What Guests Remember – Lessons from a Summer of Guiding in Karlskrona
“There are special moments on a holiday that you simply don’t forget.”
A guest wrote that after joining me on a walking tour through Karlskrona last week. It is a wonderful thing to read when you have spent a couple of hours showing someone your hometown, and the sentence stayed with me. Looking through the twelve 5-star reviews GO Nordic has received from guests this season, I started thinking about what people actually choose to write about afterwards.
Karlskrona gives me plenty of material. The city was created more than 300 years ago for a very specific purpose, spread across islands and shaped by Sweden’s naval ambitions. You can spend hours talking about kings, shipbuilding, architecture, wars and the UNESCO World Heritage Site. Yet some of the stories that seem to stay with people are much smaller.
We might stand among the wooden houses of Björkholmen and talk about the people who built the ships in the naval yard. A little later we reach the old boundary between military and civilian Karlskrona, or talk about the curious problem of supplying fresh water to a city surrounded by it. Walking between the islands gives us time to connect these places and stories, and the conversation usually finds its own way from there.
One recent guest wrote that I had shared “so many interesting facts, stories and insights” during our 6 Islands tour. I particularly like the word stories. Historical facts give us the framework, while a story can suddenly make a place understandable.
Every group sees a different Karlskrona
That has become one of the pleasures of guiding more regularly myself. Every group develops its own personality. A question about something we pass can take the conversation in a completely different direction. During one tour we may spend more time on naval history; during another, the guests become curious about Swedish society and everyday life. My Life in Sweden tour almost invites this to happen. A stop outside Systembolaget can lead to a surprisingly lively discussion about Swedish alcohol culture, politics and social habits.
Those conversations have become some of my favourite moments. I meet people from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Britain, the United States and many other places, and their own experiences become part of our time together. A guided tour then becomes something shared rather than something delivered.
When everyone carries the facts in their pocket
It also says something about the role of a local guide today. Every guest walking beside me carries an extraordinary amount of information in their pocket. They can find the year Karlskrona was founded within seconds and read about the naval base before they arrive. The value of being there together lies somewhere else.
For me, it is often about context. Knowing why an ordinary-looking building deserves another look. Connecting the street we are standing on with something that happened there centuries ago. Taking a small detour because there is something around the corner worth seeing. Answering a question about life in Sweden that would never appear in a conventional city guide.
Humour plays a part too. Several guests have mentioned it in their reviews, which makes me particularly happy. History becomes much easier to engage with when we allow the people behind it to become human beings, complete with ambitions, mistakes, strange decisions and occasional absurdities.
Seeing my own city through visitors’ eyes
Guiding has also changed the way I look at Karlskrona. When you live somewhere for years, parts of your surroundings gradually become invisible. Visitors have fresh eyes. A question during a tour can make me think differently about something I have walked past hundreds of times. I was reminded of this rather brutally one morning when I met an American guest at The Main Square. Before I had even managed to stretch out my hand and welcome him, he pointed across the square at The Fredrik’s Church: “What is that really ugly building over there?”
I have walked past that church for years. He had been in Karlskrona for a few minutes. We were already looking at the same place from two completely different perspectives.
What this means for the experiences we create
There is a useful lesson in all this for my other work with GO Nordic. Much of my time is spent developing experiences for international visitors, travel advisors, cruise guests and private groups across southeast Sweden. It is tempting in tourism to demonstrate value by filling an itinerary. More places, more activities and more inclusions make an experience look impressive on paper.
The feedback from this summer points me towards a different measure of value: what stays with the guest afterwards.
A local story can do that. So can meeting the right person, gaining access to a place that brings its history alive, or simply having enough time for a conversation to develop. This thinking has gradually become part of our Nordic Reset concept at GO Nordic, where we create experiences with more room for the destination itself.
Which brings me back to the guest who joined me in Karlskrona last week.
“There are special moments on a holiday that you simply don’t forget.”
I have worked with tourism and experience development for many years, and I could probably produce a fairly elaborate definition of what makes a successful visitor experience.
After this summer, I prefer hers.
