I did tours in the Canadian north as a pilot. Usually it’s a C206-C207 but if you only have two customers I’d take the C172 (Cessna).

I took a couple on a 45 minute sightseeing aerial tour to end up at their next reservation and go on a 3 hour walking tour. Something about them seemed a little off but I just chalked it up to nerves.

We landed in rather gusty conditions that kept trying to push us off the runway so I’m already annoyed.

I let them exit out the passenger door and then go to retrieve their bags.

I open the small cubby door at the rear to retrieve their backpacks. As I lift the first backpack the tail of the aircraft slams violently into the dirt. Not knowing what had just happened, I look up over the tail to see the woman I just flew here sitting on the tail of my aircraft. Apparently she thought she could get a nice selfie sitting on the tail of my airplane.

I proceeded to call her every name in the book and threw their stuff off to the side

Thankfully the tail wasn’t visibly damaged but I had to fly it back wondering if I was correct.

I worked at a living history farm museum. I had a kid that was climbing on stuff the whole tour in the farmhouse and trying to get behind the smith in the blacksmith shop during a demo.

After the tour, when people were allowed to roam the grounds, I heard his mom screaming and looked over to the barn where this kid had climbed the fence into the field with our longhorn oxen and was trying to poke them with a stick.

I walked over and calmly told him to get out of the field before our lazy oxen decide they’ve had enough, but this little turd decides to look me in the eye and smack Ted on the but with the stick like it’s a riding crop. Ted, bless him, just kinda jumps a little and whips his head around with a ‘WTF dude’ look on his face. But seeing as he’s a longhorn, he just wipes this kid out with one of his horns when he turned his head. Kid goes flying into the dirt and is having a meltdown. Mom is freaking out. I’m like dude, get the heck out of the pen before Ted actually gets mad.

So this kid was crying and trying to climb the fence out of the field and Bill, who has been watching this whole thing waits until the kid is almost over the fence and walks up to him and nudges him in the butt with his nose, pushing him off the top of the fence. It was all I could do to keep from laughing.

The kid was fine, Ted was fine, but the kid and his mom were promptly kicked out of the museum. Their dad and little sister were allowed to stay because she was well-behaved and was just enjoying petting the goats at the petting zoo. So since the kid had to leave but his sister didn’t there was a temper tantrum in the parking lot that could be heard all the way to the other side of the farm.

But the oxen got some extra grain that night, so I guess they won in the end.

I work at a brewery taproom and take people on brewery tours. During fermentation, CO2 is produced and excess comes out through a run-off pipe and into a water bucket.

One of the attendees (who was being a pain and trying to be funny but nobody was laughing) asked me what the pipe was for, so I gladly explained. He then asked what would happen if he breathed it in… in disbelief of his stupidity I told him he would pass out and probably damage his brain. He then proceeded to grab the pipe and take a breath. Dude was immediately ejected and barred. Some people are just beyond belief.

Tour guide at a university.

Small group gets into our gardens where there’s a big turtle pond. One girl gets excited and wants a close up of the largest snapping turtle. Girl loses her phone to the turtle and tries to get the university to buy her a new one. Girl was lucky she still has all her fingers…

Saw a kid knock over a set of replica civil war rifles that were on display, and then his mom got mad at the tour guide for yelling at him. The kid and his mom were kicked off the civil war tour.

Most of the actual artifacts were kept behind glass but the rifle replicas were only behind a piece of rope. The kid was definitely old enough to read the signs warning people to not touch stuff and to stay within the tour zone.

Couple of guys I used to play cricket with went on a school trip to Auschwitz and decided to steal a small pair of glasses and some buttons they found half-buried in the ground.

They were detained by Polish police while they were leaving the site.

Hard to know what goes through people’s heads sometimes.

My cousin is a tourist guide and biologist, most of his tours are in Africa. He instructed his group of 20-25 people including kids not to wear any type of earrings or collars especially shiny stuff since they were about to go into a thick forest to try to see a bunch of animals. This is very important because 20-25 people make a lot of noise which makes wild animals run away or hide, it’s even worse if they’re wearing shiny stuff they can spot from far away. Okay so this woman complains, decides to wear shiny earrings anyway, cousin tells her to get rid of them or she ain’t coming with the group so she obeys but puts them on a bit later.

