Tour Guiding Research

This book provides an authoritative, state-of-the-art review of tour guiding scholarship and research. It aims to foster best practice and to stimulate further study and research on tour guiding across a range of disciplines. The book is well-illustrated and its accessible style with chapter summaries makes it ideal for students as well as researchers.

Tour guides, a highly responsible group of professionals who are in direct communication with tourists traveling around the world, have a great impact on the proper promotion of the culture of countries, global peace, and tolerance. Additionally, they are also effective in the preservation of world natural heritage. Thus, the educational status of tour guides, as well as the characteristics and ethical values that they should possess, need to be examined on an international scale. In today’s world, where tourism demand is directed towards all types of tourism, practices in special interest tourism should be customized in order to ensure the highest level of service quality and cultural appreciation. Cases on Tour Guide Practices for Alternative Tourism provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of the occupational issues that surround tour guides and their applications within international tourism. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as cultural education, specialized learning, and international business, this book is ideally designed for tour guides, travel agencies, tour managers, tour developers, heritage sites, museums, academicians, researchers, students, industry experts, and hospitality professionals.

A complete training manual for aspiring tourist guide, escorts and tourism students. The book contains a professional approach of guiding and covers almost all important points that is required to become a perfect and demanding tour guide.It covers guiding concept, environment, ethics, role and responsibilities, story telling techniques, commentary, skills and qualities, etiquette of guide, do's and don'ts, dealing with difficult questions, presentation, describing monuments and cultural products, planning tour to packaging, dealing with emergency, Guide Association, Guidelines for obtaining training and license etc..This book facilitates easy to learn platform to its readers to become a perfect guide. The book is a complete training manual that helps in professional development. It contains a dynamism of tourism. It also covers tour guiding modules of various universities and institutions imparting vocational education in travel and tourism management

This book provides critical in-depth reviews on key themes and issues in tourism research in China. These themes include: Chinese scholars’ epistemological views of tourism, rural tourism development, community participation in tourism, tourist market and behaviour, tourist attraction management and tour guiding and interpretation in China. While Chinese scholars are often able to access key research in both English and Chinese, the majority of researchers from outside China without knowledge of the Chinese language are unable to read original research from China. This book seeks to redress this knowledge imbalance and bring key Chinese tourism research to the international tourism academic community. This book will be a valuable reference for tourism researchers, postgraduate students and industry professionals.

This special issue of Ethnologia Europaea focuses on tour guides as cultural mediators. It opens with a discussion of tour guiding in the anthropology of tourism by Jackie Feldman and Jonathan Skinner and consideration of how tour guiding should be seen as imaginative and performative practice. This is illustrated by a highly international and comparative collection by leading anthropologists and ethnologists, many of whom have guiding experience themselves: Valerio Simoni on intimacy, informality and sexuality in guiding relations in Cuba; David Picard on modern guiding and traditional values in La Réunion; Jackie Feldman on Jewish-Israelis guiding Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land; Amos Ron and Yotam Lurie on the intimacy and trust in guide -- tourist relations in Israel; Annelou Ypeij, Eva Krah and Floor van der Hout on the impact of gender on guide -- local relations in Peru; Irit Dekel on the manipulation of the past and the present in home museums in Germany; Jonathan Skinner on the imagination and props involved in the re-animation of heritage in a historical fantasy home in the UK. The issue ends with discussion commentaries from Noel Salazar and Erik Cohen that reiterate tour guiding as a particularly temporal and physical mediating pursuit, one which raises critical questions as to the future mechanics of tour guiding and how a performative approach to guiding engages with authenticity and new technologies.

In this volume, contributors reflect on how to teach and mediate difficult history from the perspectives of guides. Too often, their activities are undervalued and taken for granted. Guides represent an important, often forgotten group of educators. This volume takes a global view on guiding at memorial sites and museums in Europe, North America, and South Africa. The contributors to this volume show from different research traditions that it is worth understanding more about the guides’ personal interests, their motivations, and their concept of guiding. Authors apply methodologies from the social sciences to describe the guides’ point of view. Complementing the various approaches in tour guide research, a detailed linguistic analysis sheds light on a survivor’s testimony echoed in the guides’ language. The studies gathered in this volume open up an orientation for further approaches to tour guiding based on and centered around “authentic” materials from guides.

It often seems that there is more confusion than consensus regarding tourism theory. Does tourism have theories it can truly own, or does it just borrow from other academic disciplines? It can be difficult to understand the theories and conceptual frameworks available, and how to apply these ideas to a research endeavour. This book reviews theoretical perspectives on tourism from planning and management, through marketing and host communities to the tourism consumers themselves. Covering issues such as tour guiding, rural tourism development and destination image, it provides a complete guide to the industry. Including pedagogical features throughout, this book is an accessible approach to a controversial subject.

This introductory guide offers innovative ideas and strategies to students undertaking their first social science research work. Academically rigorous yet accessible, it uses a systematic step-by-step approach to illustrate the research process and its applications to the tourism industry. Students are presented with numerous examples and case studies, linking theory with practice. The textbook provides a balanced coverage of both qualitative and quantitative methods, accompanying students throughout the process of selecting a research topic and specifying research questions, aims and objectives. A range of pedagogical features such as discussion questions, practical tips and examples enable students to review the literature, understand models and methodologies, analyse and interpret data (quantitative and qualitative) and ultimately write up their findings. Featuring contributions by a group of academics with expertise in their respective fields, the book provides a comprehensive and engaging introduction to research methods. This is an essential resource to tourism students and will also be of interest to researchers in any social science subject.