Examining the Impacts of Tour Guides’ Professional Competences on Service Quality, Tourist Satisfaction and Repurchase Intentions towards Package Tour Products

Tour guide‟s professional competences might affect the service quality of tour guiding, thereby affecting tourists‟ satisfaction on traveling and their repurchase intentions towards travel agencies‟ package tour products. This empirical study was proposed to investigate the impacts of professional competences on service quality, tourist satisfaction and repurchase intentions of package tour products. Data gathered from tourists was based on a convenience sample of 345 respondents to test the proposed hypotheses. The conceptual model was validated using the partial least squares (PLS) technique. The empirical results indicate that (1) tour guides‟ professional competences significantly impact on service quality and tourist satisfaction; (2) tour guides‟ service quality positively influences tourist satisfaction and repurchase intentions; (3) tourist satisfaction has a positive significant effect on repurchase intentions. The research predicts a good amount of variance to 70.7% of tourists‟ repurchase intentions. The findings of this study are expected to provide practical implications for the competence development of tour guides and proffer instrumental contributions to help travel agencies strengthen tour guides‟ professional competences for effectively enhancing service quality of tour guiding, tourist satisfaction and repurchase intentions towards package tour products.