Nico's Project - Big Apple Greeter
For this class project, I will do a study of Big Apple Greeter (BAG), an NYC-based non-profit that pairs tourists with a local New Yorker. More than 300 volunteer guides versed in 22 languages conduct visits with individuals and families from the US and abroad to neighborhoods of their or their guides’ choice, in order to experience New York “through the eyes of a real New Yorker”.
I am very interested in the concept of local hospitality, and in this case particularly in the ways in which the guides mediate the visitors’ experiences and the impact on the visitors’ sense of the city. How can these interactions increase trust and cross-cultural understanding? How are these guides different from regular tour guides? What are the roles of guides and of tourists in this real-time tourist production? How does GAP operate as an organization- how does it market its activities, recruit volunteers, and to what extent does it frame this production before, during and after visits? What are its relationships with volunteers? What are its relationships with the wider tourist industry?
To conduct my research, I plan to attend visits with tourists, interview guides and tourists, learn about the history of the organization through research and interviews of staff, review BAG’s marketing materials, press reviews, plans for the future and more.