Adventures by Disney guides bring the passion, make the magic: Travel Weekly

Infusing guides with ‘WOO’

Not surprisingly, Disney doesn’t merely hire guides; it recruits, auditions, trains and molds them.

“Every year, we always have over 1,000 applicants to be Adventure Guides,” Combs said. The company weeds down applicants and brings the most promising to Florida and puts them through an all-day audition. It ends up hiring about 1% of applicants, making securing an Adventure Guide job more competitive than getting into Harvard.

Among their attributes, Combs said, Disney looks for the “WOO”: The gift of Winning Others Over. “When you hire a certain type of individual, they can help mold the group and make people be cohesive who might not otherwise be cohesive on a different product.”

Once they select Adventure Guides, Disney brings them back to Orlando to go through a weeklong orientation. They go through classes like Traditions (again, Traditions spelled with a capital T).

“Traditions is the first class that every cast member goes through regardless of role,” Raser said. “It’s not about training you on the tasks … but about giving you the pride and understanding of where we’ve been as a company and where we see ourselves going.”  

He added: “It’s not, ‘Day 1 you’re going to Arizona-Utah, here’s the itinerary, let’s talk through it.’ It’s setting that strong foundation of safety, guest courtesy and attention to inclusion. And then, what is the Show we’re telling as well as the story.”

After the trip-development team puts an itinerary into the works, it give guides leeway when on the tour. And it provides the guides with a bit of fun money (e.g., a “magical moments” budget) to enhance guests’ experience or for seemingly spontaneous antics. 

Upon our arrival in Moab, just ahead of a rafting trip down the Colorado River, we stopped at a convenience store so guests could stock up on practical items like water shoes and waterproof shorts. Rainey and Hage, on the other hand, emerged from the store with armfuls of kid-friendly water guns. 

Thus, the rafting trip included water warfare between the four rafts filled with guests. Those who didn’t have water cannons used paddles to fling water at enemy rafts, while our rafting guides maneuvered us downriver. Once the rafts landed at Take Out Beach, the water battle continued, with unaffiliated beachgoers looking on with bemusement.

The water guns remained in the hold of our purple All Aboard America coach (no outward Disney branding, although our driver, Theresa, occasionally wore Mickey ears), next to supplies like plastic water pistols, which had been used by a half-dozen guests recruited by Rainey and Hage to “hold-up” the bus at the Grand Canyon; after the “thieves” boarded, they distributed cotton bandanas for everyone to use against the dust in Monument Valley.

 But magical moments could be heartfelt, or personal. Rainey engaged my daughter in an impromptu game of chess in a resort lobby, and he joined a soccer game with a local kid during a stop to view dinosaur tracks in the Navajo Nation. 

On one night at the Grand Canyon, Rainey and Hage invited guests with no fixed dinner plans to join them at the Hopi Point lookout for a sunset picnic. About half the group showed up. 

Hage said he enjoyed the “freedom to be able to think out of the box, be creative and create even a better experience for guests that is going to surprise them … personally I think a lot of guides like that, that we have that freedom to make decisions, or ideas come up as we go on these tours, so they’re always different and fresh.”  

Hage said that guide teams develop a certain rhythm and learn each others’ strengths to play off each other. And they’re working together throughout the tour to trade off talks and tasks and plan out the best magical moments. 

Given Rainey and Hage’s professionalism, expertise and charisma, I felt ready to follow either of them to our next vacation (my daughter and I were on the tour as guests of Disney). 

And I’m not alone. Raser said that guests will seek out opportunities to take another trip with the same Adventure Guide, and Marvelous Mouse’s Dillon confirmed that travelers will “follow the guides” and book a vacation based on where that guide will be. “They put huge value in those guides,” she said.

 But the Disney folks also told me something surprising: Rainey had been a guide before, but our tour was his first with Adventures by Disney. He was paired with Hage, who was one of Adventures by Disney’s most senior guides and a veteran of the Arizona and Utah tour.

“I think that … speaks to the caliber of guides who are coming into Adventures by Disney,” said spokesman Aaron Wockenfuss, who was also on the trip and experienced the David and Mike show firsthand. “I was blown away by David for that being his first trip; had he not told me, I never would have known.”