How to become a Nature Guide

How do you become a successful Nature Guide? How do you start? Last Friday, the Nature Guides Frauke Bennett from Germany, Boris Belchev from Lithuania and Iwona Krepic from Poland came together in an international exchange webinar to answer those questions and to share their success stories. Even though, the three Guides have different backgrounds and stories, they all agreed that being a Nature Guide is the most rewarding job for them. To be honest, Nature Guiding is not a job to become rich with but if you truly love your job, it will fulfill you and you are still able to make a living with it.

The beginning can be tough but over time, with the help of a strong network, you will get into nature guiding and slowly build up your business. For example, working with local hotels or national parks to advertise your tours can be helpful to establish your offers. As the core message of the Nature Guide Network already says, the three Guides also confirmed: Strong partnerships, working hand in hand and being part of a strong network is the key to becoming a successful Nature Guide.

The importance of ethics was discussed during the webinar as well. In the end, nature guiding should be always be more about nature conservation than earning high profits. Nevertheless, it is ok to take higher prices for tours with small groups, since it ensures unique experiences without mass tourism. Besides creating experiences and adventures, the focus lies on developing awareness for local environment and problems, educating and sharing knowledge.

See also our reports on the other webinars: Start of webinar series & How to make people reconnect with nature.