Underbelly Tours

One tour that's been getting a lot of press lately has been the NYC Underbelly tour of the South Bronx, conducted by Curtis Sliwa, radio personality and founder of the Guardian Angels (remember them?). I haven't taken the tour so I can't comment on the content - some people like it, some don't. But what I am curious about is if this is a financially viable tour.

My general gut reaction is no. You make money one way in tourism - you cater to tourists. All guides have their particular interests, and love doing their own off-the-beaten-path type tours, but almost always the market just isn't there. Guides like to think they're educators, and that their job is to get tourists interested in the things they don't know. While this is a noble pursuit, it's not a money-making one. And for every person who's going to walk around the Bronx with Curtis Sliwa (or go on any other kind of niche tour), there's 1000 who want to ride a double-decker bus and see the Empire State Building.

Now, I'm not saying that these kind of tours can't be a somewhat profitable and enjoyable side-job (and Sliwa's pay-what-you-wish model can make you more money than a set rate, but that's another post). After all, the only investment you need is time and a little marketing. But it's certainly not something anyone gets rich off of. Even the most successful of the independent owner-operators only manage to create a full-time job for themselves, and sometimes not even that. And any kind of special interest tour generally has to marketed as extremely high-end and expensive in order to be profitable.

The more comfortable tourists get, the less they want tour guides. And many niche tours are things that appeal mostly to locals. The type of tourist that's going to want to go on a walking tour of the South Bronx - in my experience, this is generally the young Euro set - is usually going to be comfortable doing it by themselves. And locals? What kind of self-respecting New Yorker is going to be suckered into paying someone to schlep around their own town?

However, there have been a couple very successful niche tours - chief among them the Sex and the City Tour, and the Hip-Hop tour. Even though they have different subject matter, they have more or less the same business model: buses, minor celebrities as tour guides (Sex and the City guides have to be working actresses, and the regular Hip-Hop Tour guides are Melle Mel, Kurtis Blow, and Grandmaster Caz), and a subject that has the appeal to tourists of introducing them to a kind of real-life, make-believe land that they have only seen on TV before.

The question is whether or not this tour has the same appeal. Curtis Sliwa is a recognized name in New York, but I don't think anyone out-of-town would consider him a minor celebrity. And there's not the comfortability of a bus - instead you're using a combination of the subway and your feet. However, the third criteria they have in spades - maybe even enough to make up for the lack of the first two. Not only is there always a certain voyeuristic fascination for "how the other half lives" (best evidenced in the Favela Tours of Rio), but the less dangerous and more sterile New York gets, the more there's an interest in the days when it wasn't. And you can combine this with the fact that it's way easier to take people around to places like the South Bronx now. After all, no idiot would actually give a tour of somewhere where you actually have to worry about people mugging your tourists. While Sliwa advertises safety because he brings along one Guardian Angel for every two tourists, the reality is everyone would be perfectly safe with just him.

So will you actually see the "Underbelly?" Like I said, I haven't taken the tour, but I highly doubt it. That's not to say it's not a good tour. I love the South Bronx, and think it's a very underutilized tourist area for a lot of different reasons. And quite honestly, this is the only way to market this type of tour, because as offensive and annoying as it is, the ghetto appeal is the only real reason why 95% of tourists are interested in the South Bronx (there's the Hip-Hop aspect also, which in my mind is very different, but is basically part of the ghetto appeal for most tourists). But I will tell you this for all tourists out there: As a tour guide, and as a traveler, you cannot see the "secret" or "hidden" or "insider" (which are highly relative terms anyway) through anyone you can google and hire on the Internet, no matter how they market themselves. Cities are not that easy. Nor should they be. Invest some time and energy in a city and its people, and they will reward you - and usually for free.

If you want a good cultural tour of the South Bronx, call up The Point, which does an excellent Mambo-to-Hip-Hop South Bronx tour.

