Abstract
The tourism industry is considered a typical service industry, one in which the involvement of service components is relatively high. Serving and satisfying customers are fundamental goals of the tourism business, with service providers being part of the product itself. Given tour guides’ roles as intermediaries between tourists and an unfamiliar environment, special attention should be paid to the service quality of tour guides, as it has the potential to increase tourist satisfaction and produce measurable benefits in profits and market share. The aim of the study is therefore to build the quality indicators of tour guide services. In terms of research methodologies, a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches was conducted to reach the objectives. After both in-depth interviews and two rounds of focus group sessions, six dimensions (reliability, response, physical environment, guarantee, care and culture) and 30 indicators were obtained. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to determine the weighting of various evaluation criteria on the indicators of Taiwanese tour guides’ service quality. Among the criteria, “The tour guides have a precise service attitude and execution ability.” was found to be the most important, while “During the trip, the tour guides dress properly.” ranked as the least important.
Highlights
The significant role of service quality for business success has been well acknowledged
Given tour guides’ roles as intermediaries between tourists and an unfamiliar environment, special attention should be paid to the service quality of tour guides, as it has the potential to increase tourist satisfaction and produce measurable benefits in profits and market share
Extensive literature has been devoted to the service quality in the tourism field, there has been relatively little discussion of the service quality of the tour guide population, nor has there been any assessment of their quality of performance
Summary
The significant role of service quality for business success has been well acknowledged. Extensive literature has been devoted to the service quality in the tourism field, there has been relatively little discussion of the service quality of the tour guide population, nor has there been any assessment of their quality of performance. The reason for this gap may be the lack of appropriate service quality indicators for tour guides. This is a worthwhile area of research, as tour guides play an important role in the success or failure of a tour experience and often crucially influence tourists’ perceptions of the host destination [5]. Since the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method systematizes complicated problems, is easy to operate, and integrates most of the experts’ and evaluators’ opinions, AHP method was applied to determine the weighting of various evaluation criteria [7]
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