Supplier fact sheet

Who your client is booking

I’m a self-employed guide, not a company, so the contract for the guiding day runs between me and whoever pays for it.

I’m not a tour operator and not a travel agency. I don’t package, resell, or act as an intermediary for transport, accommodation, tickets, or anybody else’s activities, and I don’t sell travel packages. What I supply is the guided day itself. Assembling the rest of the trip stays with you, which is usually the reason an advisor calls me in the first place.

Certification and legal status

Every credential below sits on a public register, so your compliance team can verify it without going through me.

• Environmental hiking guide (GAE), qualified and recognised by the Regione Toscana. Regional register of qualified environmental guides
• Member of AGAE, the Associazione Guide Ambientali Escursionistiche. AGAE profile
• Authorised guide of the Parco Migliarino San Rossore Massaciuccoli, including the zones the park reserves for authorised guides. Official park listing
• Regional mushroom identification certification, which is what I lead the mushroom identification walks under.

Insurance

I carry professional liability insurance covering my guiding activity, and I’ll send a certificate of insurance on request, to you or straight to your client.

Separately, I ask every participant to hold their own personal accident, health, and where relevant travel insurance appropriate to hiking. That request is written into my terms, and it’s worth your team repeating it at the point of sale.

Group size and privacy

Nobody is ever merged with strangers. If your client books, the day is theirs.

Twelve is the most I take out on my own. Above that I bring in a second qualified guide and quote the day with two guides, so ask early.

One route is smaller. The Calvana ridge above Prato takes five walkers at most, children included, because the trailhead has room for very few cars and the ridge is home to a herd of wild horses.

Where I guide

Home ground is northern Tuscany, and I’ll travel across the region for a day that justifies it.

• Apuan Alps: marble ridges, quarry landscapes, the Corchia system
• Northern (Tuscan-Emilian) Apennines: Lago Scaffaiolo, Lago Nero, Monte Gennaio, the Acquerino forests
• Garfagnana: chestnut woods and river valleys
• Wetlands: Padule di Fucecchio, Lago di Massaciuccoli, Parco di San Rossore
• City hinterlands: Lucca, Pistoia, Pisa, Florence, including routes reachable by train with no car needed

If your client is based somewhere specific and you want to know what’s within an hour of them, ask. The current routes and their individual pages are at stefanogabryel.net/hikes/.

When I guide

Year round. What changes with the calendar is the route, never the availability.

Lead time to book

There’s no minimum notice. There’s only whether the day is free.

If a date is genuinely open I can often run a full day at 24 hours’ notice, and a half day the same evening it’s asked for. Treat that as a capability rather than a promise, because it’s entirely gated on my calendar and I won’t pretend otherwise.

• Booking form and email: I reply within 24 hours
• WhatsApp: usually minutes, unless I’m on a trail
• A request isn’t a booking. It becomes one when I confirm it to you in writing, with the date, start time, meeting point and price

For clients already on the ground in Tuscany, WhatsApp is the channel that matches their clock.

Prices

All figures are per private group in euro, and they cover one to three walkers. Nothing here is per person.

The mushroom walk costs more than a longer hike, and your team will ask why. It runs on a separate mycology certification, it only happens for three months of the year, and what your client pays for is the identification work, not the distance covered.

Additional walkers beyond the third are €5 each, so a group of twelve pays €45 over the group price. Per-route pricing sits on each page under stefanogabryel.net/hikes/, and it’s the same figure a direct client sees.

I’m on Italy’s flat-rate tax scheme (regime forfettario, Law 190/2014, art. 1, paragraphs 54 to 89), so my invoices carry no VAT. The €2 stamp duty on the invoice is mine to pay, not your client’s.

What’s included

• Professional guiding
• Route planning and safety management
• Nature interpretation: landscape, flora, fauna, fungi identification
• Basic photography guidance as we walk

What’s not included

• Transport to and from the trailhead
• Food and drinks, which participants bring themselves
• Personal equipment, above all boots with grip
• Accommodation
• The dedicated photography session, which is a paid add-on booked at the same time

That last line matters for anyone writing an itinerary. Coaching on composition while we walk costs nothing. A guide working as a photographer through the day, delivering edited images afterwards, is a separate service with its own fee.

The mushroom walk, stated plainly

My own page calls it mushroom hunting and foraging, because that’s what people search for. Your client should know what it actually is before they book.

• It’s an identification experience, led under a regional mycology certification. Clients learn to identify species in the field, with the mushrooms we find that day in front of them, the prize species and the dangerous look-alikes both.
• It’s not a collecting trip. We find, identify and photograph. Nothing is picked, and nothing goes home in a basket.
• No permit is required of the client. Picking mushrooms in Tuscany needs a paid regional permit. Identifying them needs none, and on my walks nobody picks.
• Nature has the last word on what we find. In season finding nothing at all is unlikely, but after a dry spell the woods can be thin, and I can’t promise a species or a number of finds. A thin day is not a reason for a refund or a free second walk. Please tell your client this before they book.

