doing the work they need to do to tell the stories that need to be told.
And I think that's one big benefit of not being tied to a much more corporate structured element.
Yeah.
Are there more benefits to it being a, a lot of people who are interested in the work that they're doing?
That it being a field with lots of independent freelancers as opposed to just just big tour companies?
I think so.
I think it helps diversify who's leading tours and the kind of content that you're getting.
There's a lot of crossover as well.
So kind of, as Rebecca was saying, you can supplement your tour guiding career with other opportunities.
So Rebecca and myself, for instance, also wrote a book.
So there were a lot of benefits to becoming a writer or an author.
We also see that in reverse where you have people who are naturally journalists that will then get into the tour guiding industry.
So I think it allows for a lot of flexibility as far as the sort of larger, bigger tour companies.
It's maybe less flexibility and more standards and strict ways of doing things.
But I think the industry allows you to go in the direction that makes sense for you individually.
Are there drawbacks to having DCs, tour guides seem to have designed this way?
Is there an issue with tour guides who maybe aren't up to snuff giving out incorrect information on tours or things like that?
Has that ever come up?
Have you ever in your life worked with somebody who maybe wasn't as good a third job as you were, Pritche?
Well, first of all, thank you for saying I'm good at my job.
But yeah, maybe it's like, it's a thing across industries are going to get a couple bad apples, no?
No, I just want to illustrate the point that probably in any given job, in any given workplace, any given work scenario,
there are definitely people who are a better at it or b try harder at it.
So that's something I think is true in and outside of tourism and hospitality and public history.
Yeah, to that end, you know, with so many tours out there, how can listeners judge a good tour from a bad tour?
Like, how can someone tell if it's a tour set up by our real person versus like some sort of AI, SEO, generated, gobbled e-cook?
I think one of the first things we can do is start with sort of that licensing process.
Anybody can go on the DC government website and look up someone's name or company and see if they're registered.
Now, just because someone is a registered tour guide or business doesn't necessarily mean that they might have the best tours,
but they're going through several extra steps and investing their money in this career and in this opportunity.
So they're more likely someone that's, you know, more serious about this.
As opposed to I think what we tend to see is sometimes people think it might be a great idea to be a tour guide,
and what they do is they start an Instagram account or they start a website,
but they never really follow up with it and that could be confusing to the consumer and I understand that.
But I would also say, you know, one of the challenges that we have as freelancers in small businesses is we don't always have the time
or the funding to advertise on a big level.
And so if you do a simple Google search, you might not find us at the top.
You might see larger institutions or well-funded organizations, you know, showing the results.
So I think now, particularly in DC, because we are a super educated company, I would encourage people to think outside the box,
go look on TikTok, go look on Instagram, you know, follow us on Twitter.
And those are places where you can get to know people.
And, you know, when you find one company you like, often will shout out the other reputable companies too.
We support each other.
And so you can kind of do your own journey to see what makes sense, interrogate things.
You know, AI is new to all of us, but it's definitely trying to enter this space and pull things off the Internet
and pass it as legitimate work.
And sometimes it's not.
So just do the interrogation, ask questions, ask around.
And if you want to find the answers, we're here to help, you know, bring legitimacy to the industry and the profession.
And this is, I think, true for locals looking for local tours.
And, you know, I know in DC a lot of people here love to travel and, you know, see the world as well.
And one of the biggest things, I think, to find the best quality is word of mouth.
Certainly, you know, talk to people, talk to friends.
I think what Caitlin was saying about trying to find people at the source, whether that's social media or their website,
or local media, so many local newspapers, local podcasts often talk to people in the tourism space, but always, always, always book direct.
It's really easy to use aggregator sites.
It's easy to go on to some, you know, big booking site that's going to show you a bunch of things.
But often that's where you're probably going to find either the last reputable or the very, very new.
And that's where they're going to dump their tours because it's easy to get out in front of a lot of people.
Book direct, not just because I think you're going to get a better quality, but it will also, as a consumer,
almost always mean the better price and the better customer service experience.
Oof, I have learned that book direct lesson time and time again.
Sometimes you see a good deal. It's just took it to be true.
You're like, oh, I'm going to get it. And then you get burned.
I've learned that lesson over and over again.
It's so true. And it all comes from our own experiences.
So do any suggestions for tours that locals should check out?
What are your personal faves or even just topics of tours that you all really like?
I'll just kind of start with something that people in DC might know about, but should be reinforced.
When it's cherry blossom season, go on a cherry blossom tour.
I know everyone's like, oh, it's so crowded.
And I already know about the cherry blossoms. I just want my Instagram pictures.
There's history behind the cherry blossoms.
Me and Rebecca talk about this all the time.
They were brought here by two incredible women.
And not everybody knows that.
We focus on the cherry blossoms from a women's perspective,
but there are other tour companies, for instance, that will take you off the title basin
and into neighborhoods like Cleveland Park, where there are more cherry blossoms that people don't know about.
So, you know, what would seem just like your normal everyday, let me go check something out.
Think about it and say, maybe there's a tour about this where I could really dive deeper than my surface level knowledge.
I would also encourage folks to support the local art community.
There are a lot of murals. There are a lot of artists who also are, you know, struggling to get their work noticed.
They put a lot of effort into this work and we need to go seek it out.
So think outside the box and if you want a tour, there is one that exists.
And if it does not exist, we will build it for you because we are nerds and we want to tell you all the things that we know.
Nerd power, is there anything stronger? I love it.
Caitlin Calligere, Rebecca Kroll of A Tour of Her Own. Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having us. This is a great conversation.
And before you go, here's some quick news.
First up, Penn Social is backtracking by getting rid of its coffee shop section and sticking with a sports bar and party space vibe.
The Chinatown staple reopened last spring with a new coffee house and workspace, but struggled to find customers when most workers remained remote.
With the new, but actually old business model, the owners hope to bring the original feeling and customers back to Penn Social.
Also, never fear, there was no explosion near the Pentagon on Monday, but Twitter certainly thought so.
An image of billowing smoke near the building went viral yesterday before officials reported that it was not a real photo.
The very convincing image seems to have been made using generative artificial intelligence.
The account that originally tweeted the picture took it down within the hour.
That's all for today here on CityCast DC.
And if you enjoy the show, why not share it with your favorite DC tour guide and subscribe to our Morning News Letter 2.
We'll be back tomorrow morning with even more news from around the city. Talk to you then.
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