Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Canden Arciniega. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Canden, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Almost every entrepreneur we know has considered donating a portion of their sales to an organization or cause – how did you make the decision of whether to donate? We’d love to hear the backstory if you’re open to sharing the details.

I have run a walking tour company in Washington DC for over a decade. In that time, we have been hired hundreds of times by suburban schools to run walking tours of Capitol Hill or the National Mall for their students. At one point, I realized I had never been contacted by a local DC public school to do the same. After speaking with some DCPS teachers, I was told that they on occasion take field trips to the memorials but never with a tour guide due to the expense. We started our DC Public School Field Trip Scholarship program to provide a licensed, knowledgeable (and fun!) tour guide for any DC Public School that requests ones for grades 5-8 for a civic themed tour.

A portion of our ticketed tours goes to pay tour guides for leading these tours so the students have no cost for this experience.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

DC by Foot is the Washington DC branch of Free Tours by Foot, which operates internationally, providing pay-what-you-like tours, ticketed, and private tours. We believe that travel should be for every budget and provide high-quality experiences at varying rates, including free.

We have podcasts, audio tours, self-guided tours, and guided tours. We do offer experiences of tourist locations such as the National Mall in Washington DC, Central Park in New York City, and Jack the Ripper in London to name a few. However, we also focus on telling the stories of all neighborhoods and offer tours focusing on Black history, Women’s history, and LGBTQIA+ stories.

As our US-based admin team is located in Washington, DC, we focus our corporate outreach here. We are proud that we don’t just include a land acknowledgment on our website but also honor the land by partnering with a local organization that takes care of the land through donations, volunteer service, and advocacy. We provide our guides with training to offer tours that use inclusive language, are as accessible as can be, and share the stories of all types of people.

Our guides are historians, not actors and we do not use scripts. We work as a team to research and develop tours to provide an educational but fun experience.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I’m sure this story of a time of pivoting is familiar but COVID truly changed the tourism industry and our company. Our clientele not only stopped coming but was forbidden under the US lockdown for a few months. When people started trickling outdoors again, we changed our marketing. Instead of focusing on tourists coming into our cities, we focused on locals.

Our small group, outdoor only walking tours required no alterations to provide a safe experience. We stopped pushing tours of the main tourist sites and instead began marketing our neighborhood tours to residents of those neighborhoods. It was a great time for us to encourage DC residents to learn the history of their city. This city is very transient and many residents were either new or had not ventured out to other parts of the city often. We encouraged tours of neighborhoods that people might not otherwise visit.

It was a great success and we have continued to offer tours of lesser known neighborhoods now that tourism has returned.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

My personal rule for managing my team is that I do not ask anyone to do something that I wouldn’t be willing to do. As both a tour guide myself and the manager of our DC team, I know what it is like to be outside in 95* weather for a three-tour day. We often get requests for custom experiences that are too demanding or too difficult and I do not require any guides to accept a tour if I wouldn’t be willing to do it. None of us will lead a 6 am tour!

I think of our team as that, a team and we work together to create a working environment that is encouraging to everyone. I try not to make any unilateral decisions without asking for everyone’s input and then explaining why a decision was made. I value my team’s opinions and make sure they know that.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.dcbyfoot.com
• Instagram: @topthingstododc
• Facebook: /freetoursbyfootdc
• Youtube: /freetoursbyfootdc