Today, I got an email saying that Travel Mag have published an article, “12 Unique Things to do in Coventry”, and one of those was to come on a walk run by the top rated tour guide in Coventry, which according to Tripadvisor, is me! Or at least it is at the moment…
In all it is a pretty good list: the museums; the cathedrals; the theatres; plus Fargo and if you time your visit right the Godiva Festival. An odd one was Arbury Hall which they admitted is in Nuneaton, but that can slide as of course can the fact the people at Travel Mag probably don’t know the hoarding at the Guildhall (the one which said it would be reopening in December 2021) has been painted over so it’s probably not worth encouraging people to come to the city for that reason quite yet….
But from my point of view, given that I only started doing guided walks just after lockdown ended, I’ve got to be more than happy at already being the top rated guide in the City on Tripadvisor. The odd thing is that while everything is full marks so far on Tripadvisor, I write this just minutes after getting my first review on Google that isn’t. Though it is quite bizarre, as it says: “I’m a local so I probably know the town better than the tour guides.”, which raises the question- that maybe unadvisably I have actually asked – Have you actually come on one of my walks…?
But looking back since June, well July, I think it has actually gone quite well so far. The whole thing took a while to get going, in fact I only got one couple in over a month when I started. It was a slow start to say the least. The whole thing was of course a bit of a punt, and for a very long while I wasn’t sure if I would carry on. In August I started to regret promising a sales-based donation to the Cyrenians as I got to thinking I might be needing money back off them. In the end, 50p per walk for August to September works out as £96 so I’m finally going to drop off what I’ve promised as £100 to them this week. But eventually the enterprise has turned into – well, shall we say – alright so far! November has certainly been better than you would expect demand for guided walks of Coventry to be in November, even though Mondays have been dropped now because no-one turns up for them, and the number of people not turning up has certainly increased since the weather turned.
I will definitely be back with new dates in the New Year at some point, but after my final walk this year on December 18th, I’m not quite sure when to start back again and it doesn’t help that the tool to edit the front page of this website is currently broken. I might have to do something else to earn a bit of cash for now, but this is what you have to expect when you try and set up a new business, especially when you set up a tourism based business from scratch in the middle of a Global Pandemic. Yeah, that sounds even more stupid when you say it out loud doesn’t it….!?