The International Day of Tourist Guides commemorates the founding of the World Federation of Tourist Guide Associations on 21 February 1990.
This year, the way we tourist-guides run the celebration of our special day has completely changed. Covid-19 has forced us into a virtual version of our presentation. For a better presentation, we in the Slovenian Professional Guides Association (‘Klub Profesionalnih Turisitčnih Yodnikov Slovenije’ in Slovene, or KPTVS for short) connected with colleagues from the Association of Tourist Guides of Slovenia and prepared a diverse set of broadcasts of events from all over the country. We discussed our common aims and came up with a name and theme for this year’s event: Interpreting Slovenia!
As part of this, KPTVS wanted to develop a new city tour to mark the occasion. A group of people linked with the api-tourism story got together to produce this. The api-tourism story uses the wandering of bees as an interpretive theme. In the end we decided on a combined virtual and live tour (following all Covid-19 health measures). We were all very excited about the premičre of this new city tour.
Using existing best practice, we transferred the principle of the Bee Trail from Ljubljana and adapted it for the city of Maribor. Ljubljana’s Bee Trail was one of the venues for the IE Certified Interpretive Guide (CIG) course in November 2018.
Our beekeeping and tourist-guide colleague, Jasmina (also a CIG and api-tourism guide), took us around the city and introduced us to the attractions related to bees in the urban environment of central Maribor: a hive on the city terrace, a shop with candle and gingerbread products, a honey house with a newly emerging garden of honey plants.
At the same time, a team of two KPTVS members broadcast the events to the studio, which provided live broadcasts via one of the internet channels.
The Bee Trail in Maribor is also accessible for people with special needs. For them and everyone else, the beekeeping heritage in the city will be a new challenge for a visit – we hope those visits can start in person as soon as possible!
In the end, we can say that an interesting guided tour has been created, which through interpretation of locations, events, stories and people creates a new chapter in the tourist offering of the city of Maribor.
Dominika Koritnik Trepel is a tourist guide, api-tourism guide and instructor, and an IE Certified Interpretive Guide. She was a founding member of and is secretary of the Slovenian Professional Guides Association. She lectures about accessible, pilgrimage and api-tourism during specially prepared courses for tourist guides. She can be contacted at: trepel@siol.net.
To cite this article: Koritnik Trepel, Dominika (2021) ‘International Day of Tourist Guides celebrated in Slovenia’. In Interpret Europe Newsletter 1-2021, 21.
Available online: https://interpret-europe.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Newsletter-Spring-2021.pdf