The Players: Part 1 - Ticket Sellers

As I mentioned a couple posts ago, your tour starts off by buying a ticket. There's a million combinations - 2 day, 3 day, boat rides, helicopter rides, uptown, downtown. Generally, tourists will go for a standard all loops, 2 or 3 day pass. You can buy these online, through your hotel, through various travel agents and third parties, but the majority of people simply buy them from the guys hawking them on the street.

The first thing you need to know is that these guys are paid 100% (or very close to it) on commission. Because of this, they are the purest hustlers of anyone in the game, and have absolutely no loyalty to the company or to you, the customer. You can't really blame the ticket sellers - when the sales model of a business is "you don't sell, you don't eat" that's how it goes.

The take varies depending on the tour, but it's usually about 10 cents on the dollar of your ticket price. Of course, that 10 cents changes to a 100 cents if they can simply take your cash, put you on the bus, and never enter any records of it in the computer. If you're getting tickets for anything other than the bus ride this is tough, but if you're simply hopping on what's right in front of you, the guides usually don't care a whole heck of a lot about checking tickets. Get caught at that you're fired, but pull it off and you make a day's pay in 10 minutes. There's other, smaller, scams - charging for children's tickets instead of adults for instance - but all basically involve getting your cash and not telling the company about it.

Now, there's something else ticket sellers do all the time which is to tell you whatever you want to hear - and omit anything you don't want to hear - in order to transfer the cash from your pocket to theirs. You hear "buses all the time, boat ride, free museum, go anywhere in the city whenever you want to" but when you get down to what you can and can't do in practicality, you'll find you've paid for a lot you might not be getting. This isn't really a scam, but isn't really great customer service either.

Of course, the second thing you have to know is that nobody is at all interested in customer service. The tour bus business does not really have repeat customers, and as a result, customer service does not add anything to the bottom line - especially for the ticket sellers. As far as the ticket sellers go, you see the bus, they get your money and that's a wrap. Refund? They don't know the meaning of the word. What are you going to do, complain to the company? They don't want to give you your money back either. There's perhaps a little bit of concern for good word-of-mouth or online reviews, but as there's now only one company, that's pretty much not a worry anymore either. Once your money leaves your pocket, you have no leverage. My best advice is to always pay with a credit card, and don't be afraid to cancel the charges if you aren't happy.

I'm less familiar with the Red Bus (Grey Line), but the ticket sellers used to discount at the Blue Bus (CitySights) heavily, especially on the single ride night tour where every extra dollar is profit (it costs just as much to run a bus with 5 people on it as 50 people). It had gotten to ridiculous proportions until one time a guy who had already bought a whole bunch of tickets for his group from the hotel decided to ask about the prices with the guys on the street to see if he got a good deal. The street guys told him to return the tickets to the hotel, get their money back, come back to him and he'd sell them the tickets at a discount. The guy told the hotel, the hotel told the company, and the word came down that there was absolutely no discounting of tickets anymore. Doesn't mean you can't still bargain, but it's certainly not as-of-right anymore.

Ticket selling is a tough gig but you'd be surprised as how much someone can make. The top guys at both places made over 6 figures yearly. Now, that's an experienced person who knows the game inside and out and hustles all day, every day, 365 days a year - there's also plenty of guys who don't even make enough for lunch. But it's something I always point out as an example when people of a different kind of background complain about the lack of jobs and opportunity in New York. You want money? It's there - you don't need a fancy degree, connections, or any particular skill. Hell, you don't even need a Social Security Card or a firm command of the English language. All you got to do is throw on a yellow jacket, stand out in Times Square, and hustle like hell. So either get to it, or stop your complaining.

As with most everything in New York, the profession has its ethnic skews. A disproportionate number of the ticket sellers (and many other street vendors) are West African - just like a disproportionate number of the guides are Jewish, and the drivers Chinese, but those are other stories for other days.

There Can Be Only One

Well, this is some news

CitySights and Grey Line are merging. The short story seems to be one combined company, 60/40 split monetary wise for Grey Line, 50/50 control. Mark Marmurstein (Jack Marmurstein, the owner of City Sights' kid) gets a shot at running the thing.

