Driver or licensed guide in Greece: who may guide inside a site, and what we do

In Greece, guiding visitors inside museums and archaeological sites is reserved to state-licensed guides registered with the Ministry of Tourism under Law 5121/2024; a driver may bring you to the gate, wait and orient you, and may not guide inside. Greece Private Tours runs its tours with drivers and books a licensed guide on request, quoted separately, for the Acropolis, Akrotiri, Delphi and the other ticketed sites.

What the law says

Law 5121/2024, in force since July 2024, replaced the guides’ law of 1977 and holds the rules in its Part E, Articles 33 to 45. Article 33 defines the guide’s work: accompanying visitors, on foot or in a vehicle, in museums, enclosed monuments, archaeological sites and the like, to show and explain them. Article 34 gives the right to that work to a closed list, holders of the diploma of the Ministry’s School of Guides first among them, and Article 35 has each guide announce the profession to the Ministry, which keeps a register and issues an identity card. Article 40 sets the penalties: a fine of a thousand euros for a person who guides without the conditions, two thousand for a tourism business that works with one, both rising on a repeat within the year, and a fine for advertising such services on a website. We read the law on e-nomothesia.gr and the Ministry of Tourism’s page on the profession on 27 September 2026; the law nowhere says that a driver may not enter a site, only who may guide in it.

Do we need a guide at all?

Not to visit: a ticket is all the Acropolis or Delphi asks of you, and most of our guests walk the sites on their own. You need a licensed guide if you want a person at your side explaining what you see inside the gate; that person has to be one of the register. Between the two lie the signs, the museum labels and, at Akrotiri, the official Digital Guide app that comes with the ticket.

What does our driver do, then?

Drives, waits and gives practical orientation: where the vehicle stops, where the entrance is, how long you have, where the toilets are, which order the stops take and what the road ahead looks like. At the gate the driver stays with the vehicle, for as long as you take, and the day goes on when you come out. That is the whole of the service on every tour page of ours, and it is why the tour pages print drive times and minutes at each stop rather than stories.

Where on our tours does the rule apply?

At every ticketed site and museum we stop at: the Acropolis and the Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, Akrotiri on Santorini, the sanctuary and museum at Delphi, Mycenae and Epidaurus, Ancient Corinth, the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion and the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, where the Jewish heritage day is the one day we sell with the guide as part of it; on the Athens Jewish heritage morning the Jewish Community of Athens’s own guide shows you its synagogues, and a licensed guide joins for the museum on request. The villages, the beaches, the canal bridge, the viewpoints and the wineries are not sites in the law’s sense, and there the driver’s orientation is all there is to give.

How do we book a licensed guide?

Say so in the message of the booking request, with the site and the language you want, and the office quotes the guide with the day and confirms both by email before you travel; the guide’s fee is separate from the driver’s, and no rate for it is printed on this site yet. We book in advance: no official page we read says whether guides wait for hire at the entrances, so we do not count on it.

Guides who travel with a group from abroad

One limit on the reservation comes from the European Court of Justice, in a 1991 case against Greece: a guide travelling with a group from another member state may guide it in places other than the museums and historical monuments that can be visited only with a specialised professional guide. Inside those, the Greek rule stands, and a group’s own escort walks with the group, not as its guide.