UN Vienna guided tours go virtual

At the United Nations Headquarters in Vienna, amid the murmur of diplomats, UN officials and staff conversing in conference rooms, offices and hallways, you’d sometimes hear the shriek of a 1st grader excited to pose with a UN flag during a guided tour.

But that was before COVID-19.

As the pandemic changes lives around the world, it is also changing what it means to be a UN Vienna tour guide. Henri Abued Manzano from the Philippines and Gulnara Ganieva from Russia are two of twenty guides who give tours of the Vienna International Centre, one of the four global UN headquarters.

COVID-19 has meant that most of the 5,000 people working at the UN in Vienna have been doing their jobs from home. And while the Vienna International Centre, the home to UN system organizations in Vienna, has started a gradual re-opening in lockstep with the loosening of COVID-19 measures in the host country Austria, guided tours operations remain suspended.

“We quickly decided that if visitors can’t come to us, we will have to come to them,” says Johanna Kleinert, Chief of the UN Information Service Vienna’s Visitors Service. Within days of the tour suspension taking effect in March, tour guides had set up improvized home studios in living rooms all over Vienna to conduct virtual tours through video.

Schoolchildren make up two-thirds of visitors to the UN in Vienna. Christine Kerber’s 8th graders were among the first visitors to switch their booking and take a virtual tour instead. “For us this kind of tour was a completely new and interesting experience, and brought us a bit closer to Vienna after all,” said the teacher from Bregenz in western Austria, whose class had to cancel their school trip to the Austrian capital due to COVID-19.

For their tour guide Gulnara, it was a challenge to give participants a feel for the atmosphere at the United Nations. “I was very nervous before giving my first virtual tour. I didn’t know how it would go, if participants would find it as interesting. The technical part was another issue I was worried about. I am glad everything went well, and the participants could interact as if it were a real tour”.

More than 50,000 people usually visit the UN in Vienna every year, and they want to hear how the organizations based there are working for the Sustainable Development Goals. So, Henri’s first project at home was to record a #GlobalGoals video tour for Youtube, explaining how the UN in Vienna and around the world works for Goal 10 – Reduced Inequalities.

Gulnara, Henri and their colleagues hope they can reach lots of young people online this year. But they also can’t wait for the day the occasional shriek of an excited 1st grader might again be heard at the UN headquarters in Vienna.