Abstract:
Since professional tour guides are brand ambassadors of a destination and local
community members who have first-hand experience and know-how about the
destination, their service is one of the key determinants of overall tourist satisfaction.
The sustainability of this profession largely depends on factors including risks that
require a clear understanding and the management of the same. Hence, the purpose of
conducting this study is to structure the risk factors involved in professional tour
guides, which are considerably triggered by my personal experiences as well. The
professional risks of tour guides are conceptualized using the phenomenological
approach. I have adopted transcendental phenomenology to understand these risks
through conscious experience and subjective perceptions of tour guides. Five
experienced professional tour guides were selected by using purposive, criterion, and
snowball sampling methods and conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews for
data collection. Recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim, followed by a manual
coding process to bracket out the lived experiences of respondents employing six
types of coding; descriptive, value, in vivo, versus, parent, and child coding.
Professional risks of tour guides have been constructed through four main themes;
safety and security, social issues, psychological stressors, and obstacles in the
industry, followed by eleven categories like job security, internally-driven social
issues, industry-oriented psychological stressors, and tour operator-oriented obstacles,
etc., making the phenomenon multidimensional. Furthermore, the respondents
showed the means for the industry to be restructured and the areas of risks that should
be eliminated or reduced. The trustworthiness of the study is assured by employing
the methods of peer debriefing, triangulation, member checks, audit trails, etc.
