Hi, I'm Rachel.

Customer service was my first career

Before I led tours, I ran an oral-surgery practice and served as an executive director. My obsession there was the same one I have on the road: how people feelwhile they're in your care. I trained my teams with the same customer-service playbooks the Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons use, because nobody should be able to say exactly why they felt looked after. They should just leave knowing they were.

We once spent a full staff meeting on a single question: at what exact moment in a patient's visit should we hand them their blue information folder? It sounds excessive. It isn't. The moment you hand someone the folder changes how cared-for they feel. That's the level of detail I now bring to every tour day: the hotel check-in, the seat rotation, the timing of the lunch stop.

I'm not your history teacher

I tell stories. At the Lincoln Memorial, I give students one job: go up the steps, find the line of the Gettysburg Address that speaks to you, photograph it, and come back and tell me why. The answers I get back, about a mom or a brother or a moment at home, are the whole reason I do this. If a story makes you want to learn more, I've done my job.

Grown-up tours get the opposite of a script, too. In Berlin, the stories come from my own years living in Germany. Guests put it better than I can:

“The stories you tell us are way better than any book.”

The calm in charge

The first thing every group hears from me: my job is to make sure you're safe, there's a bed under you and a pillow under your head every night, you're fed three times a day, and then that you learn a little something and have a lot of fun. Teachers and group leaders tell me the moment they meet their tour director, they finally exhale: someone's in charge, someone's taking care of it.

Reading the room is the real skill: knowing what a group of eighth graders can absorb in the four minutes before they scatter, and when a coach full of adults wants the longer version.

Credentials