Creating tourist experiences by interpreting places using digital guides

This article investigates the relationship between technology and narrative in digital guides for tourists in Sweden. The main finding shows that narratives in the guides are based on a naïve view of history. In several instances, content is based on odd stories and speculation. Recent social trends have led to the erosion of grand narratives and the emergence of multiple views of history. New digital guides must address these challenges in order to develop tourism products that are relevant to different market segments.     

Social mediation in remote developing world tourism locations – the significance of social ties between local guides and host communities in sustainable tourism development

This article discusses the role of the local, or regional, guide as a social mediator between a host society and tourists, as a means of sustainable tourism development in developing world locations. The debate illustrates how previous studies have neglected this social aspect of mediation by tourist guides and partly absorbed it into the concept of cultural mediation. Empirical illustrations are offered from the context of small tourist group visitations to local villages in rural areas of Madagascar, where collective social norms still play an important role. A qualitative approach based on personal interviews with guides and on field trip experience and observation is employed. Empirical findings indicate that the inclination of the host society to welcome accompanied tourists is facilitated by the capacity of local guides to develop relatively strong social ties with the host society. It is suggested that the increased use of local guides with good social relationships with the local communities as against the mere employment of non-local accompanying guides working for centrally located tour operators can enrich the mutual experience quality in the encounter between visitors and hosts and support local sustainable development by enhanced local involvement. Implications for sustainable tourism practice are discussed.     

‘I go to dance,right?’: representation/sensation on the gendered dance floor

This article explores a group of young adults’ experiences of social dancing in the Eastside of Vancouver, BC, Canada. Drawing from critical and feminist qualitative methodological approaches as well as dance studies, the ethnography research privileges participants’ embodied knowledge of dancing in particular nightlife settings--small alternative spaces, rather than the city’s more mainstream, big business dance clubs. Dance’s double-bind, as both embodied and representational practice is evidenced through participants’ expressed negotiations of sexuality on the dance floor. Women participants, in particular, stress that though there may be an (implied) audience that constitutes their performance, gender performances in their nightlife leisure spaces are not synonymous with a desire for heterosexual relationships.     

The Impact of Tour Guides’ Physical Attractiveness,Sense of Humor,and Seniority on Guide Attention and Efficiency

In this study, we investigated whether tourists view attractive tour guides as more competent, humorous tour guides as more approachable, and experienced tour guides as more professional, and whether these three factors influence the effectiveness of tour guide interpretation. The results indicated that physical attractiveness and humor had additive effects on interpretation effectiveness when combined. Although some tour guides were not physically attractive, experience provided an additive effect on interpretation effectiveness. Thus, we recommend discarding stereotypes regarding physical attractiveness and improving education and training in humor for tour guides. Experienced tour guides wearing appropriate attire also increases interpretation effectiveness.     

Young tourists visiting strip clubs and paying for sex

Little is known about young adults’ use of strip clubs and prostitution during their holidays abroad. This study examined this issue with a sample of 1125 Danish tourists between the ages of 16 and 34, and sought data about the frequency with which they paid for sex and attended strip clubs while they were on holiday. The tourists were surveyed at a Bulgarian airport before their return trip home. The incidence of strip-club patronage during holiday was 48% for men and 8% for women. Of the men, 12.5% reported paying for sex during their holiday. Among the men paying for sex, 47% reported having done it for the first time. Among the men who attended strip clubs, 32% reported having done it for the first time. Strip-club patronage and paying for sex were both associated with higher levels of drinking, use of Viagra^®, and with having done the same thing before the holiday. Paying for sex was uniquely associated with non-use of condoms with one or more sexual partners. The results of this study can be interpreted as part of a wider culture of commodified debauchery, which predominates many nightlife resorts.     

Tourists’ responses to humour

Building on the existing tourism–humour literature, the study investigated tourists’ views of the categories of humour used by Australian tour guides. The researchers also evaluated tourists’ responses to the experimental manipulation of humour levels. The tourists’ commentary on the settings revealed that guides in one business emphasised predominantly funny stories and self-deprecatory humour, while in the second context the visitor experience was facilitated relatively more often through amusing exaggerations. In a quasi-experiment implemented within existing tourism businesses, the guides were encouraged to add more humour to their presentations. The manipulation did not enhance perceived levels of amusement but the prevailing levels of humour contributed significantly to the tourists’ comfort, concentration and connection levels.     

