Assessment of the expected qualifications of professional tour guides and their performances by local tourists

Recently increasing communication and transportation opportunities have also affected tourism sector. As a result of increase in these opportunities, a new are in which there are more domestic and international tourism selections, and more conscious tourists with help of internet and social networks. More conscious tourist structure made compulsory to have conscious tourism services. One of the most important tourism service components is professional tourism guide (PTG) services. The PTG contributes tremendously to the success of packaged tours. As such, this research aims to determine the importance levels of the expected PTG's qualifications and assessing the performance of PTG's from the local tourists' perspectives. In order to ascertain the aim, survey was conducted with 472 local tourists that visited Gaziantep in 2014 with guided package tours in the months of March and April. The findings indicated that the ratings given to PTGs' performances were lower than that of their qualifications' importance level. From this point of view, it can be suggested that PTGs' performance levels stay under local tourists' expectations within the research framework. The results also indicate statistically significant differences with %5 significance level between local tourists' assessments on knowledge, abilities/skills and characteristics of PTGs and local tourist' education levels, genders and package tour participation frequencies.