Tour Guide Job Description

Pros of Being a Guide

I am a charter guide in Ketchikan, Alaska. I do not work in an office. I only happily work about half the year. 

Cons of Being a Guide

Time away from home, time away from family. After COVID happened,  it could be 100% on and then 0% off in one year. So it's a volatile, tourism is a volatile market.

How I Got Into This Career

I was a commercial fisherman to begin with. Commercial fishing is dying, it's hard to make money. I had to travel 3600 miles from North Carolina. I fished North Carolina, New York, Louisiana and here commercially and still didn't make it. I saw the tourism industry and the hundreds of thousands of people coming here. So it's a really lucrative place to take people. And as opposed to selling fish for money, whether we catch a fish out here or not, I'm gonna get paid.

Tips to Get Into Guiding

There's so much competition in the lower 48 states for the industry that they don't get paid much. They make very little money to do this  there. So I actually recruit from Florida because its sort of like a puppy mill for Captains because it's a real competitive industry with low margins but here (in Alaska) the margins are good. So I would say put yourself in an area that you can make money in and like something where the tourism is just so high that you know all I gotta do is get six people a day out of we got 12,000 passengers in town. So put yourself in an area to succeed.

Career Advice

If everybody at the town that you're trying to become a charter guide at is driving the shittiest truck and complaining and poor, I wouldn't probably try to recreate the wheel there because they've been doing it already and are struggling to survive. So a it's a cutthroat industry, but if you can get out here where there's a lot of people trying to go fishing, you can definitely make it. 

Salary

That guy right there is 30 years old, owns that house, he has three charter boats. He net last year $740,000 for his fishing. It's pretty good. He will be a millionaire by charter fishing. He's the only person I'll know that will be 40 with a million dollars in his back account from this industry though. So you know it's tough, but there are places to make it happen.