Open AccessHow Tour Guides’ Professional Competencies Influence on Service Quality of Tour Guiding and Tourist Satisfaction: An Exploratory Research
Author(s) -
Yi-Chien Lin,
Mei-Lan Lin,
Yi-Cheng Chen
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
international journal of human resource studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2162-3058
DOI - 10.5296/ijhrs.v7i1.10602
Subject(s) - tourism , service quality , conceptual model , psychology , test (biology) , sample (material) , quality (philosophy) , marketing , empirical research , service (business) , exploratory research , partial least squares regression , scale (ratio) , applied psychology , structural equation modeling , knowledge management , business , computer science , sociology , mathematics , geography , statistics , philosophy , database , anthropology , chemistry , archaeology , biology , paleontology , epistemology , chromatography , cartography , machine learning
Drawing upon the theoretical perspectives from activity competency model and prior tourism literature, this study propose a conceptual framework to explain the impacts of professional competencies on service quality and tourist satisfaction. Empirical data were gathered from a large-scale online survey with experienced GPT tourists to test the proposed hypotheses and research model. The proposed conceptual framework was validated using the partial least squares (PLS) technique. Data gathered from tourists was based on a convenience sample of 345 respondents to test the proposed plausible hypotheses. The conceptual model was validated using the partial least squares (PLS) technique. The empirical results indicate that tour guides’ professional competencies significantly impact on service quality and tourist satisfaction; and tour guides’ service quality positively influences tourist satisfaction.