Preliminary Analysis: Well, I can't say I know a whole lot about the business side of the deal beyond what I read in the press release. Grey Line comes with a better brand, more assets, more profit, and better marketing contacts - all in proportions greater than 60/40 so on the face of it it looks like CitySights comes out the winner. Grey Line is a subsidiary of an international company, while City Sights is a local family operation, so it looks like Grey Line decided to take a short deal in return for not having a competitor with a recession coming. Or maybe they just got tired of managing it.

However, business aside, this is definitely bad news for workers (and tourists). Competition encourages redundancy, consolidation encourages efficiency. The amount of tourists might stay the same, but if only one company is running routes, then 50 tourists can be put on 1 bus instead of 2. The math isn't quite as bad as half as many buses, and in the summer when there's more tourists than seats it shouldn't matter too much, but there'll be a lot less work in the non-peak season, and less options for tour guides.

A very good analysis of the situation from the worker's perspective is here. It mainly concerns Grey Line employees.

There's be many more thoughts beyond this one - any guest posts concerning the situation are welcome.

Why your tour sucked

If you rode the Blue double-decker bus last summer, chance are at least some of the following you'll recognize. The Red bus is a bit better, but not by much - Add longer lines but less general chaos. Since I never worked for them I can't really comment too much - check out this blog if you want the inside scoop on that company.

First, you were accosted on the street by a ticket seller promising the world (or at least New York) or maybe it was recommended by the Concierge. Stops everywhere, buses all the time, hop-on and hop-off to your hearts delight for three days, one low price. Throw in a cruise and a museum admission. Your questions were met with a heavily accented "yes, yes," you figured "what the heck" and bought. You might have even bought thinking that in addition to the tour part, that it was a great way to get around town. No paying for cabs! There's a fairly good chance the ticket seller claimed his credit card machine was broken and wanted cash. He printed out some strips of paper or gave you some tickets and pointed you to a bus on a nearby corner. And that's when your tour started to suck.

A bus came along, but didn't stop. Then an empty bus drove right by you. Another come along, but the guide tells you it's full and drives off. The ticket seller has disappeared or obviously doesn't know what's going on. Finally, after an hour, you manage to get on. This is going to be great! You sit down, ready for the tour, and hear some partially intelligible words through a static filled microphone by the guide. You get up to ask a question and the tour guide yells at you to sit down. A good thing you did also, because the bus is barreling along, and all of sudden stops short, almost throwing the guide over the side. Even though you bought the ticket because of "hop-on, hop-off," you're scared to get off, because you don't know if a bus that isn't full will come along again.

Well, at least the weather is good, and the view is nice. Riding along on a double-decker tour bus can be pretty fun. You wish you could hear though - there's someone jabbering away loudly in Italian next to you. You try to motion to the tour guide to ask them to be quiet, but he shows absolutely no interest in anything but talking into the broken mic about how this is a service profession, and you shouldn't forget to tip. And then it starts to rain.

At first it isn't bad, but when it starts to come down you decide to go downstairs. If you're on the Red bus, you're thinking that it would be nice if there were windows downstairs. If you're on the Blue Bus though, you're still wet thinking it'd be nice if there were a downstairs at all. Instead your tour guide gives you a flimsy yellow "poncho," and tells you there's not enough when you ask for two.

But it's OK. You've got a 48 hour pass, all the loops, the works. 48 hours is a long time. You're still ready for more (once it stops raining). And you don't have to worry about how to get back to your hotel - the bus goes in a loop, so you just stay on until you get there.

