Tribe Tours are privately guided tours curated by locals who know the city inside out. Our tours give the traveller a glimpse of the city, its people as they are. Our signature through all our tours lie in you doing, experiencing and interacting with locals rather than as a passive tourist. It may involve you cooking local dishes, snapping pictures of local architecture, tasting, even ordering food like a local. Our day tours range from 2 hour walkabouts to half day tours. Group sizes are kept small and intimate to facilitate interaction.
Our guests leave as friends of Tribe and bring home many colourful memories. Most tell us it’s the connection made with many of our Chiefs (our super guides) and Natives (local experts) of our tours. Some are simply blown away at the depth our guides cover with our themes.
In our tours, one learns much about the local neighbourhoods, its history, stages of development, its evolving culture and people, etc. One of our friends puts it best “it’s like knowing a city inside out with a long time friend”.
But we are not just a tour company offering unforgettable local experiences. Tribe is first and foremost an event planner. Tours are after all events. We offer innovate ideas and comprehensive solutions for corporate events, educational and professional institutions or more. Visit our corporate events page for more and read what our corporate clients had to say about our events.
We favour activities that we have a special access to. Like an exclusive access to a local coffee factory or a private access to a certain building with a beautiful vantage point for our photographer tours. Other times, it’s a special access to the local experts ( natives ) themselves. Our special relationships have been cultivated by our chiefs with locals over time and enable us to build and develop stories that are meant to be shared with everyone.
Our tours are carefully crafted to give you a real day in the life of. Each tour is deliberately designed to maximise real exchanges and interactions between you the traveller and us, the locals. We embody authenticity, we seek out the unexpected, and we are devoted to sharing the insider knowledge and sharing our heritage and rich stories.
Our tours are memorable because of the warm connection we enable you to have with the locals. A fleeting serendipitous encounter sprinkled with positive experiences bring out a sense of belonging and affection towards the place. As seasoned travellers ourselves, we believe that experiences are crafted with human interaction – mingling and interacting with the locals.
We don’t do clichés. Because the one thing that gets our goat more than anything else is travellers getting an inaccurate, skewed view of Singapore as we know it. Our experiences are carefully crafted out to be truly local and real – slice of the local way of life. Which is also why we feature tours like visiting a coffee roasting factory at 7 am to cooking a local dish with a native. We build authentic and unusual experiences that are meaningful and rich with history.
We prefer smaller private groups of between 4 – 12 guests so everyone is engaged and needs can be managed to our standards. Our guides don’t have a choreographed script but instead know the tours so well, every new tour is delivered with passion, from the heart. We do not believe in rushing through many sights with little depth. We instead choose fewer more meaningful sights that fit with the theme of interaction. We take our time to dig deep and give you a fuller account of whatever it is we are delivering. If you are looking for lists of places to eat , must-see attractions and self-walk tours , our guides can point you to the best. We simply don’t believe in charging for ‘free’ info that all locals know. At Tribe, we curate quality experiences with local experts (natives) and the best guides (chiefs) to help you get the best experience ever.
Our Chiefs are amazing with young ones and know the art of engagement by asking simple thoughtful questions and giving the younger ones in the group tasks. What is the minimum age you ask? That’s your call. If they are old enough to understand, trust our super guides to engage with them and make it a learning journey they will remember fondly.
TRIBE SERVICE CODE is an internal minimum standards we set ourselves for our tourist guides also known as Chiefs . Here is the minimum criteria of a Tribe Approved Guide.
Flight delays due to weather (remember the volcanic ash cloud in 2011), or travel advisories issued by your country of travel are instances where we make an exception. Sore as our backs may be, it is no fault of yours, and refunds are made back to your credit/debit cards once we have received official documentation from airlines, governments of country of embarkation, etc.
– Full refunds will be issued for cancellations made at least 8 days before the selected activity date
– 50% refund will be issued for cancellations made at 4-7 days before the selected activity date
– No refund will be issued for cancellations made at 1-3 days before the selected activity date.
Let’s be fair. Since bookings on our part, have to be made to lock in certain venues and guides, late cancellations are a backbreaker for us.
Keep a lookout of our reminder message (usually via emails, sometimes via mobile) on what to bring or not.
Turn up at least 10 minutes prior to the start of the tour timing.
Be at the correct meeting location.
If you are late, Tribe shall not be obliged to conduct the tour for you from the beginning and reserves the right to commence the tour without you. No refund is provided for late commers or no show for the tour.
Once tour commence, our Chiefs will be fully engaged with the guests and may not be able to answer calls during the session. Hence, if you foresee that you will be late for a session, do contact our Chiefs prior to the start of the tour.
We start by thinking of experiences that are truly local, something that gives a good slice of the local way of life. Then we ask ourselves, if we read or heard about this native or this location in Singapore, does this interest us or our friends? If not, we drop it. Next, we forge personal relationships with these locals and learn about their stories. So every place and every single person you meet on our tours is the by product of careful deliberation of our Tribe team and years of friendship cultivated.
Of course you can! And that’s why we profile them. But of course not at too short a notice please. Rule of thumb is if you made your bookings one month in advance, most likely we will be able to accomodate and have your favorite Chief lead your tour. This also applies to our repeat guests who insists on their next tours conducted by their favorite chief. We totally understand….we know how the perfect guide can make all the difference!
Unless you have requested for a private tour, it will be with others. Of course, we know the hits and misses of traveling with others. But generally, our guests tend to be respectful and considerate of others, and have a keen desire to learn about local culture and to meet with locals. We have seen groups really hit it off.
Are you even surprised if we told you we have our own metric on what we consider a Tribe worthy guide? Not all Singapore Tourism Board (STB) licensed General Tour Guide makes the cut. Now of course, all of our guides minimally must pass this training and examination. But we look for much much more. Tribe guides must have a super service first mentality and attitude that notices the finer details. Tribe guides are adept at handling the needs of the discerning traveler. We place a lot of emphasis on a guide’s ability to connect and engage with others in a natural non forced manner. Non of the over-the-top overtly friendly types that drives you crazy. Our guides can hold their own in a talk show, have substance, oodles of charm about them, and are interesting characters themselves. The cherry on top? They read your minds before you do, know loads about the city, can give you invaluable tips for the rest of your trip on must-dos.
The same way we can get recipes off Joel Robuchon and make a noble attempt at recreating his masterpieces. But to be perfectly honest, the stops are less important than you imagine. A big part of our tours are the stories by our Chiefs and Natives, the exclusive access to these locals themselves. Think of the stops as the recipes. Without the chefs’ skill (Chiefs and Natives’ insight and delivery), fresh ingredients, ambience of restaurant (special access and tour experience), the recipes are just recipes – a road map.
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