Visitors' Role Expectations On Tour Guides

With the rapid development of tourism in our country,the demand of tour guide is increasing.However,tour guides are in such an embarrassing situation that on one hand,a good journey needs not only the service from a perfect tour guide but also the support from the visitors,while there are constant conflicts between tour guides and visitors which leading to a terrible journey.As the receiver of tour guide service,visitors are supposed to have a blueprint of the service in mind.To make the blueprint specific,this article studies visitors' perception about tour guide role expectations using role theory in sociology science,and examines whether there are significant differences in scores of tour guide expectations among visitors of different kinds.This article adopts methods of semi-structured interview and questionnaires.20 visitors of different ages and sex have been interviewed to acquire items of tour guide expectations.In pre-research,170 valid samples are collected.Then,item analysis and reliability test are adopted to form a formal quesionnaire,including 23 items in 6 dimensions:appearance and manners,service attitude,service norms,explaining skill level,strain capacity,relationship marketing ability for the whole journey product.Taking Wuxi as an example,402 group tour tourists to Wuxi participated in the investigation and 385 valid samples have been collected.Methods of descriptive statistics,T test and one-way ANOVA test are adopted.Findings are as following:(1)Average scores of visitors' role expectations on tour guides in 6 dimensions are all above 4 points(total score:' points).(2)Visitors' perception for the expectations of the tour guides role is ranking as:explaining skill level,appearance and manners,service norms,relationship marketing ability for the whole journey product,strain capacity and service attitude.(3)Findings of weather there are significant differences of tour guide expectations among visitors in different social demographic characteristics:there are significant differences in all of the 6 dimensions among visitors in different age,family structures,educational backgrounds and occupations.There are significant differences in most of 6 dimensions among visitors in different gender and with different average personal monthly household income.(4)Findings of weather there are significant differences of tour guide expectations among visitors of different travel behavior characteristics:there are significant differences in all of the 6 dimensions among visitors of different length of travel time,fellow travelers and reasons for travel.There are significant differences in most of 6 dimensions among visitors of different year travel costs.