A Stitch in Haste

...sightseeing tour?

[T]wo recent college graduates are rattling the genteel world of Washington tour guides.

Ben Hindman and Brody Davis are giving tours for free.
...
Not entertained are the city's professional guides, who "really don't like us," says Hindman, 24, a Bostonian who found the inspiration for DC By Foot in Berlin, where he took a tour from a tips-only guide.
...
Actually, says Tom Whitley, who handles marketing for the Guild of Professional Tour Guides of Washington, D.C., "it would be foolhardy for highly skilled guides to get into some kind of a fight with people trying to pick up tours out on the street. Let's just say that it's much more likely that a person who wants a qualified guide will go out and get a professional guide."

I took one of those Berlin tips-only tours back in January — and the guide (an Aussie expat) was fine if a bit too unaesthetically punk in his appearance. In any case, the Berlin company is a large, full-fledged enterprise that interviews and trains the guides and advertises the service on their behalf (I believe the guides pay the company a per-diem fee in exchange for access to the tourists from whom they earn the tips). It's an entirely reasonable business model that seems to work well (especially for the better guides) — there were, for example, over a hundred tourists waiting when I went (on a bitterly cold January day, incidentally — my guide said that 100 people was dismally low turnout for that time of year).

More interesting to me is the fact that there even is such a thing as a "Guild [sic] of Professional [sic] Tour Guides of Washington, D.C." First, "tour guide" is not a profession, but merely an occupation — just as "journalist" is not a "profession" but merely an occupation. Second, I'm not sure that tour guides need a "guild" — which used to mean a limited-entry oligopoly structure sanctioned by the government.

Surely this "guild" isn't that kind of guild. No one would dare suggest that it is a proper function of government to establish a "tour guide guild" with legally enforced barriers to enrtry, right? No one would dare suggest that public health or safety are so threatened by dangerous tour guides that the government should start regulating the industry, with licensure and registrations fees and bans on tips-only business models, right?

Right?