Some species of monkeys in that area LOVE shiny stuff. They ripped the earrings from her ears.

I work in a National Park, and once saw a lady with a very thick New York accent try and pet a black bear.

I watched a man run up the side of the platform of the Winged Victory statue at the Louvre and throw his arm around it for a photo. Security got him down pretty quickly, but I’m shocked he actually made it up there in the first place. People in the Louvre have a consistent disrespect for priceless things.

A friend of mine does tours of whiskey museums in Dublin. Somebody once took a dump in one of the exhibition rooms.

I was working on a tourist island in Australia when this man pulled out almost all the back feathers of a peacock because he wanted to keep one. He sneaked up behind it, and grabbed a huge handful and yanked them all out. He was immediately escorted off the island. The peacock had a huge bare patch and most of its beautiful feathers were gone.

I had a guest, while snorkeling, try and grab the tail of a barracuda as he swam up behind it. Luckily I was able to hit the guest with a dive fin from the boat to stop him before he got ahold. If he had grabbed on, I’m sure he would have been ripped to pieces by that fish.

I was a curator of a castle in the UK. The keep was mainly a ruin but still stood 4 storeys high and was on the edge of a cliff. The amount of tourists that used to climb up the crumbling stonework right to the top just to have their picture taken was unbelievable! It was a 300ft drop onto solid stone.

We also surprisingly had a lot of Americans try and chip off bits of the stonework off to take home as a souvenir. It got so bad that when we did repair and restoration work to the stone we kept all the extra chippings in a big bin near the gate with a sign on it saying if you want a bit of castle please take some of this and don’t hack it off the buildings.

I was giving a tour of my university to the mother of a potential student. She tried to recruit me into a popular pyramid scheme and then, when I tried to change the subject by asking what she did in her spare time, she told me about her conspiracy theories that she gives public talks on. They included the dangers of Wi-Fi, 5G, and chemtrails, and that the moon landings were faked by Stanley Kubrick, who was shortly thereafter assassinated by the CIA and replaced by a clone.

I cut the tour short. Felt pretty sorry for her daughter who appeared to think these theories were reasonable and had also been recruited into her mother’s pyramid scheme at 17.

I’m in the middle of talking and someone’s phone rings. Ok, that happens sometimes, and usually they’d just cancel the call or step outside. Nope, this guy answers the call and starts talking on the phone, only a few metres from where I’m standing. I think, ‘oh he’ll just quickly explain he’s busy and end the call.’

Nope! He starts a conversation… The rest of the group glare at him and I’m put in an awkward position because my workplace placed a huge emphasis on politeness. So I suggest to him to continue his call in the hallway, just outside the room we were in, to which he replied, “No, I’m fine here,” and went back to his phone conversation.

I’m doing my best to talk to the rest of the group (about 25 people), but he’s so loud! Eventually this Chinese woman yells across the room at him: “Shut up, we want to listen to the lady, not you.” That worked. But I just couldn’t imagine having the nerve to ruin everyone’s experience like that because you’re too selfish to talk on the phone outside.

Also, the place I worked allowed photos but had a strict ‘no photos of the staff’ rule for privacy reasons. I always explained this at the start and 99% of people were cool. One day I had a particularly happy snapper who got right up in a staff member’s face to take a photo, like I’m taking centimetres from his face to take a photo. The staffer was just some random middle-aged white dude, so I’m not sure why the fascination, but he was livid. It’s like I saw it happen in slow motion so couldn’t do anything to stop it. That guy was removed from the tour.

I work in a castle with some incredibly old and delicate books and furniture. This nightmare of a tourist let her bratty kids run everywhere, grabbing and pulling at everything. I had to get a child out from under one of the beds and she just didn’t give a toss.

During my summers in college, I worked as a raft guide on a whitewater river in the southeast. It wasn’t a difficult job; the two biggest things we were responsible for were running our trips in a timely manner and ensuring that the guests in our boat had a fun and SAFE trip down the river.

