exclusive.tours — Published Standard
What we check before a guide is listed, how each fact is established, and — just as importantly — what we do not check. This document is the standard itself. It is public so that guides, travellers, guide associations and travel advisors can hold us to it.
Draft. This version has not been reviewed by counsel and no guide has been assessed under it. Clause 7 (regulated markets) and clause 10 (evidence retention) carry legal consequences and are the two clauses to settle before this goes live. Clause 14 is written from secondary sources; the referenced standards must be obtained and read before any claim in it is published.
This standard governs every verification claim exclusive.tours publishes about a guide. It applies to all guide profiles on the platform without exception, in every market.
Its purpose is narrow and deliberate. A traveller engaging a private guide commits significant money to spend unsupervised time with a stranger, often in a second language and in a country whose guiding regulations they have never encountered. This standard exists to replace a small number of that traveller's assumptions with checked facts. It does not attempt to assess whether a guide is good.
Anyone may cite this document. Clause numbers are stable within a major version; a clause that is materially changed is given a new number rather than being edited in place, and the change is recorded in §13.
Where an established standard already covers something, this document defers to it rather than restating it. The definitions and the training references it relies on are listed in §14, along with an explicit statement of what that reliance does not imply.
| Term | Meaning in this document |
|---|---|
| Guide | The individual person who delivers the guiding. Not an agency, and not a company. Every claim under this standard attaches to a named person. |
| Tourist guide | A person who guides visitors in the language of their choice and interprets the cultural and natural heritage of an area, normally holding an area-specific qualification issued or recognised by the appropriate authority. This is the sense used in the tourism terminology standards referenced in §14, and it is the sense used throughout this document. |
| Tour guide / tour manager | A person who accompanies and manages a group's itinerary and logistics. A distinct occupation, frequently outside the scope of guiding regulation, and not what this standard's marks describe. Where a guide offers both, the marks apply only to their tourist guiding. |
| Qualification | A tourist guide qualification awarded on completion of a training and assessment programme. Distinct from a licence: a qualification records training, a licence records permission to work (§5). |
| Check | A single act of establishing one fact by one method, performed on one date by one named assessor. |
| Method | How a check was carried out, drawn from the closed list in §3. Every published claim states its method. |
| Level | The identity ladder in §4. A guide holds exactly one level. |
| Mark | An independent credential claim from §5. A guide holds zero or more marks, each separately scoped, dated and sourced. |
| Register | A list maintained by an issuing authority that we can query directly to confirm a credential. |
| Lapsed | A mark whose credential has passed its recorded expiry date without re-verification. Lapsed marks stay visible (§8). |
Every claim we publish is produced by one of four methods, and the method is always shown alongside the claim. This is the mechanism that makes the standard meaningful: "licensed, confirmed against the national register" and "licensed, document sighted only" are very different statements, and collapsing them into one badge is the error this standard exists to avoid.
| Code | Method | What it establishes | Limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| M1 | Register check | The credential was confirmed by querying the issuing authority's register directly on the stated date. | Only as current as the register. Available in a minority of jurisdictions. |
| M2 | Issuer confirmation | Written confirmation obtained directly from the issuing body, retained on file. | Depends on the issuer responding. Confirms the record, not continued good standing. |
| M3 | Document sighting | An original or certified document was inspected by a named assessor. | Establishes the document, not the underlying fact. Used only where M1 and M2 are unavailable. |
| M4 | Provider check | Identity confirmed through a third-party identity verification provider. | Identity only. Never used for professional credentials. |
Where a jurisdiction offers no checkable register and the issuing body does not respond to enquiries, the strongest available method is M3, and the profile says so in those words. We do not upgrade a claim because a document looks convincing.
Levels form a ladder: each one includes everything below it. A guide holds exactly one level, and it describes only who this person is — never how well they guide.
| Level | Name | Requires | Published? |
|---|---|---|---|
| L0 | Unverified | An account exists. Nothing has been checked. | No. L0 profiles are not listed, not indexed, and not returned in any shortlist. |
| L1 | Contactable | Email address and phone number each confirmed by one-time code. | Yes, labelled exactly as "contactable". This claims we can reach this person and nothing else. |
| L2 | Identified | L1, plus government photo identification checked against the profile name and likeness by method M4. | Yes. This is the minimum level for any credential mark under §5. |
A credential mark cannot be attached to a profile below L2. Confirming a licence is meaningless if we have not confirmed it belongs to the person holding the account.
Marks are independent, not sequential. A guide in an unregulated market may legitimately hold Insured and Referenced but never Licensed, and that is not a deficiency. Each mark carries its own scope, date, expiry and method, and is meaningless when quoted without them.
| Mark | Establishes | Recorded with it | Methods |
|---|---|---|---|
| Licensed | The guide holds a guiding licence or permit for a named jurisdiction. | Jurisdiction, issuing body, reference number, issue and expiry dates. | M1, M2, M3 |
| Qualified | The guide completed a named tourist guide training and assessment programme. | Awarding body, programme name, year awarded, and whether the programme is stated to conform to EN 15565 (§14). | M1, M2, M3 |
| Insured | A public liability policy naming the guide was in force on the check date. | Insurer, policy expiry, cover type. Never the sum insured, which we do not assess. | M2, M3 |
| Referenced | Independent parties who have worked with the guide vouched for that work. | Number of references obtained, the date range covered, and whether they were clients or trade. | M2 |
References are contacted by us directly. A reference supplied as a written testimonial and not independently reachable is not a reference under this standard and earns no mark.
