An Assessment of the Effect of Tour Guides’ Competencies on the Quality of Guiding Services Case Arusha Municipality, Tanzania

Lekule, Joachim Charles (2017) An Assessment of the Effect of Tour Guides’ Competencies on the Quality of Guiding Services Case Arusha Municipality, Tanzania. Masters thesis, The Open University of Tanzania.

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Abstract

The research was to study tour guides’ professional competencies effects on service quality of tour guiding in Arusha municipality, Tanzania. The study design adopted in this study was descriptive study. The sample size involved 85 tour guides and 20 tour operators. Simple randomly and purposive sampling methods were used in identifying sample. Data collection instruments were questionnaires and interview. The quantitative data collected were analyzed using SPSS and presented in descriptive statistics and qualitative data were analyzed using content analysis through narrative interview. The findings revealed that The study discovers that tour guide professional competencies has impacts on service quality, increase customer loyalty, increase the volume of business, create good image to the customers, it leads new and special request of the same guide for the next guiding service. The study also observed that there is strong relationship between tour guide’s professional competencies and perceived quality service because the statistics significance is less than 0.05 which indicate positive relations. The challenges facing tour guides in their daily guiding activities were lack of support from tour operator, poor infrastructure conditions, and difficult clients. Also unexpected vehicle breakdown on safari, change of technology and overbooking, change of whether, outbreak diseases that some clients have and language barrier from different customer. The study recommended that tour operators, travel agents and other tourism stakeholders should provide more and required strong support to the tour guides and set strategies for tour guiding training and consideration should base on customer service and skills development and the government should set strategies on establishing and support tourism training institutions and improving infrastructures.

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