The safety part is important, because people visiting the river frequently forget that it is a natural wilderness feature and carries all of the associated dangers. We frequently received questions about whether the rafts were on tracks, whether I actually had to do anything in the back, and (my personal favorite) whether the river went in a circle and we would end up back where we started. This last question was particularly funny because we TOOK A BUS from the rafting outpost to the put-in of the river — why bother if we were going in a circle?!

One summer afternoon, I had a boat with three groups of two people; one of those groups was a mother and son. The mother seemed nice, if timid, as did the son. However, as I was going through the routine of explaining the safety concerns and paddle commands, it started to dawn on me that he was not very bright. There was nothing wrong with him — he was just dumb.

Once we were on the river, he almost immediately developed a habit of checking the depth of the water with his paddle. He would incessantly plunge the blade into the water without care nor concern for his surroundings and circumstances. The water on this river is pristine. Almost crystal clear. The riverbed is visible almost constantly, and still, this young man felt the need to verify the veracity of his own eyeballs by shoving his paddle into the river like some sort of deranged perpetual motion machine.

Of course, I warned him against his actions. At first, my concerns were that his depth-checking interferes with his ability to follow my commands and paddle. Eventually, however, my pleading grew more desperate as it dawned on me that this child paid no deference to my authority. He answered only to chaos.

It finally came to a head when, in a portion of the river that was extremely shallow (probably no more than a foot deep), he plunged his paddle into the riverbed with a force that shook the surrounding countryside. Like Excalibur, the paddle wedged itself among the rocks, perfectly erect. The boy, with a staid iron grip that could only be wielded by someone incredibly dense, kept his hand on the paddle as the rushing water carried us away from its new location. In one swift motion, he was wrenched from the raft and landed in a foot of water. He wore a face of bewildered idiocy.

It was quite satisfying to keep his paddle in the back with me for the remainder of the trip after I returned him safely to the raft. All he could do was stare wistfully at the riverbed, his poo brain longing to verify its depth.

I used to work at a heritage site. It was an old military installation with a lot of remaining original structures (bunk beds, cafeteria equipment, computers etc.).

Everyday it was a constant effort to remind people (read: kids) NOT to jump on the beds, not to slam doors open, not to punch every button like it owes them money.

The absolute worst was a group of kids on a school trip. Within the first ten minutes we’re walking through the tech portion of the exhibit, where we had a wall lined with Burroughs large systems machines (B5000’s), all behind this little fence about waist-high. I turn to demonstrate some of the pieces, and when I look back at the group one of them had jumped over the barrier, opened one of the units and started pulling out handfuls of digital tape from the reels inside.

I was about to jump on the kid when their teacher did just that. She jumped the barrier, smacked the kid’s hands and took him outside. I immediately ended the tour and had them all refunded, as I couldn’t imagine what else could happen.

I took a class of middle schoolers to a museum and one of my idiot students dragged his hand across a 3,000-year-old Indian painting. Later on I found out the object was almost certainly a reproduction but I nearly died of rage on the spot.

I used to give walking tours of Old Vegas back in the day. During one ill-fated March afternoon I had a group consisting of a mother and son, a British couple, a pair from Indiana, and a middle-aged man from China. Long story short, the Chinese man dropped his trousers and took a poo right on the sidewalk in front of the Golden Nugget without saying a word and carrying on as if nothing had happened.

Was on a tour of a small cave system somewhere in west Texas. It was really beautiful and right after the guide told us how long it took for all the stalagmites and stalactites to form she turned around to move on and some guy leans way over and snaps off a small one and shoved it in his pocket! I was so surprised I just stared at him and he smiled and winked at me like we had really gotten away with something and I was a co-conspirator or something.

Was at a reptile show and they let out some mini crocodile iguana type thing. I think it was called a dragon something? Anyway some kid decides to take his shoe off and wiggle his toes through the small rope gate we were against. Presenter says, “watch your kid, these will bite”. Kid removes his foot and immediately puts it back in when presented turns around, wiggles his toes again, and this dragon thing surges forward and clamps down. When the kid starts screaming, the presenter just looks on like “well I told you so” and removes it. Kid stops screaming, no one says anything, and presenter moves on. That’s what you get for ignoring instructions, and also for not parenting properly.