The Qualified mark describes a programme, not a person's competence. EN 15565 sets requirements for the provision of tourist guide training and qualification programmes; it is a standard that training providers meet, not a certificate an individual holds. So we record that a named body awarded a named qualification, and whether that body states the programme conforms to EN 15565. We never write that a guide "is EN 15565 certified", because no such thing exists and the phrase would be exactly the kind of borrowed authority this standard is built to avoid.
The final row is mandatory on every profile. A verification record that lists only what was checked invites the reader to assume everything else was too.
We deliberately do not compute a composite rating, a star value, a percentage, or a top-tier badge that bundles the marks together. This is a considered position, not an omission, and it is the clause most likely to be questioned.
On fees, plainly: we charge guides for performing checks, because checks cost us staff time. The fee is for the work of checking, never for the outcome. An assessor's decision is not reversible by payment, assessors carry no commercial targets, and a failed check is not refunded into a pass.
In some jurisdictions, guiding at particular sites or in particular capacities is restricted by law to licence holders. Where we have established that licensing is mandatory for an activity in a jurisdiction:
Holding a licence remains the guide's own legal obligation in every market. Verifying it is our contribution, not a transfer of that obligation.
Credentials expire, and a verification never re-checked becomes a false statement within about eighteen months. Re-verification is therefore part of the standard rather than an optional extra.
Verification requires guides to send us identity documents, licences and insurance certificates. That is sensitive material and it is held accordingly.
Anyone — traveller, guide, issuing authority or member of the public — may report that a published claim is inaccurate. Reports are assessed against this standard, not against the commercial value of the guide concerned.
Where a report concerns safety or a possibly revoked credential, the profile is suspended first and assessed afterwards. We would rather remove a legitimate guide for a week than leave a false claim published for one.
| Version | Date | Change |
|---|---|---|
| 1.2-draft | 19 Aug 2026 | Added §15 (unverified listings) — states what a listing without marks is for, restricts shortlisting to verified guides, and requires exclusions to be reported to the guide factually. No existing clause was renumbered or altered. |
| 1.1-draft | 19 Aug 2026 | Added §14 (normative references). Added the definitions of tourist guide, tour guide / tour manager and qualification to §2, and the Qualified mark to §5. Added §7 clause 5 on regulated scope. No existing clause was renumbered. |
| 1.0-draft | 19 Aug 2026 | First draft issued for internal and legal review. Not in force; no guide has been assessed under it. |
Material changes take effect only after they are published here. Guides verified under a previous version keep that version's marks until their next re-verification, and the version applied is recorded against every check.
This standard does not invent a definition of guiding, and it does not invent a competency framework. Both already exist, and borrowing them is what lets an independent reader check our work against something other than our own word.
| Reference | Subject | How this standard uses it |
|---|---|---|
| EN 13809 ISO 18513 |
Tourism services — terminology | Source of the tourist guide definition in §2, and of the distinction from tour managing that §7 clause 5 turns into policy. |
| EN 15565 | Requirements for the provision of professional tourist guide training and qualification programmes | Recorded against the Qualified mark (§5) where an awarding body states its programme conforms. A property of the programme, never of the person. |
Guiding is largely self-governed through national and regional tourist guide associations and their international federations. Those bodies hold the registers, set the training expectations, and maintain the codes of conduct that most of our checks ultimately test against. Where a member association confirms a guide's standing, that is a method M2 check and is recorded as such.
Their interest and ours coincide on the points that matter: that a guide's qualification should mean something, that regulated markets should not be quietly worked around, and that a guide's professional record should belong to the guide. Where they diverge — most obviously, that a federation exists to represent guides while we are a commercial platform — this document is the part we can be held to.
Credential marks are optional (§5), so a guide may hold an L1 Contactable listing and no marks at all. This clause states what such a listing is for, because leaving it unstated invites two opposite errors: pretending an unverified listing is worth as much as a verified one, and quietly making it worthless.
Shortlists contain verified guides only. A traveller who describes what they want is promised a shortlist of guides whose credentials have been checked; including unverified guides in it would break that promise, which is the only promise we make.
So an unverified guide is findable but not routed to. That is the whole of the difference, and it is deliberately a difference in demand rather than in display.
Where a brief matched an unverified guide's destination and languages but they were not eligible for the shortlist, we tell them, with the real number:
Two constraints on this, and they are the point of putting it in the standard rather than leaving it to a growth team:
In a market covered by §7 — where licensing is mandatory for the activity — an unverified guide is not published for that jurisdiction at all. Optional verification stops at the point where the law does not make it optional, and §7 governs. This is not softened for commercial reasons in any market, at any time.
A discovery surface dominated by empty records is a failure of ours, not of the guides on it. Where unverified profiles would crowd out verified ones on any browse or search surface, the verified ones take precedence — and if a destination has too few verified guides to be worth presenting, it stays unpublished under the threshold rule rather than being padded with unverified listings.