Tour guiding-Visitor Satisfaction Nexus: Assessment based on Visitor Perceptions and Importance-Performance Analysis in a National Park, Ghana
Description
National parks are global cornerstones supporting not only biodiversity conservation, but educational and recreational opportunities. Based on these opportunities, ecotourism has gained wide application in national parks as a sustainable form of tourism, providing visitors with recreational and educational opportunities to garner support for biodiversity conservation. Tour guides play vital roles to support these opportunities whiles ensuring appropriate behaviours and attitudes of visitors. The performance of these roles potentially influence visitors' satisfaction, which has the potential to ensure repeat visits, referrals, and financial success of national parks and other protected areas. However, the literature indicates limited studies examining visitor satisfaction with tour guiding. Therefore, this paper investigated visitors’ perceptions of the roles of tour guides using Importance-Performance Analysis, to identify areas warranting management actions to improve visitor satisfaction. Using survey, questionnaires were administered to 197 visitors to rate the importance and performance of a set of role attributes of tour guiding. The data was subjected to descriptive, importance-importance, gap and grid analyses. The results showed that there were role attributes that were important to the experiences sought by visitors. Also, some attributes were identified that required management intervention and re-allocation of resources to improve visitor satisfaction.
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Institutions
- University of Energy and Natural Resources