Island of Peace or Island of War: Tourist Guiding

The role of tour guides in conveying information, offering explanations, and developing narratives has become a contemporary research theme. The guide is introduced as a translator of the culture, who has the crucial task of selecting, glossing, and interpreting sights. The study will examine how the Island of Peace—a border site between former adversaries, Israel and Jordan, is introduced to Israeli tourists by Israeli guides and what messages the guides deliver to their captive audience. Based on participant observation of the guided tours in the site the article will show that the guides’ narratives and messages in many cases do not portray the site as a site of peace (as its name suggests), but mostly as a site with a past of tension and conflict.     

参团游客对旅行社服务质量的期望与感知实绩研究

关于参团游客对旅行社服务质量的预期和感知实绩的研究是改进旅行社服务质量,提高游客满意度的理论依据.本研究通过紧急事件访谈与问卷调查的方法,对参团游客对旅行社服务质量的期望与实际感知进行了研究,并利用IPA方法进行了分析探讨.结论认为,参团游客对旅行社服务质量主要关注产品服务质量、营业点服务质量、导游服务质量和营销服务质量,其中产品设计质量尤为重要;但游客的总体感知实绩并不理想,12个要素均需进一步改进,其中导游导购服务、产品种类多样化、价格公道和导游讲解水平是目前我国旅行社服务质量改进的关键因素,这一结论对旅行社服务质量改进具有现实意义.     

Guides' handling of multiple roles in interactions with tourists: The prism of impression management

Tour guides undertake multiple roles and may face role conflicts when interacting with tourists. A framework of impression management based on dramaturgical theory provides an insight into the inner mechanisms behind how tour guides deal with multiple role dilemmas. This situation is examined in interactions between local Chinese tour guides and Chinese group tourists in a walking-tour-shopping context in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Through observations and interviews, we find that the interplay of a moving stage and guides' role-shifting between being a Chinese sibling, a local and a cultural interpreter delivers authoritative and reliable impressions to tourists, and thus conceal their conflicting role as a shopping broker. We further refine the inner mechanism, which contributes to existing literature on tour guides' multiple-role practices. Our research also enriches the explanatory power of Goffman's framework by explaining a complex situation with multiple role dilemmas amidst a moving working stage in interactive studies.     

Explaining tourists´ attitudes to environmental support: a multilevel approach

This article contributes to a better understanding of tourists’ attitudes to environmental support when they make their holiday plans. Modelling these decisions is a challenge because although environmental concerns are heterogeneous across countries, they also depend on the individual characteristics of the tourists from each country. This article uses a multilevel approach, using a two-level structure, in which individuals are nested into countries. This approach may be helpful for understanding the contextual and compositional effects simultaneously. The estimates from a two-level random intercept logistic model and the post-estimation analysis, based on non-parametric techniques, demonstrate that the effects of country vary randomly, and that there is significant variance in the level of tourists´ environmental support within and between countries. Regarding the contextual effect, the post-materialist hypothesis explained most of the heterogeneity between the EU-27 countries. The affluence hypothesis was rejected and the challenge response hypothesis was only partially supported. The results from the compositional effect support the attribution hypothesis, demonstrating that the environmental concern of tourists is higher when travelling domestically than abroad.     

Entrepreneurs in RomanceTourism in Indonesia

This article addresses the extent to which the opportunity to enter into a sexual relationship with Western female tourists poses a challenge to the vast number of self-employed young men in Indonesian tourism destinations. The areas compared in this article (Lombok and Yogyakarta) differ in terms of Butlers resort area cycle. Whereas Yogyakarta is about to enter the consolidation phase, Lombok has only started to develop tourism. The position in the area life cycle affects the opportunities and restrictions that self-employed young males encounter in their participation in the informal tourism sector and, as a consequence, their expectations regarding relationships with female tourists.     

Testing a model of effective interpretation to boost the heritage tourism experience: a case study in Macao

While the impact of tour guides’ interpretation on tourism experience is well acknowledged, little research has been conducted on the production of effective interpretation by tour guides. In this study, effective interpretation is defined as producing a positive outcome on tourists’ knowledge and understanding of the visited heritage site, feelings and emotion, satisfaction and likelihood of visiting other relevant nearby heritage sites. Based on a literature review, a conceptual model of effective interpretation consisting of four propositions was formulated and examined by empirical on-site research in the World Cultural Heritage Site in Macau. The empirical findings support the four propositions and the applicability of the model for effective interpretation in Macao. The research was conducted in two phases: on-site guide evaluation and a linked tourist survey. The target market was mainland Chinese visitors. The results revealed the influence of four factors on effective interpretation, namely, heritage and tourist information knowledge, service attitude, communication competence and emotional intelligence. Special attention is given to the use of humor, provocation and emotional sensitivity. Future research should further investigate tourists’ emotion management and the applicability of this model to other tour guides’ heritage interpretation, at different types of site and in different regions.     