On an open topped tour bus in London – woman tries to dangle her toddler over the railing, then starts saying she’s going to complain to my manager when I told her to stop. Caught her doing it again and company policy said that anyone endangering their kids like that was to be removed from the tour, so the driver had to come up and march her off. She still insisted she did nothing wrong. Like, she literally had the kid’s feet on the side rail of the (moving) bus and was just holding him loosely round the waist. One low hanging tree branch, of which there were many on the route, and that kid was gone.

A guy peed on the side of an Omaha Beach bunker. Not out of spite or something, he just didn’t want to walk back to the portapotty, so he started peeing on a piece of history. Obviously not the worst thing that’ll be in this thread, but certainly made the rest of the group turn to him and ask what in the world he was doing.

I work at the National Cathedral, and a tourist took a small votive candle, and lit their friend’s hat on fire. It didn’t spread or set off any alarms, but it got through most of his hat and almost caught his hair on fire. He was also really overreacting, and he threw his burned hat into the organ. The Cathedral suffered from earthquake damage in 2011, and we borrowed one of their ladders to get it down.

Not a tour guide but I guess you could say I work in the tourism industry. I work ground crew for a company that does helicopter tours. Number one rule for customers is, “DON’T WALK UNDER THE TAIL BOOM, THE ROTOR WILL KILL YOU AND IT WILL HURT.” It’s unbelievable how many people have a death wish out there. People see the fastest way to the other side of the helicopter and don’t stop to think, “Oh hey, that spinning blade may or may not slice my whole head off — let’s see how close we can get to it!”

Tour guide/boat captain in the Caribbean.

We had about 40/50 people on the boat, got off. We would normally go feed swimming pigs and someone would get nipped by them for doing stupid stuff but nothing too serious.

Well, the next stop after that was another island where we would hand feed turtles, sharks, and stingrays. So we would tell the people to hold it with the the palm open and food in the middle for the stingrays and they would come over the top and take it out. For the turtles and the sharks — put the food in the water holding it between the tips of your fingers and when they are coming, it let go.

Of course, this dingus decided he would be tough and feed this baby shark, no longer than your forearm, without letting go. Shark proceeds to bite his fingers; he screams and jumps up out of the water and flicks it off of his hand, pulling one of his finger nails off in the process.

So that’s one I always remember.

I was a tour guide for my college on open day. I was leading a group of prospective students and parents, and there was one bunch who didn’t appear to have any teenagers with them and spoke only Chinese. Whatever, maybe they’re applying as mature students.

My college is pretty obsessive about the lawns. There’s only one lawn you’re even allowed to walk on (no food, drinks or music allowed though), all the rest carry a £5 fine if you get caught. So we’re walking around the lawn on the path, and the Chinese group start wandering onto the lawn and away from the tour. I try to bring them back, but they don’t seem to understand.

Another parent asks a question and I have to move on with the tour. We come back around to the lawn a few minutes later and they’ve set up a small tent and are hammering tent pegs into the perfectly manicured grass. One lady is picking flowers from the flowerbeds. I called security and when they grabbed a passing Chinese student to translate that this was unacceptable, the visitors started screaming at the poor guy. They had to be kicked out by police.

I was on a tour with my family in Cambodia and we visited Angkor Wat. Now as everyone knows, Angkor Wat is teeming with tourists day and night. There was a long line to climb the Bakan (basically the topmost tower, wherein the steps are very steep). It was a hot day and when it was almost our turn, a middle-aged man took two steps, fell backward and started having a seizure.

People came to his help immediately. However, one man who was also crowding around him did nothing but pull out his cellphone and start recording. Thankfully, everyone noticed and started yelling at the guy to put that thing away. He acted like the victim though and he said he was “just trying to help”.

There’s a small hill on a pedestrian footpath outside my university. Once, I witnessed a Segway tour attempt to use this path. The first Segway slowed to a stop as it reached the top of this hill. The second Segway sped up in an attempt to make it over, and crashed into the first Segway. One by one, each Segway crashed into the one in front of it, toppling over each other. The pathway now has a “no bikes or Segways” sign.

