Assessment Of Professional Tour Guides’ Performances By Local Tourists

Abstract

With the help of internet and other social networks, a more conscious tourist profile has gained momentum in this new tourism era. The professional tour guide (PTG) services, one of the most important components of the tourism services, have been inspired due to these developments. The PTG contributes tremendously to the success of packaged tours. As such, this research aims to determine the importance levels of the expected PTG's qualifications and assessing the performance of PTG’s from the local tourists’ perspectives. In order to ascertain the aim, survey was conducted with 472 local tourists that visited Gaziantep in 2014 with guided package tours in the months of March and April. The findings indicated that the ratings given to PTGs’ performances were lower than that of their qualifications’ importance level. From this point of view, it can be suggested that PTGs’ performance levels stay under local tourists’ expectations within the research framework. The results also indicate statistically significant differences with %5 significance level between local tourists’ assessments on knowledge, abilities/skills and characteristics of PTGs and local tourist’ education levels, genders and package tour participation frequencies.