The Professional Guide's Handbook
How to Lead Adventure Travel Trips and Expeditions
Professional guides have a lot of skills to learn and perfect to become successful. In the first book of its kind, The Professional Guide’s Handbook covers everything contemporary guides need to know to become successful in their profession. Professional Guide and educator Colby Brokvist covers skills for success, ethical standards, sustainability issues, leadership, and how to utilize all these skills when on the job.
The Professional Guide’s Handbook offers insight, wisdom, and real-life anecdotes from the author’s own worldwide adventures as an expedition leader. Readers will find a thorough and thoughtful text that looks at everything from leadership skills to the importance of stewardship practices in the outdoor industry. They will develop a better understanding of travelers and their expectations to group management frameworks. It will leave readers empowered, enlightened, and ready to lead their next trip with renewed confidence. Colby Brokvist has more than 20 years of experience in the travel and expedition industry and is a technically competent and accomplished outdoorist.
Colby Brokvist is a professional guide who leads worldwide expeditions for some of the most acclaimed companies in adventure travel. He was inspired to pursue guiding as a career during a through-hike of the Appalachian Trail in the summer of 2000. Since then, he has led hundreds of adventure travel departures, ranging from backpacking and trekking adventures to mountaineering and rock-climbing trips, sea kayaking and sailing voyages, and wildlife safaris. His expeditions have taken him to destinations as far-flung as Greenland, Antarctica, Africa, and Patagonia, as well as across the United States and Canada. In addition to fieldwork, Colby assumes a variety of managerial, operational, and consulting roles within the adventure travel sphere. His work centers on guide training, guide team management, and itinerary development. He sits on the board of directors for the Polar Tourism Guides Association and is a certified Senior Polar Guide through the same organization. He calls Boulder, Colorado, home.