I used to give “Naturalist Boat Trips” through a coastal area in Florida. Very slow, see dolphins, learn history, see lots of birds and learn about them, horseshoe crabs, island ecology, etc.

I would usually start as we left the dock by talking about some of the small commercial fishing boats there and how they worked. Then, on to the history of the area. By this time people would typically be asking questions.

One nice young couple said… nothing. Other than saying hello when they got on the boat — and they were the only ones on the boat — they said….NOTHING. I had no idea what to do. Did they hate it? Did they love it? Should I keep talking? Should I shut up? I was sweating bullets.

So I more or less talked for the first hour (not constantly, but some) and for the second hour, I didn’t say a word. I figured if they wanted to say something or ask a question, they would. The only sound for that last hour was the low hum of the boat engine and the occasional loud bird.

At the dock, they thanked me and gave me a tip and walked away. To this day, I still can’t figure out what was going on, but it was my most memorable time as a guide.

I saw a kid throw a whole bag of chips in a dolphin pool, like almost a full bag. You weren’t actually supposed to have food in the dolphin show but this little turd brought a bag of chips nonetheless.

They had to stop the whole dolphin show after he did that and I can’t remember but I think he and his parents got kicked out afterwards.

Didn’t happen to me, but one of my company’s tour guides was on a flight with a bunch of middle schoolers. One of the boys got caught playing with himself. In his seat. Next to a girl who wasn’t even from his school.

I used to be a tour guide at a primate sanctuary with a strict ‘no touching policy’. At the end of the tour there’s a suspension bridge, tourists go first, guide goes last as per the rules. I always warn the tourists that the other side is the territory of a Hanuman langur monkey and he doesn’t screw around, keep your distance etc. He doesn’t attack people out of nowhere, but he likes showing his teeth and screaming, which scares tourists.

Anyway, one tour I get to the other side of the bridge, and a tourist got bitten. He says the monkey just bit him out of nowhere. When I asked the other tourists, they told me that, no, he had tried to pet the Hanuman. Dumb guy got what he deserved

I used to give tours at my university. There was a group of middle schoolers I was giving a tour to (to show them why they should want to go college… yada yada).

There was this one kid who kept trying to sneak away and was whistling at just about every girl who walked by. Weird. Okay, whatever, he thinks he’s a big shot.

Then a very attractive girl comes jogging by us, and he tried to GRAB HER and starts AIR THRUSTING at her while he watches her run away from us. I was mortified.

I ended the tour. The teachers didn’t even care; that was probably the worst part.

Not me, my best friend was a tour guide on an island off the Australian coast. He saw one of the tour ignore the huge signs warning people not to go to the edge of the water.

Predictably, the tourist got hit by a huge wave and swept out to sea.

I know it was the worst thing the tour guide ever saw because he and my best friend both went into the sea to rescue the tourist.

And they both died.

Funniest guy I ever met. Miss him most days.

The tourist who caused it all? Predictably, he survived. Pretty sure he doesn’t feel too good about the whole thing.

Tour guide at my university.

I led a tour with a very overbearing father and his quiet daughter, among 4 other people. As I led the tour, I tried my best to gear the information toward the students’ interests and chosen programs to make sure they got the most information.

In the middle of my tour, I referred to the daughter’s program and the dad just blew up, yelling at me that his daughter is underage and it’s unprofessional that I hit on her on the tour.

He asked to speak to my supervisor, who helped me explain to him that I’m gay and I had had a boyfriend for almost a year at that point.

I wasn’t the tour guide but I was on a tour of Namibia and had a Zimbabwean guide who was telling us his craziest stories. He had a couple that was married who were on their honeymoon who were on one of his trips. One night, everyone is sitting around the fire and chatting (just as we were) and this couple gets up to go to the bathroom. This is a campsite so they walk off into the darkness towards the toilets.

A few minutes later the guy runs back alone, crying and panicking. Everyone asks him what happened. “I think my wife was killed by a lion.” Gasp, shock. Everyone is freaked out, asking him what happened, and as he’s trying to explain, the now-irate wife walks up to the campsite and starts yelling.