Sell it as three hours of mycology with a certified guide, not as a harvest, and nobody turns up with a basket expecting to fill it.

Weather policy

This is the weather policy your client accepts when they book. Like the cancellation terms below, it’s written to them, so the “you” is your client. Tell them about it at the point of sale, not on the night before.

You book a guide, not a forecast

Tuscany isn’t a place where hiking stops for rain, and I’d rather set that expectation now than argue about it at 7 in the morning.

We walk in light rain

Rain on its own never cancels a walk. We go in drizzle, in passing showers, in fog and on grey damp days, so bring the jacket and come anyway. Wet weather gives you cloud drifting through the woods, colour in the rock and paths with nobody else on them.

I may change the route or the start time

If storms are forecast over the ridges in the afternoon, we start early and are off the high ground before they arrive. When a washed-out morning clears by midday, we go later. Wind on an exposed ridge, a hot day or short winter daylight can also send us onto a different route. So on a full-day hike, keep the whole day free. A half day, the mushroom walk included, needs less: just leave some room before and after. If you’ve already got something else that day, tell me when you book and I’ll work around it, weather permitting.

I cancel only for a real danger

That means one of these:

• thunderstorms I can’t plan around or outrun
• strong wind on an exposed ridge
• ice or hard snow on a route that would need an axe and crampons
• a red-level heat warning in the national heatwave bulletin
• an orange or red alert from the Regione Toscana covering the ground we’d actually be walking on

The Region issues those alerts for broad zones, so I read the bulletin against our route. An alert over a wide area doesn’t make every valley in it unsafe, and some days the answer is a lower route rather than no walk at all.

No message means we’re on

I watch the forecast from about three days out. The regional bulletin for the next day comes out in the early afternoon, so by the evening I know what I’m dealing with. If anything has to change (a new start time, a different route, or calling the day off), I message you by 20:00 the evening before. No message means we walk exactly as booked, same time, same meeting point. If conditions turn overnight, you’ll hear from me first thing.

Who makes the call

The call is mine to make, in both directions, and that’s deliberate. Reading a mountain on the day is most of what a guide is actually for, and it’s the part my licence and my insurance rest on. A forecast on your phone can’t tell you what the ground is doing under the cloud.

Whose rule this is

No Italian law obliges a guide to cancel on an orange alert. This is my own published standard, and it’s in line with what the parks do on the same signal.

The “no message” rule is the one to say out loud. A client who expects a confirmation the evening before reads its absence as a problem.

Cancellation and refunds

This is the policy your client accepts when they book, word for word. It’s written to them, so the “you” below is your client.

If you cancel

• more than 7 days before: full refund, minus a €25 processing fee
• within 7 days: 50% of the total is retained
• within 3 days: the full amount is retained
• no-show, meaning you’re more than 30 minutes past the agreed start with no word from you: treated as a cancellation, no refund

I’ll wait that half hour and I’ll try to call you. If you’re running late and you tell me, we just work with what’s left of the day.

If you’d rather not walk in the rain

Tell me at least 48 hours before. If I have another day open while you’re still in the area, I’ll move you to it at no extra cost. That depends on what’s left in my diary, so it’s something I do when I can rather than a promise, and it’s one move. If I have nothing free, or you tell me inside 48 hours, the cancellation terms apply as normal: by then I’ve held the date and turned other work down.

If I cancel

I call a day off for safety, when weather or ground conditions make the route dangerous, or when something beyond my control gets in the way. Then we look for another date that works for both of us. If there isn’t one, I refund the full amount you paid, with no processing fee taken off, within 10 working days. If we haven’t agreed a new date within two weeks of the day I called off, the refund goes out on its own and neither of us has to chase it.

That refund is the limit of what I can cover. It doesn’t extend to travel, hotels or anything else you booked around the day, which is one more reason to have travel insurance.

If we turn back early

If we turn back part-way, for any reason, the day counts as delivered and no refund is due. Getting you safely off a mountain is the job as much as getting you up it. If we’ve barely started when I call it, I’ll do what I can to find you another date while you’re still here.

Guided experiences are leisure services supplied on a fixed date, so the 14-day right of withdrawal doesn’t apply to them under Article 59 of the Italian Consumer Code. Cancellations run on the ladder above.

Languages

I guide in English and Italian, and I write, quote and handle correspondence in both.

Working together

Commercial terms are agreed case by case, so tell me how your network prefers to work and we’ll shape it around that. I’ve worked both ways: white-label inside somebody else’s itinerary, and as a named local expert your client knows by name before they arrive. Either suits me.

What I’d want from you is the client’s dates, group size, rough fitness, and what they’re actually interested in. What you get back is a route proposal and a straight answer about whether I’m the right person for it. Sometimes I’m not, and I’d rather say so than take the booking.

Contact

• Email: stefano.gabryel@gmail.com
• Phone and WhatsApp: +39 351 366 3017
• Trade enquiries: stefanogabryel.net/collaborate/tour-operators/
• Press kit, bios and images: stefanogabryel.net/press/