Guide certification is part of the qualification system of the tourism industry and in Georgia is regulated by the legislation on tourism and resorts. It must be said at the outset: the core tourism law does not itself establish the detailed procedure of guide certification — the form of the examination, the validity of the certificate, or the fee. It defines the general framework under which standardization, certification, and licensing are regulated by the rules established by Georgian legislation, together with the principle of state facilitation of personnel training. On this page you will see what these norms establish and where to look for the procedural details.
The Legal Framework of Certification
The standardization, certification, and licensing of tourist and resort activity is regulated by the rules established by the legislation of Georgia — this is what the relevant norm of the tourism law provides. This definition can be imagined as three regulatory tracks: standardization — the establishment of uniform requirements for services; certification — confirmation of the qualification of personnel or the conformity of services by an established procedure; and licensing — the advance permission of the state for defined types of activity.
Guide certification is precisely one application of this framework: the confirmation of a guide's qualification takes place through the institution of certification, whose specific procedure is established by legislation. Importantly, the sectoral law does not itself describe the details of this procedure — the detailed rules are placed in separately established normative grounds, and information about them must be verified with the authorized body managing the sector.
This legislative technique is widespread in other sectors as well: a framework law fixes the principle and distributes the details to lower-level rules. For a guide this means that the only reliable way to know the current requirements is to read the principle and the detailed rule together: first the framework, under which certification is regulated by the procedure established by legislation, and then that procedure itself.
Personnel Training and Qualification Improvement
The tourism law regulates the personnel issue by a separate norm: the authorized body managing the sector, together with other agencies, facilitates the creation of study programs and institutions for the purpose of training, retraining, and qualification improvement of tourism industry personnel. This norm defines the state's role in developing the educational infrastructure and applies to the training of guides as well — a guide is part of the tourism industry's personnel.
In practice this means that study programs intended for future guides develop with state support: the authorized body, through inter-agency cooperation, facilitates the creation of institutions that train personnel, retrain them, and improve their qualifications. Qualification improvement and retraining are especially important for those who already work in the tourism sector and wish to obtain or retain the status of a certified guide.