Thoughts on Giving Tours

I have been giving tours of the mansion and grounds at Grey Towers now for a few weeks and have been giving a lot of thought to the way I approach tours, and the ways in which I can make people understand the history I am presenting to them. Overall I have been a little bit disapointed with people's impatience, lack of attentiveness, and all out rude behavior on tours. I never gave a tour at Daniel Boone where someone in the group asked me to hurry up, or talked on their cell phone during a tour. These things have happened at Grey Towers.

The first thing I began to wonder was why? Was it the way I was giving a tour, or was it just that the people on the tour were in a rush or had other things on their minds? I think it was a little of both. The tour is supposed to last 50 minutes, but can easily last an hour if some people ask questions. This is just too long of a time to have to try to hold someone's attention. Most people have an attitude of "I'm not in college anymore, why should I listen to a lecture?" The other reasons for visitor's bad behavior is the location of Grey Towers. It's in Milford, the Pocono Mts., and the Delware Water Gap National Recreation Area is right near by. People have other things that they are doing while they are on vacation. They have dinner reservations, canoe trips, and hotels to check into. I think that at Daniel Boone they knew that the site was pretty large and they built more time into their schedules for it. At Grey Towers people think that they'll just poke around the house and the gardens for a few minutes and then be on their way.

So how do I make my tour more interesting for people? How do I hold their attention? I can't shorten my tour because I am not the one who determined how long it had to be in the first place, my boss did. I have experimented with a few things over the past few days with mixed results. I usually give a fairly long introduction (10 min.) outside of the house that fills visitors in on the construction of the house, how Gifford's father made his money, and I give an overvview of GP's life and work as a forester and governor. For a few tours I decided to keep the intro short and give more of that information once we got into the Great Hall (the first room of the house that is included on the tour). I thought that maybe it would keep people from getting too antsy to get inside the house. What I found instead was that people got very anxious to get out of the Great Hall after spending about 15 minutes in it, and they were getting even more impatient, and were less likely to ask questions about things in the room. I also tried to simplify my message. I spelled out my key messages right in the beginning of the tour by saying "these are the two things I want you to come away understanding after the tour today." I think that this helps, but most people understand the themes whether you come out and say it or not. I am also toying with the idea of using photos in the introduction to grab people's attention in the beginning of the tour.

We'll see how these innovations go. If they don't work, I will be convinced that as a nation we have collectively lost our attention spans, and that on our vacations we are in such a hurry to do all of the activities that we've planned that we don't take time to enjoy ourselves.