Except the tour guide kicks you off before your stop. He seems to kind of glance suggestively toward the box labeled "Tips," and offers you a grudging "thanks" when you throw in a buck. You ask how you get back to your hotel, and are told to walk, take the train, or take a cab. This is the end of the line. You could have sworn the ticket seller told you the buses run 24-7, but no, they stop in the early evening - you must have mistaken the "24-hour ticket" for "24 hour buses." The tour guide points you around the corner - maybe you can catch a "night tour" that will take that'll take you there. The line is down the block, but the buses seem to be filling up quick. Finally it's your turn - except when you get on the bus just sits there half-full. You keep asking when you're leaving and you keep getting "in 5 minutes" every five minutes. Finally it takes off and you learn this one isn't hop-on, hop-off. You got a two-hour tour, but not a ride back to the Hotel.

The next day though, it's a little less crowded. You decide to hop off and see the sites. You have a free museum ticket, but you're told the museum's closed. That's OK, you can still catch the cruise. The guide tells you that the cruise only leaves 3 times during the day, but you might make the last one if you hustle, and points you down the block. After 10 minutes walking, you reach a desolate industrial area, but you haven't hit the water yet. Another 10 minutes, you find the cruise terminal. The boat is taking off. No refunds or exchanges for tomorrow of course, but you can pay $40 for another ride. Instead you choose the $10 cab ride back to midtown. It sure would have been nice to know the times the boat leaves and that the museum was closed - you could have arranged it all perfectly.

An altogether unpleasant experience. You want your money back. You ask the tour guide about this, and he tells you to talk to the ticket seller. The ticket seller tells you to talk to the dispatcher. The dispatcher tells you to find the original guy who sold you the ticket, but how are you going to do that? Then he tells you to cancel the charge on your credit card, but you paid in cash. Exasperated, he tells you to call the office. You get a machine, leave a message, and never hear back.

Now, your tour could have been much different, without even a lot of effort. It could have been a pretty good experience - a smooth ride in frequent buses, space to sit, an intelligible tour guide more interested in pointing out the sites than asking for tips, an honest business transaction at the beginning where how the buses work and what you're getting are clearly spelled out, and you don't feel like you got hustled. But that's the thing - the double decker tour guide game is one big hustle. There's a reason why everyone acts the way they do, and it's not because they want to make your life miserable. It's simply because of how the business is structured. I'll spend the next few posts trying to explain.

How to deal wth racists

I am not a gay Uzbekistani. However, today I played one on the tour.

The easiest, most non-directly-confrontational way to deal with the people who had mentioned that they had gotten their hot dog from "that immigrant guy," was simply to be "an immigrant guy" myself. Since I'm white and have no discernible accent (for character purposes, I had left Uzbekistan when I was 5), sometimes the tourists feel OK letting stuff like that slip. I threw in the gay part just for fun.

Now most tourists , even the bad kind of tourist, are not racist. But there are various levels of ignorance that are shown on the tour - mostly by Europeans, who don't really have a great sense of what is or isn't appropriate, rather than Americans. In addition, Euros sometimes have kind of a voyeuristic fascination with black and hip-hop culture (and especially Harlem) that makes me cringe a little.

But occasionally you get some unapologetic backward Americans. Not 1960s style racist, and without any real malice, but who say things like "look, a real life Chinaman" (I kid you not, that is a direct quote from a tourist while driving through Chinatown), or wear a "welcome to America...now speak English" T-shirt. Or the person who asked my Canadian girlfriend on the tour "do you have blacks up in Canada like we do here?" And it's less what they say - it's more their reaction to what you're saying.

It's weird to deal with this. You've got a job to do, and you can't very well stop the tour and give them a lecture on inclusivity and tolerance and such. There's really only two things to do - start the general spiel about how great New York is for its diversity, or make yourself into the object of their prejudice so that the tourists feel like assholes and reconsider their thinking.

The first one is pretty fun - after my general spiel, my kicker is usually "it doesn't matter who you are, where you come from, whatever walk of life, there's a place for you in New York. There's even a place for Republicans - there's an entire Republican float in the Gay Pride Parade every year (which happens to be true). It's function is to make the point to the tourists that they're in our city, and they need to behave respectfully in it. I don't go take a tour of Mississippi and talk about all the rednecks around, don't come here and talk about "those immigrant guys."

