According to the law, a guide applying for certification must have a higher or secondary vocational education, as well as additional professional education in the guide profile.
The exam itself consists of two parts: a test and a practical task. At the first stage, guides must correctly answer 30 questions on socio-political topics of the city, culture, architecture and history of St. Petersburg, as well as on the methodology of the excursion. In the oral part, applicants for certification must tell the commission a fragment of an excursion on a given topic.
Those who successfully complete the test and the oral question will receive a certificate and an ID card. The data of permit holders are entered into a special register of the Ministry of Economic Development of Russia. Guides must confirm their qualifications every five years.
– If a person works and organizes excursions to the main cultural sites of the city, then it is easy to prepare. As soon as the commission understands that the examinee answers confidently and knows what he is talking about, the certification is considered passed, says the guide Alexandra Zhivulko.
Representatives of the professional community point out that the exam is still young and requires “polishing.” Many guides found some tasks inflexible and noted errors and inaccuracies in them.
– I received an oral question about the route to Pushkin. In practice, I do not conduct excursions there, since only full-time guides can work in the museum-reserve itself, and accompanying tourists as a transfer guide is not very interesting for me from a creative point of view,” says guide Yana Mityaeva, who received her certification in February 2023.
One of the aims of the law is to protect the interests of local guides, experts stress. Only Russian citizens can obtain certification. This should support the tourist guides of St. Petersburg and return to them the “bread” that the “tourists” took away. In addition, certification acts as a guarantee of quality service provision.
However, the usefulness of the law depends on how its implementation will be monitored. So far, guides are only closely supervised at museum sites. For example, on the territory of the Peter and Paul Fortress, guards ask guides without badges to show their ID or leave. But if in museums the presence of guards seems obvious, on an urban scale it is difficult to imagine what resources are needed to rely on the omnipresent “tourist police.”
– By July 1, the St. Petersburg Tourism Development Committee was supposed to prepare documents and regulations on the procedure for checking the availability of a valid certificate. As far as I understand, the law referred to a “permanent roundup.” There are 10-15 places in St. Petersburg where there are always a lot of tourists. These are, for example, the Savior on Spilled Blood, St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Singing Bridge near the Hermitage. Perhaps controllers were supposed to appear at these points. Random checks would be sufficient, since it is impossible to assign a representative of the authorities to each guide. This would help to stop obvious cases of illegal activity. If a Chinese man with a microphone leads a group of Chinese, it is logical that it should be checked whether he has the right to do so, says Sergey Kalinin, chairman of the board of the Commonwealth of Professional Guides, Translators and Tour Guides of St. Petersburg.
For example, in Petropavlovka, guards ask guides to show their ID or leave.
Several years ago, a bill was submitted to the State Duma that would provide for fines for tour guides without a permit. The authors of the initiative proposed imposing fines of three to five thousand rubles on illegal guides. And officials who released the guide on the route were threatened with a monetary fine of between five and ten thousand rubles. For legal entities – from 15 to 30 thousand rubles. But so far, no penalties have been introduced for conducting tours without certification.
The lack of certification already creates some real limitations. So, to post an ad on large tour aggregators, you now need to upload a permit document. And for many, websites are the only way to sell their services.
The city’s Tourist Information Office also clarified that the certification gives the right to conduct excursions only on city routes. Guides must be separately accredited to work in museums. Permits are divided into two types: for guides working in Russian and for guide-translators. Initially, museums only granted accreditations to the latter. Later, some institutions allowed guides working in Russian to conduct excursions, but today there are few such museums.
– Accreditation can be obtained by completing special training. Courses are different everywhere: some consist of one or two lectures, others last one or two weeks. There is also no uniform standard for tuition fees. Prices range from three to five thousand rubles and can reach 40 thousand rubles. Permits also have an expiration date. In different museums, the validity of the document must be renewed annually or every few years, explains Sergei Kalinin.
Some regions have already come close to solving this problem. Starting from September 1, the Unified Museum Accreditation Center will be open in Moscow, where guides will be able to obtain permits to conduct excursions to one or several museums at a time. Accreditation from the center will also allow you to avoid paying admission to cultural organizations every time.
