If you love art, want to work for yourself and make quite decent money, then streetart is an option that you should consider. Thanks to big names like Banksy amongst others, streetart is now more popular than ever and auctioned works can and does sell for millions. With such high interest in the medium it’s never been a better time to launch your own tours and in this article Guidecris, a German based streetart tour guide lays out what he has learned during his career.
PM: Hi Guidecris, so let’s say someone decides tomorrow they want to be a street art tour guide. What’s the next step?
GC: First, you would need to create the concept of your tour. What area and what artists would you cover? Then you need to create chapters and do a timing for your tour. Take pictures and test the tour with real people. Then, look for a marketplace where to offer the tour. marketplace is a website, a platform where the tours are offered.
PM: Can you elaborate on what you mean by ‘concept of the tour’
GC: The concept of the tour means that you need to choose one or more subjects to combine to the script. Normally you would have Local History and Art as two of the main subjects. These are the ones that I use.
But, the options are infinite, as infinite activities are subjects you can choose for your tour. You must think what you want to offer to the attendants of your tour. If I were in London for example, my subjects would be local history and Street Art combined because that’s the tours I do.
Now, a big market is open in London for Black History Tours. This is a subject I never used that I believe would be totally successful.
Black History tours in London are a trend now.
Other possible subjects:
Foodies Tours, visiting museums or gallery tours, tours in parks, or even cemeteries with other kinds of chapters of history involved. Architecture and History tours, photography tours, fashion tours… and I can follow. I have the scripts of my tours in London, by the way. I wrote some scripts I love in London. There are lots of chapters of history and architecture there.
And Street Art tours of course.
But Street Art tours are even better combined with History. But not everyone can combine both subjects so you must think what you can do when you want to start writing. A good Street Art tour with only Street Art must be perfect as well.
Once you have the concept, you need to start searching the content of the tour and start writing information you consider valid for your script.
And in this time you need to choose a title. The title is very important because is what it first engages the customer. Today, there is a new philosophy for the writers of tours for the title. Today, the titles must include a verb in the beginning that invites the customer to imagine his or her self doing the activity.
For example, my tour with Air BnB here in Berlin is called: ‘Discover Berlin Wall History and The East Side Gallery Tour’. With the verb “discover”, I’m making the perfect invitation to the customer to come and discover for his or her self the experience I’m offering with Air BnB.
Which are the subjects of this tour? The Berlin Wall History The East Side Gallery History (Street Art)
PM: What do you recommend as an ideal tour length in terms of time? And what are the considerations when figuring how to price a tour?
GC: In my case, the best time is 2 hours tour. Best times of the day: 12:00 – 14:00 15:00 – 17:00
The price in the beginning depends on the promotion you are willing to pay. If you put the tour live on a platform, the best thing is making 10 euros an hour. So 20 euros or pounds for 2 hours tour. But all of this depend on you.
If you want to pay for promoting your tour in any way? Maybe you need to increase the price. If you include an invite for the people like a coffee at the end of the tour. Then you would also have to raise the price.
That depends on you. And then someone will get a share of the total you get if you go to an exterior marketplace.
So probably you will not get the total 20 pounds per person in that case (But roughly you will earn per person like in between 15-17 euros)
It depends on the commission of the marketplace.
If you want to know more or get in contact with Guidecris then click this link: https://www.instagram.com/guidecris
