Tour Guides Send Open Letter to Minister: “Our Profession Has Been Sold Off”

We have received and are publishing an open letter from Isabella Ruggiero, president of AGTA (Association of Licensed Tourist Guides), addressed to the Minister of Tourism, Gianmarco Mazzi: In the letter, Ruggiero criticizes the new call for applications for tour guides, denounces an exam she considers too easy, and accuses the government of failing to involve representatives of the profession. The text follows.

Mr. Minister,

Yesterday, two press releases were issued by FTO and CNA supporting your ministry’s strategy regarding the call for applications for new tourist guide certifications, and their texts mirror your response to the parliamentary question during Question Time on June 10. Perplexed by the repetition of content that we find misleading and incorrect—and unable to engage in dialogue since requests for a roundtable with industry representatives have been ignored—we are writing to you publicly.

Enough with the hypocrisy of touting tour guides as the country’s “calling card” and emphasizing the importance of “skills,” when a quiz—designed for high school students and passable by 94% of candidates—has led to oral exams for 7,844 people. These tests are not suitable for assessing the skills of those who will work as guides and devalue the profession. Those who designed this exam and those who approve it care nothing about skills.

Enough with the rhetoric of the call for applications to combat unlicensed practice: we’ve never heard of thousands of licenses being issued to unlicensed practitioners to combat unlicensed practice in any profession. Try doing that with taxi drivers and let’s see what happens.

Enough, too, with the repeated mantra about exams that have been on hold for years: countless licenses were issued through various systems between 2015 and 2025—when, in theory, they should have been suspended—in Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, Sardinia, Apulia, Sicily, and through the recognition of foreign licenses.

The truth is that this profession has been sold off to the two major players in the tourism market: the large tour operators and the European Commission. This call for bids is liberalization disguised as an exam. The reform of the profession is being betrayed: a law that we do not particularly like in its final form (the result of an amendment to the original Law 190/2023) but which has the merit of having put an end to 10 years of regulatory vacuum and which, in any case, if it were truly enforced and respected, would protect us.

Everything has been organized hastily and poorly just to immediately supply a certain number of guides to the tourism market: by the end of July, there should already be more than a thousand new guides available on the market, with thousands more to follow starting in November. The truth is that the bigwigs in the tourism sector don’t care at all whether the new guides are properly trained or not, because that’s not their goal—their aim is to increase the total number of guides, reverse the supply-and-demand ratio, and drastically lower market rates.

Every day in Italy, licensed tour guides see the number of places where they can work dwindling and their rights increasingly violated, without the ministries that are supposed to protect them doing anything about it. Problems that have remained unresolved for years persist. The creation of new guides should be accompanied by consistent efforts to ensure that those working in the field—both now and in the future—can perform their jobs effectively, but no one is willing to do this. Instead, they prefer to hand out a piece of paper to everyone: it’s easier and pays off more at the polls.

Mr. Minister, we would prefer to hear one less rhetorical statement—such as that guides are a “key figure in the tourism system”—and instead be consulted and listened to. We consider it an unacceptable institutional failure that a ministry has decided to issue a call for applications (after the first one was a proven disaster) without convening representatives of the tour guide associations, and, moreover, basing all three on-site exams against the advice that nearly all associations had given during the meeting with the Ministry on February 3, 2025, and finally ignoring the many requests for urgent meetings sent by our organization and others starting on May 27, even before the written exams took place.

Since we have no opportunity to participate in a roundtable discussion, we will continue to voice our observations publicly.

Isabella Ruggiero

President of AGTA – Association of Licensed Tour Guides

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