Tour Guide Confidential Dr. Eyal Dujovny

Send us a Text Message.Our guest, Michelle Levitz, is a tour guide based in Zichron Yaakov, Israel. Michelle shares her fascinating background, growing up in a multicultural home in New Jersey with a Yemeni-Israeli father and a mother from the United States. Her upbringing in an open and welcoming Orthodox Jewish community contributed to her passion for guiding and sharing different cultural perspectives with others. We discuss the challenges of leading multi-generational family groups a...

Send us a Text Message.I had an interesting conversation with my friend and fellow tour guide Adam Wadell that touched on issues surrounding educational tourism as well as interfaith relations and guiding in the post October 7th world. In addition to our shared American upbringing, Adam and I have many things in common including an interest in environmental policy and a focus on educational tourism. We talked about our experience of working on programs that bring people to Israel to better un...

Send us a Text Message.In this episode, tour guide Haike Winter, returns to Tour Guide Confidential to share her experience of volunteering in a dairy farm during the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. Like all tour guides in Israel, Haike was left unemployed by the war that began with the massacre of October 7, 2023. A "milker" since the 1980s, Haike has volunteered twice for the cowshed of Nir Oz, a small kibbutz in the Gaza envelope that was devastated by the pogrom. This is the kibbutz...

Send us a Text Message.Anita Andziak is a Swiss-based tour guide and tour leader, PhD candidate and Virtual Tourism expert. Her passion is the combination of artificial intelligence and tourism. We sat down in January of 2022 to talk about the promises and pitfalls of Virtual Reality both during the pandemic and as we stride into the metaverse of the 21st century. Based on her research and professional experience, Anita discusses the ways in which customer behavior, cultural changes and...

Send us a Text Message. In this episode, I sat down with Aliza Bellehsen Avshalom in her beautiful home in the Galilee for a wide ranging discussion based on her decades of experience as a tour guide in Israel. Among other topics, we talked about Aliza's fascinating familial connection to Israel, growing up in New Jersey and what led her to train as a tour guide. We discussed her background of working with youth tours and educational tourism; environmental tourism and her love of hiking ...

Send us a Text Message.In this episode, Yoni Shapira shares his rich, decades long involvement in tourism. He recalls how, as an oceanography student, he entered into this field as well as his long model making career or “life in miniature” at Mini Israel and elsewhere. Most importantly, we talked about the split between Guides focused on Incoming Tourism and those who work with the Domestic Tourism market and how this led to the creation of the organization Moreshet Derech or the Israeli Inc...