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Tour guide Katie Berridge was headed by bus to the Italian town of Ferrara with a group of tourists when she received an alarming email.
A colleague had intel that some of the town’s key historic buildings were under renovation and covered in unsightly scaffolding.
Katie Berridge in front of the Hungarian Parliament and Danube River in Budapest.
Instead of panicking, Berridge did a pivot worthy of an Olympic gymnast. She calmly directed the driver to head 70 kilometres north to Padua.
After online research, Berridge coolly hosted a walking tour of Padua’s churches and gardens, with none of the tourists batting an eyelid about the unscheduled location switch.
Berridge, from Kew in Melbourne’s east, says her 18 months of leading tours for Contiki clients, mostly aged 18 to 35, across 24 European countries, so far, has been a crazy but memorable ride.
She’s bathed in Iceland’s Blue Lagoon, paraglided in the Austrian Alps and cried at the beauty of the northern lights in Tromso, Norway. And got paid for it.
Katie Berridge and her coach driver boyfriend Joao on Christmas Day 2024, on Burano Island in Italy.
“There’s no other job like it, where you can get to go to all these incredible places and be able to call it something that you do for work,” she said.
Berridge is one of four Victorians that The Age is profiling for a Living Abroad summer series, about locals who spent 2025 far from home.
Two years ago, Berridge was working for a Melbourne betting company when a colleague who had been on a European tour heard that Contiki were hiring guides.
“I thought, ‘I really want to travel and none of my friends want to go overseas. Wouldn’t it be cool to travel and get paid for it?’”
Katie Berridge, in the yellow helmet, on a white-water rafting tour in Voss, Norway in September 2025.
After a recruitment process involving online quizzes and video and in-person interviews, Berridge was hired.
Her training in early 2024 included a 62-day tour through 17 countries.
In June 2024, Berridge hosted her first trip, and has now led 12, with three coming up this winter.
While there were romances and one marriage proposal between clients, Berridge also fell in love last winter — with Joao from Portugal, who is a Contiki coach driver and now her boyfriend.
Katie Berridge takes a dip in the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa near Grindavik in Iceland, August 2025.
Berridge says traits advisable to have in her job include patience and the ability to get along with a range of people.
She plans special outings for clients to make trips memorable, like trying to spot billionaire Jeff Bezos and his bride Lauren Sanchez at bars during their Venice wedding.
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“In Riga, in Latvia, I found an ice hockey match for €5 [$8.80] each so we all bought tickets and went,” Berridge said.
While Berridge was once keener to party into the early hours after, say, seeing a show at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, she now makes sure she turns in to get the rest needed to be fresh for clients the next day.
Berridge keeps in mind that while she can have fun, she is at work.
“The way I see it, it’s their holiday, not mine,” Berridge says. “So I know when to put their holiday first and not to make it about my fun over their fun, if that makes sense.”
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