The impacts of tour guide performance on foreign tourist satisfaction and destination loyalty in Vietnam

Abstract

This research was generated through my previous career as a tour guide in Vietnam. The tourism industry has been developing over recent years in Vietnam, as will be evidenced by the literature review below. This research investigates the impact tour guides have on the satisfaction of tourists who are choosing Vietnam as a tourism destination. The following proposal outlines the case of the study in terms of history of tourism industry in Vietnam, the role of tour guide in a package tour, and the relationships between tour guide performance, foreign tourist satisfaction, and tourist's destination loyalty in Vietnam. In the literature on tourism studies, significant attention has been paid to tourist satisfaction that depended on various factors, but relatively little attention has been paid to the effect of tour guide performance on both tourists' satisfaction and their destination loyalty. Even less research has been conducted on the role of the tour guide in a package tour. Tour guides are frontline employees in the tourism industry who play a significant role in drawing tourists to a destination. Tour guiding service is the principal component of tour services. Whether tour guides can deliver quality service to tourists is not only essential to the business success of the company, but also significant to the image of the destination (Huang et al., 2010). Although previous research looked at the factors of tour guide performance on the experience of tourists in package tour, there is disagreement about the impact of tour guide performance on tourist satisfaction. Destination loyalty of tourist also needs to be investigated from the tour guide performance and tourist satisfaction perspectives, in order to provide a more complete understanding of the role of the tour guide in a package tour. This research, therefore, attempts to bridge these gaps by exploring the attributes of tour guide performance from the foreign tourist's perspective. The study was conducted in the context of the foreign tourists who are in Vietnam to evaluate domestic tour guide performance. This context was chosen on the basis that there has been no research conducted on tour guide performance in the Vietnamese context. A self-administrated questionnaire was developed based on the review of the relevant literature and focus group interviews, and was administered to a sample of 500 foreign tourists in six big cities that attract many foreign tourists in Vietnam. Tour guides were recruited for data collection in every tour held by tourism companies. Tour guides distributed the questionnaires to the tourists on the last night of the package tour and then collected them on the next morning. The tour guide, in addition, also informed the tourists that only the researcher would see the returned questionnaires that they put in a sealed envelope. Additionally, I and my colleagues also travelled to the places that attract many foreign tourists; handed the questionnaires to them; let them have approximately 10 minutes to answer; and finally collected the questionnaires again. Following a pilot study testing the survey instrument, the main data collection phase resulted in 451 completed and useable questionnaires being available for analysis. Structural equation modeling was used to explore the relationships among tour guide performance, tourist satisfaction, and destination loyalty. The findings show that the theoretical model fits well with the data, and that the five hypotheses proposed were supported, providing answers three research questions. The finding indicates that tour guide performance plays an important role on foreign tourists' satisfaction and tourists' destination loyalty in a package tour. Tour guide performance is comprised of five dimensions - appearance, professional competence skill, solving problems skill, organizational skill, and entertainment introduction skill. Tour guide performance is not only positively and significantly related to the satisfaction of tourists, but also is one of the factors that determine the destination loyalty of customers. This study, moreover, has proposed a number of suggestions for both tour guide and tour manager/tour operator in order to identify the advantages and disadvantages of tour guide attributes, and then to foster and enhance the performance of this force to reach a higher level of customer satisfaction, as well as promote destination loyalty.

Date of Award	2015
Original language	English