By Ching-Yu Hsieh, National Kaohsiung University of Hospitality and Tourism
The government has actively opened the restriction on the number of tourists from Mainland China to Taiwan since 2008, and lead to the number of group tourists from Mainland China redoubling, and it has replaced Japanese tourists and becomes a large amount of tourists enter Taiwan. It has great importance that the issue on servicing the tourists from Mainland China to Taiwan by professional Chinese speaking tour guides.
This research aims to explore and in response to the change in China’s tourism policy, and understand in depth whether the opportunistic behavior that may generated when the professional Chinese speaking tour guides face the work with low-income, high-risk and long hours will affect their service quality.
This research objects are 16 persons in total who are current professional Chinese speaking tour guides in Tainan and Kaohsiung areas and with conducting in-depth interviews, it explores the “Stress Management”, “Work Risk”, “Opportunistic”, “Service Quality” relevance in four aspects of their practices.
It integrated four aspects and 70 indicators and factors in total. Then with the aid of Delphi Method technical analysis method, it conducted two rounds Delphi of questionnaires with 100% recovery rate of 16 copies in total. Through average, standard deviation, quartile deviation, Kendall’s W verification as four convergence criteria, it deleted indicators and factors which do not match the standard on the first round and conducted the second round questionnaire analysis. Final result integrates four aspects and 56 indicators and factors in total which included aspect of “Stress Management” with 12 items in total, which holds that item of “cut tour guide’s travel expense” is the most important indicator and factor; aspect of “Work Risk” with 13 items in total, item of “company closes down without warning” is the most important indicator and factor; aspect of “Opportunistic” with 8 items in total, item of “lead members to go into the shopping stations without contracting” is the most important indicator and factor; aspect of “Service Quality” with 19 items in total, item of “spirit and attitude of engagement” is the most important indicator and factor.
In short, the professional Chinese speaking tour guides consider facing the reduction of income and unstable operation of the company, and then lead members to go other shopping stations to earn more opportunities for speculation of income. However, they still hold the professional attitude as the principle to service members. Overview that all walks of life has an insufficient importance degree on the practice behavior of Chinese speaking tour guide, so we hope Chinese speaking tour guide practitioners in the future, travel industry, tourism academia, government units, all sectors of tourism industry and subsequent researches can take this research as reference, and can provide the Chinese speaking tour guides a securer working environment to enhance Taiwan’s tourism service quality, travelers’ tourist willing to visit Taiwan and create cross-strait tourism vision.
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