The second one is easier said than done of course. I can pass myself as an Uzbekistani immigrant, or even half-Puerto Rican if I have to. And since I actually am Jewish, the laughing and pointing at the guys in the funny hats with the beards and curls (which happens a good amount) is also pretty easy for me to deal with. I routinely talk about my boyfriend if I get funny looks when doing the spiel on the Stonewall riots in the Village. But of course it's tougher when the object of ignorance is someone who I have no hope of reasonably approximating.

I don't act any different from how I usually do, or even do much of a different tour - in fact, part of the point of doing this is showing the tourists that just because someone happens to look and sound like them, they can't assume they aren't "that immigrant guy," or whoever else they might think it's OK to subtly ridicule. It's not a perfect solution, but it's the best one I can come up with. And it's always a lot of fun.

Horse Drawn Carriage Ban hearing tomorrow

Horse Drawn Carriage Ban Hearing at City Hall tomorrow - 1:00 PM

Some quick thoughts on the whole thing.

The ban itself: You can read the rationale for and against yourself. I personally don't think they should be banned, but I do think a few more rules are needed, and that the carriages shouldn't be allowed out of Central Park (except perhaps Central Park South) at any time.

The bills: There's two bills - a bill to ban the carriages and an industry bill raising the maximum rate to $54 from $34 for a half-hour, and establishing some new rules. I don't think the industry bill is perfect, but I do think the new rules are needed, and raising is fair considering it's been decades since it was raised. I'm actually kind of torn on this. Horse Drawn Carriages aren't like cabs - they're a novelty, not a basic part of the city or a serious means of transportation, and novelties don't need price controls. If someone wants to pay a million dollars to clomp around in Central Park at 3 miles/hour, who am I to say it should be illegal?

On the other hand, I can't stand how every entertainment-related activity in this town has doubled in price over the last 5 years, and seeing one more go this route kind of gets me in the gut a little bit. In addition, there definitely needs to be transparency in pricing. It doesn't so much matter what the price is, just that it's listed and room for shenanigans are at a minimum.

My personal solutions is that the price cap should be raised, but tipping banned. Aggressive solicitation of gratuities is one of the worst things about the tourism profession in New York (there'll be a lot more on this later), and the Horse Drawn Carriages are by far the worst offenders.

The Politics: PETA (the big sponsor behind the ban) was smart to go after a high profile, but small and unorganized industry. If nothing else, they'll get some publicity and fund-raising appeal out of it.

Avella is probably sponsoring this for much the same reasons - the chance to get some publicity, fund-raising opportunities, and volunteer manpower (all of which he desperately needs) behind his Mayoral run.

If I'm the Horse Drawn Carraige industry, I'm super-pissed at Council Speaker Christine Quinn as the entire industry is based in her district. Maybe there some politics or process involved I don't know about, but if your councilwoman's the second most powerful elected official in the city, you aren't supposed to have deal with bills to ban your entire industry.

The Prediction: There's no way this passes. PETA rallies, Avella grandstands, and the bill gets bottled up in committee. Eventually the industry bill passes but with some stronger regulations and maybe less of a price hike.

So you wanna be a tour guide... Part 2 - licensing

Now, you can't just decide you want to be a tour guide and go to it, like you might decide to be a bartender, or actor, or traveling salesman. You've got to have credentials. All tour guides are required to have an active license from the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs - the same guys who license everyone from tattoo artists to hot dog vendors.

To get the license you've got to jump through a few hoops - pay the money, currently $50 for a two-year license, get a certificate saying you don't owe child support, and pass a test, which is also $50. So yes - tour guides do know what they're talking about (mostly). Even if you're not a working guide, having a license is a little bit of a point of pride. It's a quick, official way to become an credentialed expert in New York. Well, expert might be a bit of a stretch. You can get a tour guide license without an 8th grade education, much less a history degree from an accredited institute of higher learning. It's kind of like becoming a Deacon in the Church - you're still a layperson, but an acknowledged layperson.

