Abstract

This book provides an authoritative, state-of-the-art review of tour guiding scholarship and research and aims to foster best practice and to stimulate further study and research on tour guiding across a range of disciplines. It explores how tour guiding theory and practice has evolved over time and what factors have contributed to this. The volume consolidates, synthesises and adds to the knowledge base and foreshadows how current and future trends and issues might impact on tour guiding research and practice in the 21st century. The studies reviewed in this book cover a wide range of contexts in which guided tours are conducted, ranging from city streets to heritage and wildlife tourism attractions, from high-end tourist lodging establishments to national park campgrounds, and from highly developed destinations to very remote ones in both developed and developing countries. The book is well-illustrated and its accessible style with chapter summaries makes it ideal for students as well as researchers.

Increasingly, visitors seek personal and memorable experiences in their travel, and tour guides play a unique and important role in mediating these experiences. This book provides a timely review of, and important contribution to, the scholarly literature on tour guides and guiding. Theory, research and practice are given equal attention, using a highly accessible style and structure. Betty Weiler and Rosemary Black's analysis of tour guiding research will be valuable to academics, students, tourism managers, and most importantly, tour guides themselves.

Overall the book offers valuable insights and information on tour guiding drawing extensively from the available literature and on-the-ground evidence. The book is a rich collection of meaningful analyses and useful frameworks grounded on an extensive, robust, and updated literature review. It is a must-read book essential for academics, students, tourism managers, park rangers, and researchers interested in tour guiding, and most importantly, it should be essential reading for current and future tour guides.

Ismar Borges de Lima, State University of Roraima, Brazil

The book is a great starting point for new researchers and postgraduate students working in the area since it provides a comprehensive review of relevant research. Given the critical points outlined in the book, it would also contribute to reading lists of classes focusing on cultural tourism and sustainable planning because the role of the tourist guide is often critiqued in such modules when looking at how tourists consume new knowledge of a destination.

Nicholas Wise, Asia University, Taiwan

This is a remarkable book. It opens a series of illuminating windows into the fascinating world of tour guiding, and also into interpretation, implementing sustainable tourism, visitor satisfaction, performance assessment and professionalization, and opportunities for future research. Packed with information, skilfully structured and beautifully written, this is a must-buy, must-read book.

Bernard Lane, Editor of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism; Visiting Professor, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

Tour guides play essential roles at tourism destinations and are well-known both within and outside the tourism industry. However, few studies have comprehensively examined the tasks of a tour guide and the components that constitute tour guiding. Therefore, this book fills this gap and provides an overview of tour guiding research and scholarship throughout the past 50 years. It broadly outlines the major concepts related to tour guiding and introduces its theoretical foundations. This book is a suitable, readable introductory text to the subject area and provides an outline of the theoretical background and practical guidelines related to tour guides.

Chien-Yu Chen, Chihlee Institute of Technology, Taiwan, ROC and Chang-Hua Yen, National Taichung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan, ROC

In collating and presenting decades of collective experience Betty and Rosemary have not just written a book but rather created an almost timeless literary resource. A resource that goes into detail on historic and contemporary perspectives whilst forecasting considerations for the tour guiding industry. This book is comprehensive, insightful and will be a paramount reference on tour guiding – a one stop research destination that will trump Google™.

The language used in the book and its structure are easy to follow. The book provides concise and original tables in each chapter, summarizing and categorizing the existing literature. These tables shed light on studies for enthusiastic but perhaps confused beginners in the tour guiding research. At the end of each thematic chapter, the authors share their insight about the implications of the relevant chapter for research and for tour guiding practice. This aspect of the book contributes to making Tour Guiding Research: Insights, Issues and Implications a permanent reference for researchers who aim to delve into area of tour guiding.

Ilkay Tas, Dokuz Eylul University, Turkey

As a whole, this book is a valuable resource for anyone involved in guiding, and to a lesser extent, interpretation. Weiler and Black have distilled fifty years of research into a cogent and concise desk reference. They have also provided several road maps to improve the industry and the state of research. Practitioners and academics from mass tourism through ecotourism as well as multiple emerging niche markets will benefit from the resources and analyses provided in this text.

Jeffrey C. Skibins, Kansas State University, USA

Betty Weiler is Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia. Her main research interests are tour guiding, visitor communication, tourist behaviour and visitor management.

Rosemary Black is Associate Professor at Charles Sturt University, Australia. Her research focuses on tour guiding, visitor communication, sustainability, environmental education and heritage interpretation.

This book presents an authoritative and timely review of the scholarly literature on tour guiding theory and practice. Six key themes prominent in tour guiding research are identified, and under each of these topics a wide range of guiding studies are critically examined and synthesized to help identify the key theoretical learning and empirical findings. Based on these findings, implications for both guiding research and practice are revealed...The book is well structured and wonderfully written; it is indeed a comprehensive and readable volume.

 

Wei Hu, Hainan University, China