Ok, First off read this Becoming a guide
If you’re still interested, then here is my personal experience. I did my first season guiding last year for Mountain Edge In Austria. I have the SMBLA Mountain Bike leader qualification and also the TBV (tirolean Mountain leaders association) Mountain Leader award. Qualifications are essential if you want to be insured, and the SMBLA is probably the place to start.
Fitness and skill – I race elite level XC, and I was still tired most days – when you end up riding 40 miles for 10 days in a row you really need to be fit. Bike handling suffers when you ride that much too, so make sure you know your way down the toughest trail you can find with confidence. you need to be comfortably better than 95% of your clients to make sure you can give them a good guiding experience.
Secondly, guiding is hard work. not every day will be fun, but most will. you will fix more punctures than you can keep count of and pick gravel out of many a knee. it will rain, you will get lost and people will crash and complain. but it is the best job I have ever had.
I taught a 56 year old woman to ride a bike from scratch, and by the end of the week she was riding singletrack with her husband. I took a Uni group on a 4 day, 150 mile adventure on the Austrian Wilderness, and I also broke my bike alot!
I would say think about what you really want to get out of your sabb. Guiding is a great experience but it isnt a holiday, its a lifestyle which takes alot of enthusiasm to get it to work.
As for contacting companies, most smaller companies will only employ people they already know, for reasons of wanting a guide they get along with. the bigger companies are more likely to accept a random application, but remember its pretty competitive.