When choosing an Antarctic expedition cruise, people often concentrate on the ship and its amenities alongside the itinerary, but there is one element that’s all too often overlooked but that we believe, can transform a simple voyage into something truly extraordinary – the guiding team. Expedition Guides bring an amazing wealth of polar experience to your trip, bringing to life making you an active participant in adventure, while teaching you about everything from humpback whales and glaciers to the history of early Antarctic exploration.
Expedition guides wear their expertise lightly, while making sure that your time in Antarctica goes as smoothly and safely as possible. To find out more about just how they do this, we spoke to Graham Charles, founder and programme director of the Polar Tourism Guides Association.
Professional polar guides
Antarctic cruising is a relatively young branch of the travel industry. The first purpose-built polar cruise ship took its maiden voyage in 1969, and in 1991 the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO) was founded to manage the responsible development of Antarctic cruising, based on the highest environmental protocols. In the last decade it’s been the turn of the polar guides to take the lead in raising the industry up even more.
Graham Charles has worked as an expedition guide for over 20 years. Before that he had helped establish a professional outdoor training and assessment scheme for outdoor guides in his native New Zealand. With expedition guides coming from such a wide variety of backgrounds, from marine biologists and ecologists as well those from the adventure travel industry, it was clear that there was an opportunity to standardise guiding qualifications.
‘I thought we could build something based around skills performance – an examination where an experienced guide and trained assessor looks at your performance and says, “This is a minimum standard or above, and that’s what we need to be a guide.”’ says Charles. ‘That was the genesis of it all.’
After calls from guides at a joint conference in 2015 for guides working in both Antarctica and the Arctic, Charles set about founding the Polar Tourism Guides Association, which came into being the following year. Its aim is to provide internationally recognised certification and professional development for polar guides and other field staff.
Getting qualified
Since its founding the PTGA has offered external testing for polar guides and qualifications that meet the international standard for Adventure Tourism Leaders and Guides. Charles is keen to stress that ship operators already had inhouse training systems in place, but the existence of the association has proved popular. ‘Operation managers see that a third party vetted system can help save them a whole lot of recreating the wheel,’ he says.
The nature of the qualifications offered gives an insight into the very specific operating conditions that expedition guides work in. These range from zodiac driving and radio and satellite phone communications to leading hikes in technical terrain (for those guides working in the Arctic, these also include things like firearm skills for polar bear environments.
Nearly 20 years into operation, the PTGA has more than 640 qualified guides in its ranks. The majority of Swoop’s favourite ship operators are now affiliated with the PTGA as Accredited Providers. This means that they collaborate on training initiatives and encourage their guides in their professional development to have over 80% of their guides qualified with PTGA status.
Crucially, all the guiding qualifications are tested by trained assessors out in the field, rather than an online test: practical learned experience is at the heart of has always made expedition guides the best at what they do. On one recent Antarctic trip, we sat in the ship’s lounge listening to a trainer do just that, reviewing with a new guide the morning’s excursions and how they’d been affected by the weather. It was an enlightening experience, and a measure of just how much knowledge a guide needs to do something as seemingly innocuous as driving a zodiac pulling a string of kayaks around an iceberg.
A polar community
For Charles, one of the biggest impacts that the PGTA has had, particularly post-Covid was in the creation of a worldwide guiding community, irrespective of which ships particular guides work on. This builds on the fact that when they’re working in the field, Expedition Leaders on different ships are constantly sharing information with each other about landing sites and local weather conditions. Simply put, in Antarctica, everyone looks out for each other.
To keep guides in the loop with current developments, the PTGA holds also an annual online conference to get guides ready for every new season. Guest speakers include trainer guides and representatives from IAATO. In recent years, the addition to the roster of scientists from the Antarctic Wildlife Health Network has helped ensure that guides have been able to clearly understand the state of Avian Flu in the region and how to ensure vital biosecurity procedures are followed by expedition teams and travellers alike.
In addition, the PTGA produces Brash Talk, a regular newsletter that has become vital reading across the industry. Its most popular feature is the ‘Guano Happens’ column, where past situations from the field are analysed so that other guides can benefit from the experiences of others.
‘As guides we all know how important it is to learn from our colleagues about safety management, says Charles. ‘Open discourse, sharing near misses and reviewing incidents are indicators of a mature and healthy industry culture.’ When potential hazards could range from a rapidly moving iceberg to an overly curious fur seal, it’s clear that guiding in Antarctica requires a rather different skill set and approach to risk management than in other destinations.
Building on success
While the PTGA continues to grow, Charles acknowledges that there are some guides for whom membership won’t always be appropriate, including those who just travel south for a few weeks every year and aren’t looking to become full time guides, or might have qualifications from other providers (Finland, he tells me, offers excellent qualifications for snowshoe guides). Guides for kayaking, snorkelling and scuba diving also bring their own qualifications from competent authorities. On top of that, all Antarctic guides have to pass an IAATO exam to be able to work in the region, irrespective of who they work for or their past experience.
But for Charles, who has been training trainers for nearly thirty years, the success of the PTGA shows that they’ve been able to build something that’s valued by both guides and ship operators.
‘We’ve created a community where guides don’t care which company you work for – they just want to be better at their jobs and they want to learn,’ says Charles. ‘The PTGA gives a new guide to the industry a connection to hundreds of different guides and different resources to learn from.’
That’s something that can only benefit cruise passengers. And when you’re out on a zodiac in some remote Antarctic bay, it’s reassuring to know that while your guide effortlessly gives you a talk about penguins or ice, they’re also constantly monitoring the wind and sea as they drive, to make sure your experience is safe as it can be.
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