Guides: who needs them?

Guides. How many people use them I wonder. Do you? And I don't mean travel guidebooks. Nor the guides who take package tour groups around. And not the specialist guides who lead treks through mountains, jungles, glaciers and other hard-to-get places we might not otherwise have access to. I mean the specialized personal guides who people hire to escort them around a city for a few days, walk them around a museum or archaeological site, and take them on walking tours, culinary tours, and so on. I'd never given the subject much thought, until recently. We've only ever used guides a handful of times and on all but two occasions they ruined the experience for me and I swore I'd never use them again. I keep reading and hearing about people hiring guides: the owner of a travel website we were consulting on was creating itineraries that inevitably involved using a guide in each destination and sometimes several specialist guides in one place; in a travel magazine I read the other day a reader asked the expert to suggest guides she could hire in a popular European city; and a trip planner recently asked if there was a guide in Dubai I could recommend. Dubai is the last place on earth anyone needs a guide. The city is easy to get around, people are friendly, and everyone speaks English. And surely they're the main reasons you'd consider hiring a guide: accessibility challenges, hostile 'natives' and language barriers? I've occasionally felt while researching a guidebook in a place where we only speak the basics that we could have benefited from a translator. And when we trekked the hill tribe villages in Thailand, we certainly would have had a warmer welcome if we would have had a guide from the area - as promised! A visit to an art gallery or archaeological museum can be enriched by a guide familiar with the work on display. But it baffles me when I see a guide bringing a tourist into a café in Damascus and I overhear an explanation which seems to come straight out of our guidebook (the one we wrote!) or I see a guide walking a couple around an easily-navigable city such as Paris, Milan or Madrid. Part of the fun of visiting a place for the first time is getting lost.

Pictured? The last place I'd want a guide - no way would I want anyone to get between me and the wonderful assault on all senses that is Aleppo souq.