The best house guest is also a tour guide

Forget gifts and washing-up. Anna Hart prefers helping her hosts to rediscover their home city

There are many components to being a good house guest. At some of these, I do not score highly. I don’t have a car and I’m unlikely to arrive at your door with a hefty hamper from Fortnum & Mason; my generosity in the hamper department is hampered by physics, not economics. I’m rubbish at buying gifts for children, because I just want every child to reach the age when I can buy them my favourite books and discuss movies and music with them.

And I don’t believe in being one of those guests who loudly and ostentatiously insists on “helping” by clearing everything away and cleaning. I’ll empty the dishwasher if I’m up first thing in the morning. But when I host guests, I just want everyone to sit and smile, assisting with the illusion that I am on top of things, rather than spotlighting the stuff I haven’t done. Bustle stresses me out. So if I have ever visited you and come across as lazy, thoughtless and stingy, I apologise.

But one area of house-guesting in which I excel is forcing my hosts to be tourists in their own habitat. I arrive a little light on presents, but laden with invitations to the new Mexican restaurant or infrared sauna spa, to country walks, art exhibitions and vegan food tours. Ideas are blessedly light to carry, particularly my airy-fairy lightweight notions, and I am generous with them. I am also greedy for inspiration, and will nick as much local intel from my hosts as possible, and completely follow their lead with local recommendations. But that’s the nice thing about sharing ideas. Nobody is counting.

This week, I am in my hometown of Belfast, staying with Mum and Dad. I’ve built a week-long holiday around my friend Wai-Fun’s wedding, and dragged my parents all around town, to attractions and venues they studiously ignored for over a decade. Belfast’s big TripAdvisor-dominating attraction, aside from anything to do with the paramilitaries or Game of Thrones, is the Titanic Experience (titanicbelfast.com). Don’t worry, it’s not a very authentic experience of the Titanic, because that wasn’t great for some 1,500 people. No, like most things that are called “experiences” in an effort to sound “immersive” and “interactive” and other tourist board buzzwords, the Titanic Experience is essentially a museum. A very good one, as it turns out. “We could have visited this any day for the past 10 years… but we didn’t,” said my dad, as we swam from our Titanic Experience to a nearby life raft (okay, the nearest fancy hotel bar). Mum and I ordered espresso martinis, because we were on

our holidays; dad stuck to the hard stuff, an Americano. Our drinks in the lovely Titanic Hotel (titanichotelbelfast.com) kept us on holiday for a little longer, before we made the 10-minute drive to the house in which I grew up.

Never assume that your hosts have been through the full Tripadvisor things-to-do repertoire. I know Parisiens who have never been to the Louvre, Londoners who have never been to the British Museum and New Yorkers who haven’t been to the Met.

I also never turn up my nose at a tour, because I have always learnt something by joining one – and tours in places you think you know are often the most satisfying of the lot.

The day after we survived the Titanic, Mum and I took a Belfast street art tour with Seedhead Arts (seedheadarts.com). I sometimes find street art fairly humdrum – all cheesy symbolism, with female portraits resembling perfume ads and far too many skulls and aliens, the sort of stuff I scribbled all over my homework diary at school. But street art tours are unfailingly brilliant, an entertaining romp through the cultural and socio-economic history of a place. A tour like that turns the city into a gallery and teaches you the language of the street; my memories of Sao Paulo, Tucson, Austin, Athens and Derry are much richer for it. Specialist tours, such as street art tours, are perhaps my favourite things to drag hosts along to when I travel, because it’s always enjoyable to see someone who sees the city every day view it through a different lens.

I’m pleased to report that, so far, my parents are enjoying their surprise city break in Belfast… and since they have yet to get away, anything resembling a holiday is something to be cherished.

So next time you visit friends or family, remember the golden rule of the reverse holiday: take your hosts to something old, do something new – and buy them an espresso martini, too.

Titanic Experience in Belfast, where Anna’s parents live, was a revelation for them