Tourists’ Expectations and Satisfaction toward the Use of English and the Content of Information by Thai Tour Guides in Bangkok
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Abstract
The tourism sector is one of the most important economic sectors in Thailand. A tour guide represents an important role on tourist satisfaction and intention for re-visiting. Understanding tourist expectations and satisfaction would provide strategies for developing better services of the tour guides. The objectives of this study are to investigate the level of tourist expectations and satisfaction of the English use and content of Thai tour guides and to provide recommendations to develop the training courses. Using Bangkok as a case study, a total of 106 questionnaires were collected with the help of tour guides during the tour conduction. Data were analyzed using factor analysis, hypothesis testing, multiple regression analysis, and K-means cluster analysis.
Findings revealed that the delivered message was the most important factor towards tourist satisfaction and followed by the English use of the tour guides. The sampled tourists came to Bangkok with higher expectations and left with higher satisfaction levels for the content of information provided. It is recommended that Thai tour guides must be improved in terms of grammatical correctness, use of vocabularies, technical terms and expressions, delivery of the messages, and understandable stress, accents and pronunciation. Findings from this study provide insights into both tourism industry and academic areas to improve services of the tour guides and to revise curriculums to meet tourist expectations.
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