Great tips, thanks! I'll try to read up a bit more about the places we visit. I usually have a little spiel about the prohibition and how it relates to Montreal but I keep it short since most people on my tour are Americans. Didn't know you used to run tours like this. You really did a lot of different things eh!? We've been running the tour for a while, so the bartenders know us already and are great sports about it. If they can, they try to keep an open seated spot for us :) However, to get a "specialty" drink or even a smaller version of a drink, they can't really do much about it. I need to speak to a manager for that. I'm going to ask the bartenders tonight if they would consider splitting a cocktail into 7 "shots". This way, we'd be paying for 4 drinks (we visit 4 bars) instead of 7 and the people would get a taste of the signature drink at every place. It's more work for them, but even if we tip generously we come up on top expense-wise. You have any wild stories from your tour guide days? Where was that? I'm guessing somewhere in the UK?
Yes. Talk to the Manager. They want more business, and want to incentivize you to bring people in to their place of business. The bartenders? You are just more work. They don't make more money if you come in, and then you take your patrons away to another bar. They have little motivation to do more than the minimum for you. So you need to have an official arrangement with the manager, and the manager needs to tell the bartenders how to meet the arrangement you have with the manager. ---- I used to be a Ghost Tour Guide in Pike Place Market in Seattle, and also did the affiliated Lust Tour. (Here's some proof. And More Proof under a different name, and me again.) I walked people around the market after closing hours, and told them ghost stories and the gory history of our city. (Like Dr Linda Hazzard, the "Starvation Doctor", active hauntings that still happen almost weekly in a bar called Kells, that is where the mortuary used to be. The brothel that used to operate in the Market, and what would happen when the navy fleets of thousands of men came to a brothel that employed 30 women... The ghost of Chief Sealth's daughter, "Princess Angeline", which is still seen in the Market sometimes today... etc.) The Lust Tour was a seriously dirty/sexy/gross history of Seattle's 1st Ave, which used to have the highest density of porn shops anywhere in the world. Fun tour...