A study to determine performance competences of tour guides: Developing a tour guide performance scale

Tours are among the foremost products of travel industry. Tour guides are one of the reasons why people prefer tours instead of travelling on their own. Whereas tour guides were supposed to execute the tour program on behalf of the tour operator and inform the tourists, these days they have various missions ranging from destinations to sustainability. Tour guides affect the tour opeartors they work for in some ways. Tour guides' role is more critical in ensuring tourist satisfaction, tourist loyalty etc. compared to the rest of the employees in tourism industry. Because tour guides interact with the tourists the most. The foremost means for this interaction is the guiding service which is shaped by the performance the guide exposes during the tour. The performance of a guide is composed of actions s/he is in charge to fulfill. In this study, a conceptual framework on travel industry and its organizations, tour guiding and its organizations, the working principles of guiding and tour guide performance was established. Subsequently, it was noticed there were only several studies investigating tour guide performance and only a few scales measuring tour guide performance. Moreover, no scales regarding the attributes of guided tours in Turkey and characteristics of the guiding service offered by Turkish tour guides was observed. Consequently, a tour guide performance scale was intended to develop. Primarily, a a qualitative research was carried out via semi structured interviews so that competences determining tour guides' performance could be found out. Afterwards, a questionnaire consisting of 29 questions (performance competences) was administered in a quantitative process. After executing exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), a tour guide performance scale composed of three factors and 18 items was developed. Keywords: Travel Industry, Tour Guides, Tour Guide Performance, Performance Scale,Validity and Reliability in Measurement