Our guides are carefully selected from the best tour guides of Dublin.  Besides the necessary experience and knowledge, they’re chosen for their personality and ethos – they want to authentically connect with people and truly want to give them the best tour they’ll ever have.

We, however, believe that it takes a guide with the right mix of personality, listening skills, talents, professionalism, intellect, travel experience, enthusiasm, knowledge and passion to deliver a truly outstanding and memorable experience. Many tour companies just look for a few of those qualities.

At Dublin Tour Guide, we focus on a guide’s personality over their experience. Tour guiding experience can be acquired through training, but the personality fit for Dublin Tour Guide is grown through years of personal development. 

How we choose our guides: 

• Recruit trained and experienced guides (we prefer guides who have lived in another, preferably non-Anglophone, country. This perspective change is a difficult personal rite of passage and it has, as a result, a lasting impact on people: it enables them to be more empathic to those of different backgrounds and viewpoints.)
• Demonstrate our ethics and vision to them
• Ascertain their scores on various parameters (from knowledge and experience to communication skills and personality traits)
• Determine their suitability for small, private tours (our core business)
• Take them on as a trial guide until they get 3 stellar reviews
• On-board them as a junior internal guide and nurture them to become even better tour guides. The more 5* reviews they get, the more they’re paid.

We emphasize the importance of making a personal connection with Ireland through a very personable guide. Travellers don’t want to walk around a destination inside a tourism bubble. They want to experience the destination as much as possible, to really understand and feel the spirit of a place. The best way to do that is, naturally, with a tour guide, but a tour guide that doesn’t just relay cold facts like dates, but one who gives unique cultural insights and, most importantly, one who wants to connect with travellers.

Our guides have warm, extroverted personalities and therefore are sincerely interested in getting to know the traveller. As a result, in the course of just five hours, we establish friendships that have already lasted years. Invitations to come visit have been offered and accepted. In some cases, more than once. These travellers will never forget their Dublin tour.

We don’t focus on the black & white of history – academia. We don’t blabber on endlessly with superfluous information. We believe that the traveller’s attention is limited and so the guide must carefully choose the information. You don’t need to know the architect of a building (our guides do), but you do need to know what that building means to the people. A city without its people is called a ruin. We focus on informing, for example, you about how people feel about a building, what it means to them today and what it meant to them in the past.

Dublin Tour Guide was started in 2012 by Garvan Rushe to strive for something magnificent. Garvan wanted to give people the best tour they’ll ever have. Due to incredible success on TripAdvisor, there wasn’t enough Garvan to go around so he began a difficult search for tour guides who shared the same passion and values.

• We believe that people don’t just want ‘a tour’, but they want to experience the city like the locals do. They want to truly understand Dublin and her people on a deeper level. They want to know what it feels like to BE Irish.
• We believe that creating unforgettable experiences is what makes life worth living.
• We believe that memories are worth investing in.
• We believe the world needs to know about the cultural treasures of Ireland and how wonderfully unique and passionate the Irish are.
• We believe in connecting curious travellers with passionate and inspiring guides.

We are embarking on a journey to transform ordinary trips into extraordinary ones. 

Our goal is to give the client the best tour they’ll ever have. 

We want the client to not only see Dublin but feel it. We want every visitor to remember Dublin in five years and recall how they felt when they stood on the cobbles of Dublin Castle or the hallowed ground of the General Post Office. We want the client to recall fondly the charming and lovable guide with whom they made a deep connection. The client will look back on the tour and feel like they didn’t pay for a tour with a professional tour guide, and it was merely a transaction, but rather like they met up with an old friend.