Talk to Your Guide: (605) 252-9100
Talk to Your Guide: (605) 252-9100
When you book a private tour, you are handing a full day of your vacation to one person, so I think you should know who that person is before you book. Most tour websites never tell you. Here is ours.
I started My XO Adventures in 2018 because I kept watching visitors drive past the best parts of the Black Hills on their way to the famous ones. My background is in travel, history, and education, and before this I trained in hospitality with Hyatt and The Ritz-Carlton in Sarasota, Florida. I also founded Black Hills Tour Guides, the regional training program that certifies professional guides across the Hills, because I wanted the bar for guiding here to be higher than a driver’s license and a script. Most days you will find me behind the wheel with a van full of guests, and my own credentials are the ones I ask of every guide who drives for us:
Logan is our lead guide and a wildlife biologist, which changes what a day in the Badlands or Custer State Park feels like. Plenty of guides can point at a bison, but Logan can tell you what the herd is doing and why, and he reads the landscape the way most people read a menu.
Every tour includes professional photos at no extra cost, and Day is the reason that promise means something. He guides the same routes he shoots, so he knows where the light lands at golden hour and exactly where to stand you for the picture you will frame when you get home.
Amiee is not the one driving, but if you have traded messages with us before your tour, there is a good chance you were talking to her, and she makes sure the trip you were promised is the trip that shows up at your hotel door.
Nobody drives for us on charm alone. Every guide is trained on the places we take you, the wildlife you will meet, and the history under your wheels, and every guide knows the rule that matters most in a national park: the animals set the distance, not us. The van is the same one we name in our reviews, the picnic is real food, and the photos your guide takes along the way are included because you should be in your own vacation pictures.
If you want to know which guide leads your date before you book, ask us. It is a fair question, and we will answer it with a name.