Tourists to Lhasa,Tibet: How Local Youth Classify,Understand and Respond to Different Types of Travelers

Local residents in tourism communities are observers of those who gaze at them. This research extends host gaze studies using an emic approach. It explores how tourists are viewed in three different settings in the context of Lhasa, Tibet. The young Tibetans viewing tourists in these three different settings have different economic and social backgrounds. They also have different degrees of exposure to tourists. The study offers baseline information on how tourists are differently understood within Tibet across nationality differences. It was demonstrated that three different groups of young Tibetans variously use ethnic origins, travel and transport arrangement, and how tourists are hosted to develop their different classifications. Tolerance towards most types of tourists is high, though it varies subtly for different groups. These core perspectives can be helpful in establishing not only how Tibetan tourism is viewed but also how it can be managed and developed in the future.     

The guided tour a sociological approach

In an exploratory study of guides and based on data derived from research combining observation and extended interviews, the relationship between guides, drivers, and their passengers is examined. The evidence suggests that the guiding role is not yet institutionalized, and remains open to interpretation by guides and passengers alike. The role of guiding involves a number of subsidiary and sometimes conflicting sub-roles, of which the information-giving function is emphasized by guides themselves, in their drive for professional status. Guides are found to develop manipulative and dramaturgical skills to satisfy their passengers' quest for a unique touristic experience. The mediation of the guide as “culture-broker” eases and may make more meaningful the contrived and artificial relationship between tourists and their hosts.     

跨文化旅游中的语用移情

语用移情是跨文化旅游交际的关键因素。跨文化旅游的成功与和谐,取决于导游能否充分运用语用移情,与旅游者保持良好的沟通。但由于交际双方各自的母语和社会文化背景不同,跨文化旅游交际存在移情障碍。该文从语用学的角度出发,讨论了语用移情在跨文化旅游中的作用,并通过典型案例分析了语用移情障碍的成因。     

A tourist's “vision quest” in an African game reserve

This essay deals with the role of guides in the Moremi Wildlife Reserve of Botswana and the frictions that arise between them and visitors to the reserve. The guides' role as “interpreters” is juxtaposed with the tourists' desire for first-hand “communion” with nature, which is here treated as similar to a “vision quest.” The essay analyzes the interactions between the Tswana guides on the one hand and South African tourists on the other, focusing on the relegation of the former by the latter to the (basically menial) role of pathfinders and assistants that most Africans fill in the tourists' home culture. Attention is drawn to a possible crisis brewing in tourist-guide relationships, due to the fact that guides are unsuccessful, or even redundant, mediators in “vision quest” tourism.     

Connecting tourists to musical destinations: The role of musical geographical imagination and aesthetic responses in music tourism

While the value of music in connecting tourists to destinations is recognized, its mechanism remains unclear. This study adopts aesthetic responses to explore how musical geographical imagination influences tourists' place bonding and subsequent behavioral intentions. This explanatory sequential mixed-methods study: 1) elucidates the connotation and effects of musical geographical imagination integrating with aesthetics in tourism research; 2) shows that tourists' aesthetic cognitive and affective responses to musical geographical imagination strengthen place bonding, and buttresses the importance of affective responses in leveraging behavioral intentions; and 3) indicates that tourists’ responses to musical stimuli differ in direct and indirect destination experience contexts, demonstrating that musical stimulus context moderates on associations of imagination with cognitive responses, and affective responses with behaviroal intentions. This study empirically expands the imagination from individual auditory spaces to a destination and advances tourism aesthetics research; it guides using music in tourism sensory marketing and tourism soundscape design.     

Selling Strategies and Shopping Behavior—An Example of Taiwanese Guided Package Tourists to Mainland China Destinations

China has become the most visited destination in the world for international tourists. The number of Taiwanese tourists going to China on guided tours has increased; “shopping” and “optional tours” are the two most controversial consumption experiences for them due to price competition. This study aims to investigate the Taiwanese guided package tourists’ shopping intentions and behavior when traveling in China and also to examine how their shopping behaviors are influenced by sales representatives, local tour guides, and other tour participants. This study found that benefits sought, perceived sympathy, and social acceptance are often used by service providers to persuade tour participants to buy. It is expected that the study can contribute to tourism industry theory, and help the travel industry to improve the quality of guided package tours to China.