So what had happened? Well, they’d walked off, and at some point near the toilets, they both heard a kind of snuffling noise in the underbrush, clearly an animal rooting around. The husband completely freaks out, pushes his wife towards the noise and down to the ground, screams, and runs away. Spoiler alert, it was not a lion and the wife was not pleased at the attempts at being sacrificed. The guide told us that they didn’t speak the entire rest of the trip and they he believes they got divorced. Hilarious.

We were in Australia, visiting Uluru. There was a section where it was so sacred that photographs were not even permitted; I leave this couple alone to take in the scenery and I come back approximately 7 minutes later to see them full blown naked and doing it! If it’s too sacred for cameras, it’s definitely too sacred for that.

Not a tour guide, but was doing an English language camp for foreign kids.

Took the kids on a day trip to London, which involved going up the London Eye ferris wheel. While in the queue, one of the kids started shouting that he had a bomb in his bag and he was going to blow everyone up. Almost got all 20 kids in the group kicked out.

Former whitewater rafting guide. There’s a calmer section of the river people can, if they choose to, hop out and swim through. They are wearing life jackets so you can just float through it.

This woman decides she wants to try it and hops out. After she pops up she slowly tilts forward until just the back of her jacket is out of the water and she’s completely still. After 5 or so seconds of this I start to realize this might not be intentional and paddle over and physically pick her head up above the water followed by her gasping for air. I haul her in the boat and ask what happened.

She said she didn’t know what to do as she’d “never been submerged in water before”. 1) why are you on a whitewater rafting trip? 2) why didn’t your strategy involve moving your body?

We’re pretty good at stopping tourists from doing too much damage. After being in the industry for a while you get a spidey sense for when people are going to do dumb things and can often steer them away from doing anything too bad. That being said, here’s one of my favourite stories to tell.

I was 7 months pregnant and it was the week before I went on maternity leave. I was driving out to one of our sites and to get there I had to drive (on the road of course) through our penguin colony. This particular species of penguin burrows underground and stays hidden in their burrow during the day, and comes out at night when birds of prey and other potential predators have gone to sleep.

As I’m driving out to the site, I realize the parking lot up ahead is full and people have started parking up and down the road. And that’s when I see a giant SUV pull off the road, drive between the bollards and into the penguin colony. I pull over as what seems like 20 non-English speaking tourists start to pile out of the vehicle and take selfies with the ocean backdrop. Staying as calm as possible and using sign language I point out the no entry signs of the bollards they drove past, the burrows they have just collapsed, inform them they may have killed penguins, and to get their vehicle out of the colony NOW.

Once I got them out of there, I started digging out the collapsed burrows to check for penguins. The first four were luckily empty but the last one had a breeding pair. I get the girl out, check her over for injuries, and having no where else to put her I follow protocol and tuck her under my left arm against my side. I get the boy out and put him in the same position on the right side and start to check him over. Remember how I said I was pregnant? Well normally, you hold a penguin down low almost on your hip, but because of my round tummy I was holding him more at the bottom of my ribcage. So when I turned my head to start my health check, the penguin reached up and grabbed my top lip with his beak and ripped straight through the middle.

It was about this time that the tourists walking along the road realized this ranger was holding on to two penguins. I had five or six tourists sprint through the colony towards me and start snapping pictures, while at the same time potentially collapsing more burrows. If any internet sleuths stumble across a picture of a heavily pregnant, angry-looking ranger, holding two penguins with blood pouring down her face let me know. I’ve been waiting for that picture to show up for 3 years and haven’t found it yet.

Happy ending: I chased away the photographers, popped the two uninjured penguins in a nearby unoccupied burrow, and radioed for backup to help with the parking situation. My lip healed without a scar, and both penguins left the following morning for a well deserved day in the ocean.

I was on a tour at Pompeii and the tour guide nearly had an aneurysm when some American parents let their children start picking rocks out of one of the historic houses. The guide was screaming, “These houses survived a volcano blast but they are going to be done in by your children while you do nothing!!” The parents still did nothing and the children were climbing and destroying things the entire tour.