This is the third interview feature in our How to Run Events for Tourists series looking at the individuals behind successful tourist events.

Amber Raney-Kincade

It might sound strange to be shown around London by an American, but Texan-born Amber Raney-Kincade is one of the capital’s most in demand tour guides.

According to Amber, it is being a foreigner that gives her a unique view on the city and has led to her development of market-leading tours such as Supercalifragilistic, the only Mary Poppins tour in London.

“When you live somewhere you don’t explore it,” she says. “I live here but I came here as a tourist – a foreign person living in a new land and I wanted to explore it. I’ve got a lot of experience exploring London and so I see it from a different perspective.”

Amber moved to London 20 years ago to undertake an MBA in International Marketing, supporting her studies by taking a role as a tour guide on a double-decker bus. After she graduated, Amber landed a job as an account director in a marketing agency, but she still continued to explore the city whenever she had free time.

She recalls: “My fiance – now husband – was at that time working night shifts so he’d sleep during the day. On my days off I’d pick a spot on the map and go and explore so I really got to learn London from the ground up.”

Amber realised she could put the knowledge she had gained to good use when the recession hit in 2009 and marketing budgets got slashed. She suddenly found herself looking for an additional income stream.

“I thought maybe I’d do the tour guiding thing part time and I started looking at the qualifications. I did The City of London tour guide qualification, which is a one-year course, and then the City of Westminster badge.

“In the beginning, I was spending half my time doing freelance marketing consulting and the other half guiding, but my tours became more and more frequent and now I do it full time.”

Guiding became such a big part of Amber’s life that she helped spearhead the formation of the Camden Tour Guide Association and created a badge for the borough. Meanwhile, she has given training to the City of London Guide Association on how to use Eventbrite and has been part of an initiative to get guiding associations on social media.

“The tour guide courses are great because they teach you things like how to create a route and write up a walk and how to guide from a health and safety perspective, but they don’t cover marketing yourself as a guide. Having a marketing background has been a real advantage for me.”

Amber decided to use her nationality as part of personal branding, naming herself American Tour Guide in London, helping her stand out in the listings – and make sure people knew what they were getting.

“Previously people were like, ‘Oh you’re American, what do you know about Churchill?’ and I was like, ‘Well, I can read.’ So I had to overcome that initially but now it has become a selling point. My customers say they can really tell how much I love my job.

“I remember when I was doing my training course and they would throw out these facts or reference something cultural like an old television show from the seventies and I would think, ‘Gosh, that’s just going to fall on deaf ears for some people.’ I’ve even had British people who didn’t know who Christopher Wren was! With that in mind, I make sure that everything is understandable and, while there are complexities in history, I try to break it down and make it relevant.”

Credit: American Tour Guide in London

While Amber understands the aspects of British culture that might be lost on foreigners, she also knows better than many what will get them excited. It was this instinct that led her to create her Supercalifragilistic Tour in 2013.

“I’d always been a Mary Poppins fan since a little girl and when I was doing my City of London training I was walking around little streets and thinking, ‘This is just like in Mary Poppins!’. I looked around and saw there were Harry Potter tours, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond but no Mary Poppins. When I told some of my guiding friends I was thinking about doing the tour they said, ‘Oh that’s really old, nobody cares about that anymore’ but I went ahead anyway. Then the film Saving Mr Banks came out the following year and the interest just grew and grew.”

The tour gives participants a view of London through the eyes of PL Travers, the creator of Mary Poppins, says Amber: “She was a woman from Australia who always wanted to come to London and I can identify with that. The movie wasn’t actually filmed in London so it’s not even a film location tour but what I do is conjure up the spirit of the character. I talk about the books and their themes, like how Mrs Banks became a Suffragette.”

Credit: American Tour Guide in London

With the 100 year anniversary of the Suffragettes, and a new Mary Poppins movie coming out later this year, Amber is expecting increased competition in the tour market.

“All of a sudden people are jumping on the bandwagon, you see afternoon teas with a Mary Poppins theme – but I think it’s great! It will be a different Mary Poppins as the new one is set in the thirties. I actually ran into them five times while they were filming. I was in costume and they were like, ‘Are you going to set?’”

Other tours run by Amber include Love Actually Christmas Lights, Finding Bridget Jones, and Downton Abbey: Lady Mary’s London – and she dresses up in costume for all of them.

“I get so interested in something and I think, ‘Is there enough material there for a walk?’. Or I’ll go into a costume shop and then have all these new ideas for a tour,” she says.

“I’ve just developed a new tour called Winston, Women and Song. It’s looking at Winston Churchill through the eyes of the women in his life; his mother, his nanny, Wallace Simpson, the Suffragettes, and his wife and daughters. I’ve also done some research into the music that was popular at that time so there’s a song at every stop.”

Credit: American Tour Guide in London

Amber’s tours represent her passions, which is why she doesn’t mind sometimes not having any time off: “I consider myself to be a historian, someone interested in the topic on a deeper level. What I give you on the tour is just scratching the surface – it could be a four-hour tour.”

She adds that it’s important that holidaymakers can have confidence when parting with their hard earned spending money and having guiding qualifications helps to foster trust.

“There’s an extra bit of reassurance for the customer that they’re getting something of quality and value,” she says. “It’s also extremely important that people have confidence when booking online, which is why I use Eventbrite. It’s a platform people know and the interface is so easy. It also offers me visibility through its searching mechanism. There’s a lot of noise out there so visibility is always the biggest challenge but Eventbrite is a great way to get in front of people looking for something to do.”

Thinking of taking a “jolly holiday” to London? Check out American Tour Guide in London’s tours on Eventbrite.