Tourist guidance professional practice issues: Perspective of women tourist guides

Tourist guides, who undertake the promotion of tourism in the tourism sector, have a great role in the promotion of the country. However, tourist guides may experience some problems while performing their profession. These problems differ depending on the gender of the guides. In the tourist guide profession, female guides may experience more problems than male guides. The source of these problems can be either by the stakeholders or by the tourists. In this context, in order to find solutions to the problems of female tourist guides, 14 female tourist guides with actions registered in the guide rooms of TUREB were reached and the problems they experienced with the stakeholders and tourist groups were tried to be determined. The interview questions determined by the experts in the field were applied by the researcher to the female guides with the face-to-face interview technique, one of the qualitative research methods. Before starting the interview, preliminary information about the research was given and the interviews were recorded in line with the approval of the female tourist guides. Parts of the audio-recorded interviews related to the research area were written down. The identities of the participants were kept confidential due to the confidentiality of the interviews, codes were given, and descriptive analysis technique was used as a result of the interview. With this technique, it became possible to examine the interview results in depth within the predetermined themes. As a result of the research, the problems experienced by female tourist guides while performing their profession were determined and solution suggestions were produced. Considering that there are few studies on the related subject, it is thought that the problems can be reduced to a minimum with the proposed solutions as well as contributing to the literature.