A guide then is essentially a contractor you hire to provide a service. If you hired a contractor to put a new roof on your house, and in the process they tore up your front yard with a truck, you'd raise hell unless they immediately made it right- and any excuse such as "I can't afford to fix it, but I'll give you a discount on your next roof!" would be met with calls to the BBB, and bad reviews on Angie's List or whatever. Fishing guides are just people who CHOOSE to make their living by taking people fishing--- as in any other business, as the contractor they damn well better be prepared to deal with whatever happens. This one obviously was not. Lame excuses don't make anything better.

There have been a few other threads about the ideas of hiring guides. Buying accessibility, or essentially "renting" accessibility to a piece of water is easier for me to understand. I've only lived in central Pennsylvania for about 5 years, and although I fish for everything, stream trout are somewhere down on my list. I've always been someone who takes great satisfaction in doing things on my own, not saying I re-invent the wheel every time I do something new, and I'm not against getting helpful advise.