Tour guides: Roles, challenges and desired competences A review of literature

Abstract

It is important to understand that tour guides play an important role in a tourist experience at a destination. As a frontline line service provider they leave a lasting impression. Since tourism has multiple stake holders, each have different expectations from tour guide. Accordingly at different places and times, different roles have been envisaged for tour guides. This paper is a review of literature scanning the importance of tour guides; roles that different stakeholders and researchers have outlined for guides; the challenges they face; and, the debate on building competence of these guides. This paper evaluates different opinions to understand what guides should be expected to do. There is very little reference to researches that analyse challenges that tour guides face. Paper also tries to assimilate research references to challenges to tour-guiding. Last section reviews research related to approaches to guide competence building. Key words: Tour guide, role, challenges of tour guiding, training, training content, literature review

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