Analysing the relationship between professional tour guides emotional intelligence level and problem solving skills on the basis of problems encountered during daily tours

The purpose of this study is to determine the emotional intelligence and problem solving skills' effect on professional tourist guides' managerial problem encountering frequencies during daily trips, besides determining whether the emotional intelligence and problem solving skills vary across demographical factors. Within this scope, the related body of literature is reviewed, the previous studies are utilised and in order to obtain primary data for this study a survey is conducted on professional tour guides working in Turkey. 300 tourist guides serving actively in various regions of Turkey constitute the research sample. Nonprobability sampling method "snowball sampling" is applied in the study. The obtained data is analysed through the statistical program developed for social sciences; frequencies, percentages and arithmetic means are calculated. To have inferential statistics regarding the variables of the research; t-test, analysis of variance, correlation and regression analaysis are applied. In the light of statictical analysis findings, it is conluded that; as the emotional intelligence level increases, the frequency of encountering managerial problems decrease and both the emotional intelligence scores and problem solving skills increase as the age increases. Only the emotional intelligence subscale "well-being" and problem solving subscale "approach-avoidance" are found to differ by marital status. Keywords: Emotional Intelligence, Problem Solving, Professional Tour Guiding, Tourism, Managerial Problems