The test is kind of silly. It was pretty easy until 2003 (to put it in perspective, I passed after living in New York for three months). Then they decided to amp it up a bit. However, instead of just making the test harder, they also decided to make it into a lecture. So now some of the questions are a page long and don't really have a whole lot to do with the answer, but it is a better test in general.

People always ask me how to study for the test, and I have only a few quick suggestions.

First, ignore the DCA's lazy advice to read the Blue Guide. It's out of date, a reference book that you don't really "read" and has a couple of egregious errors in it anyway (the Flatiron building was never the tallest in the world, for starters).

Second, learn where and what the different museums are.

Third, go over the commercial traffic rules - a lot of being a tour guide is knowing where you can take buses - and know what streets in Manhattan go which way.

Fourth, casually read over the NY Times City Section from 2002 - that's when the test was written, and a lot of questions are taken from the articles.

Do this, and have some good, general New Yorker knowledge, and you'll be fine.

If you really want to ace it though, you can go right to the source. The entire thing was written by Justin Ferate, so maybe you should just drop him a line. I actually wrote kind of a snotty letter to him and DCA after I took the revised test, as it mostly consists of him showing off (as you can tell from the sample questions), but once I had a class with him and learned he took people the back way through a hole in the fence to the Vanderbilt Mausoleum in the Moravian Cemetery in Staten Island, I decided he was OK.

Now, the test is 150 questions. There's two different "passing" grades for the test: 97 and 120. Originally they were going to make all current guides take the test and pass with a 120, instead of grandfathering them in. When there was an outcry over this, they grandfathered in the existing guides, and lowered the passing score to 97 - but you still get a little star by your name as a special mention if you get a 120 or higher. You can check if your favorite tour guide got the star here (.pdf file).

Whether you need to be licensed or not in all practicality is a different story. Almost all large or mid-sized tour companies will check to make sure you're licensed, although a few unlicensed people have slipped through. Now, in a pinch the Blue Bus will throw someone on top of the double-decker who can't even speak English, much less is a licensed guide, and I wouldn't be surprised if some other companies did the same. Some folks let their licenses lapse out of laziness or lack of funds - one of the dumb things the DCA does is make the renewal date April 1st - right after the dead season, when a lot of guides are struggling to come up with the $50 for renewal. I've run into people who've been suspended from the large companies for letting their license lapse. On the other hand, just looking over the list right now there's at least one working (and very good) tour guide I know who has let his lapse without any apparent consequences.

Smaller outfits are a bit different. I know of at least one, high-end company that doesn't bother to get their guides licensed. And out-of-town guides rarely, if ever, get licensed (the legalities of them conducting tours is still fuzzy). Enforcement isn't like Rome (which as I've mentioned, is the only city with more cynicism toward tourists than New York), where roving bands of undercover cops patrol the center of the city, protecting the jobs of the officially designated guides. I've heard of the DCA doing license checks exactly once in the last decade. If you're a casual part-timer, it's really professional pride that dictates a valid license, not practical concerns.

But licensing itself is only a reflection of knowledge, and a limited knowledge at that. And knowledge is just one tool - and generally an overused one - in a tour guide's arsenal. A lot of guides think "most knowledge=best tour guide" and if you God-forbid find yourself in a group of more than a couple guides, you are guaranteed some "whose tour guide dick is bigger" competition regarding who knows the most about the city. But knowledge counts for less and less in this day and age of wikipedia and google. And there's certainly no guarantee that someone who has the little star (120 and above) by their name is a better guide than someone who doesn't, or even someone who flunked the test completely. And I know of zero tour operators that require, or even give preference to, someone with the star by their name.

Me? I could have been grandfathered in and skipped the new test, but as the DCA let currently licensed guides take it for free, I shlepped down to their offices on Lower Broadway. I scored a 123 and got the little star - but I had to take it twice.