Changing roles of tour guides: From “agent to serve” to “agent of change”

IF 3.3 4区管理学 Q2 HOSPITALITY, LEISURE, SPORT & TOURISM Tourist Studies Pub Date : 2023-09-27 DOI:10.1177/14687976231200909

Lianping Ren, Cora Un In Wong, Caiwei Ma, Yanping Feng

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Abstract

The guided tour industry has undergone drastic changes in China along with the socio-economic, demographic, and technological developments of the past decades, leading to new demands on the tour guide profession. The COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated the changes. Yet little is known regarding how the tour guides’ roles have evolved. This study aims to fill this gap through exploring new roles and services undertaken by tour guides, drawing on qualitative data (in-depth interviews) from both tour guides’ and tourists’ recent guided tour experience in China. The findings demonstrate a continuum of roles of the guides, ranging from “the serving roles” to being “the ones who facilitate changes.” Five main driving forces were identified, namely: the tourists’ customization needs, demographic change, rapid ICT development, increased special interests, and the pandemic and tourists’ favor in remote destinations. Instead of expecting serving roles only, the Chinese tourists now welcome roles that can foster positive changes, reflecting Chinese tourists’ motivational shift to having eudaimonic experience through traveling.

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导游角色的转变:从“服务的代理人”到“变革的代理人”

在过去的几十年里，随着社会经济、人口和技术的发展，中国的导游行业发生了巨大的变化，对导游职业提出了新的要求。2019冠状病毒病大流行进一步加速了这些变化。然而，人们对导游的角色是如何演变的知之甚少。本研究旨在通过探索导游的新角色和服务，利用导游和游客最近在中国的导游经历的定性数据(深度访谈)来填补这一空白。研究结果表明，向导的角色是连续的，从“服务角色”到“促进变革的角色”。确定了五个主要驱动力，即:游客的定制需求、人口变化、信息通信技术的快速发展、特殊兴趣的增加以及疫情和游客对偏远目的地的青睐。中国游客不再仅仅期待服务角色，而是欢迎能够促进积极变化的角色，这反映出中国游客的动机转变为通过旅行获得幸福的体验。

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来源期刊

Tourist Studies HOSPITALITY, LEISURE, SPORT & TOURISM-

CiteScore

6.90

自引率

4.20%

发文量

期刊介绍： Tourist Studies is a multi-disciplinary journal providing a platform for the development of critical perspectives on the nature of tourism as a social phenomenon through a qualitative lens. Theoretical and multi-disciplinary. Tourist Studies provides a critical social science approach to the study of the tourist and the structures which influence tourist behaviour and the production and reproduction of tourism. The journal examines the relationship between tourism and related fields of social inquiry. Tourism and tourist styles consumption are not only emblematic of many features of contemporary social change, such as mobility, restlessness, the search for authenticity and escape, but they are increasingly central to economic restructuring, globalization, the sociology of consumption and the aestheticization of everyday life. Tourist Studies analyzes these features of tourism from a multi-disciplinary perspective and seeks to evaluate, compare and integrate approaches to tourism from sociology, socio-psychology, leisure studies, cultural studies, geography and anthropology. Global Perspective. Tourist Studies takes a global perspective of tourism, widening and challenging the established views of tourism presented in current periodical literature. Tourist Studies includes: Theoretical analysis with a firm grounding in contemporary problems and issues in tourism studies, qualitative analyses of tourism and the tourist experience, reviews linking theory and policy, interviews with scholars at the forefront of their fields, review essays on particular fields or issues in the study of tourism, review of key texts, publications and visual media relating to tourism studies, and notes on conferences and other events of topical interest to the field of tourism studies.